Democrats Seek $500B in Climate Damages from Big Polluting Companies

I have absolutely no love for oil companies, but retroactive penalties for actions that weren&#x27;t illegal at the time and that all of American society contributed to seems misguided to me. This is in the same vein to me as letting websites get sued for actions of their users, and gun manufacturers getting sued for shootings. It&#x27;s antithetical with the concept of personal responsibility and impossible for a business owner to plan for.<p>I wish our politicians would focus more aggressively on actually incentivising emission reduction&#x2F;carbon capture investment and less on pointing fingers and shifting blame.

A one time $500B payment spread out over, multiple companies kind of seems like a gift to me... Pay once, and you&#x27;re absolved of all past environmental wrongs. Sounds almost like the church 500 years ago ^^

&quot;Personal carbon footprint&quot; was an incredibly successful PR campaign by the biggest polluters to shift the responsibility onto individual consumers (who have much less ability to actually change anything). I&#x27;m glad to see the trend of pushing back this narrative. It&#x27;s clear that the biggest polluters have profited immensly from pushing their externalities onto the rest of the world.<p>As much as I do like my personal choices and responsibilites, I don&#x27;t even know why some things are available for me to buy. Isn&#x27;t it kind of insane to think that I could walk into a supermarket and buy chocolate that was produced with slave labour? Why is that even an option? Similar for any product with an outsized negative environmental impact.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that the Democrats&#x27; path here is the way forward (I&#x27;m not American and don&#x27;t want to try to understand if something like this is even legally possible), but expecting consumers to educate themselves about climate change in a meaningful way as an approach to preventing disaster is doomed from the start.

Makes sense. The climate movement has always blatantly been about non-productive people appropriating money from others who have been engaged in productive enterprise.

We&#x27;re so busy attacking supply, and yet demand continues to grow an grow.<p>Why do I feel like we&#x27;re heading for another energy crisis?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;TqOuU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;TqOuU</a>

&gt; <i>&quot;draft legislation [...] directs the Treasury Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to identify the companies that released the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from 2000 to 2019 and assess a fee based on the amounts they emitted</i><p>Seems pretty reasonable to retroactively tax previously untaxed externalities.<p>By 2000, the science was pretty conclusive. If fossil fuel companies&#x27; reaction was full-steam-ahead, they deserve what they get.<p>That said, the revenue generated should <i>definitely</i> be used to fund climate mitigation and backstop unfunded insurance shortfalls. I.e. costs directly caused by the profits made.<p>Also, cited in article as an example of work to base such a decision off of, Climate Accountability&#x27;s &quot;Carbon Majors Report&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;climateaccountability.org&#x2F;carbonmajors.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;climateaccountability.org&#x2F;carbonmajors.html</a> (attempts to quantify emissions by company)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bill_of_attainder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bill_of_attainder</a>

The American people have continued to enjoy the benefits of hydrocarbons for electricity, transportation, heating, and other uses. The &quot;big polluting companies&quot; produce legal products that meet vital needs. Demonizing them is hypocritical unless one lives like the Amish without electricity, and I doubt these retroactive taxes would stand up in court. It would be legal for Democrats to drastically raise the gasoline tax, but they avoid that because they know that people are not willing to pay much to ameliorate climate change.