The state claims Big Oil has deceived the public about the risks of fossil fuels that plaintiffs say are responsible for things like storms and wildfires.
"For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us — covering up the fact that they've long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet," Governor Gavin Newsom (D-California) recently said. "California taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill for billions of dollars in damages — wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells."
Climate Depot's Marc Morano says this is just a way to get money.
"It's a financial shakedown based on scientific witchcraft blaming energy companies for causing a bad weather event, when in reality, extreme weather is down on climate timescales," he says. "As CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere, the weather and climate [are] less extreme."
As for claims that companies like ExxonMobil knew about climate change and did nothing about it, Morano calls that nonsense.
"What did Exxon supposedly know?" he wonders. "In the 1970s, the CIA was warning about global cooling. You had top climate scientists like Stephen Schneider warning about man-made global cooling. You had professors writing Richard Nixon a letter in the 1970s warning about man-made global cooling. They were worried that aerosol was going to burn and that fossil fuels were dimming the sun and creating global cooling. They wanted to do geoengineering. So, it makes no sense to say, 'Exxon knew.'"
Meanwhile, Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-California) says enough is enough. In a statement to the Associated Press, he argues that companies "have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment."
"This is a way to get money," Morano reiterates. "This is a way to blame every weather event for energy, and it wants to ignore one simple fact: Since our use of fossil fuels has gone up, climate-related deaths have been dropping 95%, almost 100% in the last 100 years."
