They conned the public, and will never pay for it
I know this is obvious, but not to take it off our radar screens for a second: climate chickens coming home to roost, and who’s going to take care of them? Not the fossil fuel companies.
The U.S. Congress is presently debating, how much should the government provide for disaster relief and recovery due to hurricanes—around Houston, in Florida, in the Virgin Islands, and most disastrously, Puerto Rico. The Congress is reluctant, because a precedent for paying now points the way to astronomical payments to come. They know that named hurricanes are just the tip of the climatic disaster iceberg (sorry for the incongruous metaphor) .
Anyone who has, with an open and analytical mind, paid attention to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and Climate Change, has connected the dots between profligate burning of fossil fuels and catastrophic weather events.
You can just bet there are a lot of folks in Congress who have connected the dots. Many of them, not stupid but politically compromised, know about the connections but refuse to acknowledge them, for reasons if made public should condemn them to ignominy. (Or maybe not; since Roy Moore is even being considered for election to the U.S. Senate, there may be no moral depths to which conservative supporters will stoop in order to further an uncompromising and ignorant agenda.)
Scientists in Exxon already connected the dots long ago. And Exxon kept both the dots and the connections buried. Never mind, for them the consequences of dishonesty are potentially so tiny that they are mere flies on an elephant (the parallel with the Republican mascot is too rich not to mention).
Cost/Benefit analysis: fossil fuel industries come out way ahead of humanity at large
How often have we heard, from conservative economists, that the costs of climate change will be well more than offset by economic growth? (Hint: a lot.)
Whatever the costs are, for damned sure the fossil fuel companies will not be paying them. The public will be paying—the public at large, or certain unfortunate populations who have been abandoned by their governments for reasons of “fiscal responsibility.” (Exhibit A: Puerto Rico. But not Exxon and Shell.)
The most huge externalized costs in human history will be the costs born by the worldwide public as a result of Climate Change—the costs imposed by irresponsible, immoral, and ultimately criminal agents of the fossil fuel industry.
And they will get off scot-free because the connections cannot be definitively proved. That’s something they’ve known for years, and have been counting on.
In time (50 years? 100 years), the actions of the fossil fuel companies and their leaders will be identified as criminal. But what do they care? The current leaders will be dead by then, and their heirs will have received all the protections from a hostile world that money can buy.
Who’s laughing?