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climate homicide
The Killer CEOs of Big Oil
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week it's horrifying to look out and see the world they are creating for the rest of us.
Jan 11, 2025
Public Citizen would like you to know that there are killers among us.
They wear $2,000 suits and travel in private jets, unbothered by the TSA or the teeming masses. Their children attend the finest universities in the world, and they vacation on private islands and yachts. Many “earn” more in a day than most Americans take home in a year; their positions ensure their heirs will never have to work a day in their lives.
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week they’re arguably responsible, in part, for billions of dollars in losses, numerous deaths, and thousands of shattered lives in Southern California.
Illegitimate president-elect Trump is trying his best to cover for them, claiming that the fires ripping through the Los Angeles area are the fault of California’s Democratic governor, calling Gavin Newsome by a childish name to draw more attention to Trump’s efforts on behalf of the Republican Party’s most generous donors.
Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Mainstream media is largely going along with Trump’s charade, choosing not to even mention — in the vast majority of their reports on the crisis — the role of climate change in the fires. And never, G-d forbid, mentioning the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate change that has turned these fires from an annual nuisance into a hellscape.
It’s as frankly absurd as a TV news person reporting on a plane crash and, instead of asking aviation experts what caused it, simply lifting their collective shoulders with a helpless “shit happens” shrug.
But these fires — and the droughts and changing weather patterns that made them so severe — aren’t something that just happens by random happenstance, any more than an airliner crash.
And the oil industry has known for decades this day was coming.
In November, 1959, the famous scientist Edward Teller — the “Father of the H-Bomb” — was the keynote speaker at a conference on “The Energy of the Future” in New York, organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The news he conveyed to the assembled oil industry executives was stark:
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect ...
“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
This shocking news apparently provoked a scramble in the oil industry, probably similar to when the asbestos industry learned in the 1930s that their product caused lung cancer (the mesothelioma that killed my father), or in 1939 when the tobacco industry learned that smoking also killed people.
They set out to determine if Teller’s prediction was true. He’d predicted that CO2 levels would reach the point where they’d begin to seriously melt the polar and Greenland ice caps and alter weather patterns within a few decades, telling the oil executives at that 1959 meeting:
“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the [heat] radiation leaving the earth.”
For the next decade, industry scientists went to work along with studies commissioned by major universities. One of the most well-known was a 1968 report the American Petroleum Institute hired the Stanford Research Institute to conduct. Its findings corroborated Teller’s prediction:
“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. ... there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. ... pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”
It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting pretty much exactly what’s happening right now in Los Angeles, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.
And then the “climate denial” began.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their oil companies funded think tanks to promote skepticism, pushed frontmen onto radio and TV to claim that climate scientists and people like Al Gore were “in it for the money,” and began funding the campaigns of politicians willing to exchange the future habitability of the planet for a few decades of power and wealth.
In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding, and detailing roughly three decades of lies foisted on the American Public. The industry and its executives’ efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their income stream and avoiding any liability for the deaths they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.
And now that day is here. Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Two-thirds of voters, according to a 2024 poll, believe the fossil fuel industry and its pampered executives should be held civilly responsible for the damage climate change is causing, and a plurality want them to face criminal charges.
Public Citizen published a 2023 report titled “Charging Big Oil with Climate Homicide,” including legal rationales and possible strategies for holding the killers in suits accountable by state and local prosecutors.
Will Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or California Attorney General Rob Bonta have the courage to hold these companies and/or their executives accountable for the lies and deceptions they’ve funded that this week are killing Angelinos?
Will enough people call their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 to provoke investigations that could lead to congressional action?
Will our media ever begin to call out Trump and the alleged climate lies and deceptions of the industry that owns him?
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Amid Soaring Temps, Heat-Related Deaths Have More Than Doubled Since 1999
"It is likely that continued increases in average temperatures, the number of 'hot days,' and the frequency and intensity of heatwaves could be playing a role," said one researcher.
Aug 26, 2024
As 55 million people in the U.S. Midwest faced heat alerts on Monday, research published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association showed that heat-related deaths in the country rose 117% between 1999 and 2023.
"The current trajectory that we're on, in terms of warming and the change in the climate, is starting to actually show up in increased deaths," lead author Jeffrey Howard, an associate professor of public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio, toldUSA Today. "That's something that we hadn't had measured before."
Using a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention platform, Howard and co-authors from Pennsylvania State University and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences analyzed all deaths from those 25 years coded for "hyperthermia of newborn," "effects of heat and light," or "exposure to excessive natural heat" as either a contributing or underlying cause of death.
They found 21,518 deaths for the full period, with 1,069 in 1999. The lowest annual figure was in 2004 (311) and the highest was in 2023 (2,325). Last year was the hottest on record globally and scientists are already warning that this year is expected to continue that trend.
"As temperatures continue to rise because of climate change, the recent increasing trend is likely to continue."
Last year broke the record that was set in 2016—a year that's also significant in the new study: "The number of heat-related deaths... showed year-to-year variability, with spikes in 2006 and 2011, before showing steady increases after 2016."
Howard toldCBS News that "it is likely that continued increases in average temperatures, the number of 'hot days,' and the frequency and intensity of heatwaves could be playing a role" in the rise since 2016.
"There is also a social and behavioral component as well," he added, "including differences in access to air conditioning, outdoor work, the number of unhoused individuals, and things like that."
The researcher noted that Arizona, California, Nevada, and Texas had the highest heat-related deaths—which he said is "not terribly surprising because we know that these are some of the hottest regions in the country, but it does reinforce that the risk varies regionally."
The paper warns that "as temperatures continue to rise because of climate change, the recent increasing trend is likely to continue. Local authorities in high-risk areas should consider investing in the expansion of access to hydration centers and public cooling centers or other buildings with air conditioning."
The authors also acknowledged limitations of their research—including "the potential for misclassification of causes of death, leading to possible underestimation of heat-related mortality rates; potential bias from increasing awareness over time; and lack of data for vulnerable subgroups"—meaning the true death toll could be higher.
A legal memo published in June by the watchdog Public Citizen detailed how local or state prosecutors could bring criminal charges against oil and gas companies for deaths from extreme heat made more likely by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
"These victims deserve justice no less than the victims of street-level homicides," said Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel for the group. "And this memo shows that prosecutors have a path to secure that justice, if they choose to pursue it."
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Legal Memo Makes Case for Prosecuting Big Oil Over Extreme Heat Deaths
"The only question left," said Bill McKibben, "is whether our legal system will recognize these crimes—and this report shows there's a good chance the answer could be yes."
Jun 26, 2024
A U.S.-based consumer watchdog unveiled a legal memo Wednesday detailing how local or state prosecutors could bring criminal charges against Big Oil for deaths from extreme heat made more likely by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
"As Americans reel from another lethal heatwave, it's important to remember that these climate disasters didn't come out of nowhere," said Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel for Public Citizen, the group behind the framework.
Extreme heat and other deadly weather events, he continued, "were knowingly caused by fossil fuel companies that chose to inflict this suffering to maintain their profits, while regular people, like the victims of the July 2023 heatwave, and of so many other climate disasters, pay the price."
"These victims deserve justice no less than the victims of street-level homicides. And this memo shows that prosecutors have a path to secure that justice, if they choose to pursue it," added Regunberg, lead author of the new preliminary prosecution memorandum, which focuses on the fatal heatwave last summer during the hottest year in human history.
"These victims deserve justice no less than the victims of street-level homicides."
The memo's other authors are George Washington University law professor Donald Braman—who also worked with Regunberg for a paper on "climate homicide" recently published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review—as well as David Arkush, director of Public Citizen's Climate Program, and Cindy Cho, a law professor at Indiana University.
"When someone causes suffering by breaking the law, good prosecutors know it is their duty to bring appropriate charges," said Cho, a former federal prosecutor. "Some of the very best public servants I've had the privilege to work with are prosecutors who embrace really tough cases because they can also be the most righteous cases."
"Although civil remedies are of course vital, sometimes only our criminal laws can measure up to the harm someone has inflicted," she added. "If human-generated climate change is killing people, and the organizations that generated it knew the risks, then it stands to reason that criminal charges may be exactly what society expects."
Last summer, the memo explains, "a lethal heatwave which would have been 'virtually impossible' but for human-caused climate change broke temperature records across the American Southwest. Communities like Phoenix, Arizona experienced a historic 31 days in a row with temperatures above 110 degrees."
"Hundreds of people across the region were killed," the document notes, "with Maricopa County alone recording 403 heat-related deaths in July 2023—far more than all the murders the county experienced that year."
The defendants in a potential prosecution for last year's deadly heat, according to the memo, "would include some of the world's largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies and a national oil and gas trade association: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, BHP, Peabody, and the American Petroleum Institute."
The proposed offenses are reckless manslaughter, defined as "recklessly causing the death of another person," and second-degree murder, which is recklessly killing someone by creating a "grave risk of death" under circumstances "manifesting extreme indifference to human life."
Pursuing those charges would require prosecutors to show that last July's heatwave caused deaths, climate change caused the heatwave, and the fossil fuel companies caused climate change. The memo lays out how they could do all three—thanks in part to advances in attribution science—and explores various potential defenses.
It also emphasizes that "while the July 2023 heatwave was devastating, it was not a unique occurrence. In recent years climate-fueled heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires, and other disastrous weather events have killed thousands of Americans—have burned children alive in Maui, drowned families in Puerto Rico, killed people by heatstroke in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere—and this loss of life will continue to accelerate as climate chaos intensifies."
"The charges described in this memo provide a starting point for similar analyses that could, and should, be undertaken by prosecutors in every jurisdiction that experiences loss of life due to climate disasters," the document declares.
Welcoming the memo's release amid more widely anticipated extreme heat, author and climate activist Bill McKibben stressed that "what's happened to the climate is a crime: After fair warning from scientists about what would happen, Big Oil went right ahead pouring carbon into the atmosphere, and now there's a huge pile of dead bodies (and a larger one of dead dreams)."
"After fair warning from scientists about what would happen, Big Oil went right ahead pouring carbon into the atmosphere, and now there's a huge pile of dead bodies."
"The only question left," he said, "is whether our legal system will recognize these crimes—and this report shows there's a good chance the answer could be yes."
Earlier this month, McKibben moderated a virtual panel featuring the memo's four authors along with Amy Fettig, deputy director of Fair and Just Prosecution; Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists; and Hadrien Goux, fossil fuel campaign officer at Bloom, which recently filed a criminal complaint against TotalEnergies in France.
"There's a lot of work to do here," Regunberg said during that discussion. "We are creating a movement... and it needs to grow."
Others suggested that legal leaders across the United States may be open to pursuing such cases, particularly if they face public pressure to do so. Cho said that early on in the research, she was skeptical about criminally prosecuting Big Oil in this way—but she concluded that "it actually isn't as much of a stretch as the people on this call might think."
"It fits within the framework of what they seek to do with their careers," she said of prosecutors who want to protect their communities.
Fettig pointed out that for the most part, prosecutors and district attorneys are elected officials, meaning that "they're accountable to you."
"The truth has been that most people haven't paid attention to those elections and so we haven't seen the kind of public accountability for district attorneys and prosecutors that is really available—so as constituents, get to the ballot box," Fettig said. "That's an important power that you have."
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