If Climate Change Doesn't Exist, Then Why Does Big Oil Want Government Money to Protect Against It?

In an article titled “Big Oil Asks Government to Protect It From Climate Change," the Associated Press reports on plans to spend billions in public funds on infrastructure intended to protect the oil industry from climate change, primarily in the form of seawalls and other barriers off the Texas coast.  The grotesquerie of the single most culpable industry in the matter of global warming now benefitting from taxpayer money as it seeks to evade the consequences of its contributions to this crisis should be apparent to anyone not blind to scientific fact; it is, in fact, totally enraging, depraved, depressing, and, above all else, unacceptable.  

The hypocrisies alone should be enough to qualify as a new form of toxic gas.  The climate change-denying oil industry is happy to accept government protection for its crimes against nature, while anti-government spending senators like Ted Cruz and John Cornyn happily back the disbursement of massive federal funding.  But beyond the hypocrisy loom profound and interconnected questions of justice and the best way to spend finite public resources addressing climate change.

There should be no question around this basic principle: if a company has contributed to the denial of human-caused climate change while benefitting economically from the destruction of our planet’s environment, then it should receive not a single penny in public benefits to protect it from the consequences of its immoral actions.  This position would be the right one under any circumstances, but what seals the deal is that oil companies are some of the most profitable, if not the most profitable, companies in the history of the world.  Certainly in the United States, they have long evaded paying anything near the taxes they should.  

Rather than benefitting from public largesse, the fair situation is clearly the reverse: oil companies should be taxed at a maximal rate that will pay for public efforts both to deal with the effects of climate change and to arrest its progress.  The question of how to prioritize spending is a disputed one, even among those who understand that climate change is human-caused and have made addressing climate issues their life’s work.  But the idea that we should spend money on protecting the industrial sites that are ground zero for our climate crisis — the production of oil, gas, and other carbon fuels — should be given extremely close scrutiny and treated with deep skepticism.  Certainly it doesn’t make sense to protect all our oil infrastructure if it’s necessary to wean ourselves away from oil at the quickest possible pace?  Shouldn’t there be a discussion about which facilities should be closed down?  Every dollar spent on projects merely to mitigate the effects of climate change is a dollar not spent to fight the sources of climate change, whether it be construction of new renewable energy facilities or massive reforestation projects that will help sequester carbon.

Predictably, advocates of the crazily expensive sea barrier projects along the Texas coast point to national security, that last refuge of scoundrels and contractors, as the argument-ending reason why the government just needs to spend this money: otherwise, they say, the economic consequences for everyone will be devastating should a storm knock out enough of the country’s oil processing industry.  But while this raises legitimate concerns about the extent we need to protect the industry while we transition it into obsolescence, it also conveniently short-circuits a debate about who should pay for this protection.  It feels as if the public is being blackmailed into giving the oil industry what it wants, when this industry helped create this crisis to begin with.  But are they really in a position to blackmail the rest of us?

I suspect there is a far larger public appetite than is currently acknowledged for making the oil industry pay, both literally and morally, for its crimes against humanity and our planet.  It seems absurd that anyone should be profiting off a business whose regular side effect is to degrade the ability of current and future human beings to live.