It Just Got Way Easier to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Change: For years, industry has argued you can’t prove which company caused which disaster. A new study says otherwise.
The paper is here
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2026/08/it-just-got-way-easier-to-sue-fossil-fuel-companies-over-climate-change/Open linkView original on slrpnk.net
12 replies
No raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood. Also something about Julius Caesar. Oh, and fuck those corporations. They always knew.
Kill more executives. Court is nothing but a slap on the wrist, as the very best case scenario.
Sue insurance companies who ignored the data and did not sell flood insurance in Indiana
Basically no insurer in the US underwrites home flood insurance. It's all a single federal program.
I read the article. If I understand it, they can now link weather events to emissions but not necessarily an industry or individual polluter. But what excites them most about this area of attribution science is that this is just the beginning and there is much more to come. Is that accurate?
Pretty much. Though greenhouse gases mix in the atmosphere pretty thoroughly, so responsibility is almost surely in direct proportion to cumulative historical emissions
Game on fuckers
Cool, but US states (with most of those companies) signed a bill that you can't sue them.
Edit: corrrection
This varies by state right now. You can sue in most still.
I think New Zealand might be the only country to have formally granted the fossil fuels industry immunity
until the people personally gaining from things like decades of corporate propoganda about climate change face any consequences, things like this will keep happening
but, sure, lets focus on making a bunch of lawyers rich by punishing a collection of capital on paper :shrug:
Ok climate change, how did the ice age end w/o humans putting CO2 in the atmosphere? Maybe we have cycles?
Now I'm all for a clean environment, but we have to recognizes the Earth has been way hotter than now w/o industrial humans.
On the off chance you aren't here in bad faith... I'll attempt to clarify.
indeed there are cycles in earths climate and we are at a particularly stable time in earths history. The issue is scale. Outside of cataclysmic event, caldera explosions / asteroid impacts for example. These cycles are particularly slow, so slow that the majority of species that would be affected will naturally adapt with the environment. We are experiencing an incredibly rapid change in GLOBAL climate.
And what's more damning is that we can actually see this acceleration at exactly the same time we started to pimp pollutants into the air. To within a couple of years.
A good example of this is oceanic currents, we KNOW that they can collapse and change course. But geologic evidence along with ice core samples and fossil evidence shows that while such things do happen. They are slow and a usually paired with feedback loops that can limit the runaway. What we are seeing in one generation is a process that should be on the scale of hundreds of years. Not decades.
So yeas, when the earth formed it was much hotter, but we can see and explain quite well how we got here and what's even more telling... We have been predicting this since the 70s (and in some cases earlier). We can measure the pollutants and calculate the effects... And so far we have been incredibly accurate considering the immense number or variables.