by Mike O’Brien
At the dawn of this new year, I might have chosen to wax hopeful about promising social and technological developments boding well for the future. Or I might have taken a light-hearted detour from my usual concerns, and written about something artistic, literary or otherwise creatively engaging. But no, there will be none of that here. Because this leopard has accepted his spots, and so instead I will be sharing some sobering and morally outrageous tidbits from a 250-page court filing. I really do think grad school broke my brain. Normal people don’t read court filings. Not even all lawyers do (avoid those ones).
The filing in question was submitted to the federal district court in Puerto Rico near the end of November 2022. Entitled “Municipalities of Puerto Rico vs Exxon Mobil et al.”, it is a class action complaint filed by 16 Puerto Rican municipalities on behalf of all municipalities on the island (these being the “class” represented), against the largest investor-owned energy companies (and their collaborators) conducting business in the territory. These defendants include Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, Peabody Energy, and many others besides, along with the network of media, public relations and think-tank enterprises which these energy companies employed for their anthropogenic global warming (AGW) denial campaigns. Puerto Rico is particularly vulnerable to climate change, as a small island territory in the path of “Hurricane Alley”, and surrounded by waters that are experiencing faster-than-average warming. This vulnerability is cited throughout the complaint, characterizing the territory as an “eggshell plaintiff”, analogous to someone with an eggshell-thin skull who suffers great harm from a blow to the head. The defendant may not have known that the victim had such a thin skull, but they ought to have known that hitting people on the head was likely to cause harm, and must suffer the bad luck of being fully liable for the extraordinarily bad consequences. Of course, in the case of the fossil fuel industry and Puerto Rico, the industry’s own data told them that Puerto Rico had the climate-vulnerability equivalent of an eggshell skull. But this is an industry that historically has had no qualms about bashing literal skulls to advance its interests, so figurative skull-bashing ought not to elicit surprise. Read more »