If elected president, Kamala Harris should take on the fossil fuel industry for its history of spreading climate disinformation, environmentalists say.
Forty US states and municipalities have sued big oil for allegedly spreading climate disinformation. For years, climate advocates and some lawmakers have said the Department of Justice should file a similar case.
It has so far failed to do so – even under Joe Biden, who ran on a climate-focused agenda.
“We get the sense that [the Biden attorney general] Merrick Garland has no interest in pursuing this issue,” said Richard Wiles, president of the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which supports climate litigation.
That could change under Kamala Harris’s leadership, said Jamie Henn, director of the climate accountability non-profit Fossil Free Media, who recently wrote that Harris is the “perfect person” to prosecute the case.
He is calling on Harris to make climate accountability a priority, including by empowering federal regulators to target alleged price gouging from oil companies, and appointing an attorney general who is willing to lead a new lawsuit on behalf of the Department of Justice (though the agency operates independently from the White House).
“It’s to be determined if she’s really willing to take all this up,” he said. “But I think that there’s a lot of signs that she could and she has the ability.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Before serving as a US senator and Biden’s vice-president, Harris was California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017. In that role, she launched an investigation into the oil giant ExxonMobil’s framing of climate risks in January 2016 (though she did not sue the company, as she once claimed).
That spring, she also won a major indictment in a criminal case against the Plains All-American Pipeline over an oil spill in Santa Barbara. Harris additionally played a key role in landing a $15bn settlement from Volkswagen after the Environmental Protection Agency found it was installing software in diesel vehicles to cheat on emissions tests. Months later, she secured a $14m settlement from BP subsidiaries over charges related to leaking underground fuel storage tanks.
During her time as attorney general, she also went after ConocoPhillips – the company behind the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska – for air quality violations at their gas stations, and filed other lawsuits against Chevron and the Southern California Gas Company. And she successfully sued the Obama administration over its plans to frack off California’s Pacific coast – demonstrating an “impressive” willingness to “even stand up to Democrats”, said Henn.
“She’s got a strong background on going after big polluters,” he said. “So when it comes to pressing this case, she’s the right person for the job.”
Harris voiced support for climate litigation during her 2019 presidential primary…
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