I’ll be a guest on KQED Forum this morning at 10am discussing lawsuits against the oil industry and its deceptive practices related to climate change.
Most recently, 18 California children sued the EPA for failing to protect them from climate change. The lawsuit is one of many efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry to account that reporter Dharna Noor highlighted in her series for the Guardian US called “Big Oil Uncovered.” We’ll discuss the strategies oil and gas companies are using to delay or avoid action on climate change — and the people and policies who are taking them to task.
Tune in on KQED in Northern California or stream live at 10am PT!
Some environmentalists have noted with schadenfreude that the auto industry is getting its just desserts now for pressing the Trump administration to weaken Obama-era fuel economy standards. While the auto industry may have originally just wanted some additional flexibility for compliance, instead they got a wholesale revocation of the program.
And this rollback means a worst-case scenario for the auto industry, with potentially years of litigation and uncertainty to come. In short, they won’t know what type of vehicles to produce for the next few years at least.
So if the auto industry didn’t want the administration to take this approach, why is it happening? The answer may involve the other industry that benefits from weakening fuel economy standards: Big Oil. As Bloomberg reported:
The Trump administration’s plan to relax fuel-economy and vehicle pollution standards could be a boon to U.S. oil producers who’ve quietly lobbied for the measure.
The proposal, released Thursday, would translate into an additional 500,000 barrels of U.S. oil demand per day by the early 2030s, about 2 to 3 percent of projected consumption, according to government calculations.
Apparently oil industry leaders have been quietly lobbying for this action, including Marathon Petroleum Co., Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, and the refiner Andeavor. In fact, on the KQED Forum show I participated on this past Friday, one of the guests supporting the rollback was from the Koch-funded think tank “Pacific Research Institute.”
So it looks like Big Oil doesn’t really care if the auto industry twists in the wind on the rollback, if it means the possibility of selling a lot more climate-destroying oil in the meantime.
The oil industry is wealthy and influential on transportation policy. But when it comes to electric vehicles, they have a natural — and more similarly sized — opponent in electric utilities. Electric utilities stand to make a lot of money selling electricity as fuel to EV drivers, while oil companies will lose market share in the process.
California policy makers deliberately exploited and stoked this rivalry in passing SB 350 (De Leon) in 2015, which allowed utilities to invest billions in charging infrastructure around the state. Other states have followed suit.
We’re now seeing the political fruit of that division pay off, in favor of electric vehicles. Case in point is a recent battle at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which convenes conservative lawmakers and private-sector representatives to draft model legislation pushing conservative governance across the country.
Koch brothers-backed oil industry groups tried to push an effort to eliminate state incentives for electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging. But as ClimateWire reported [pay-walled], the oil industry met a worth foe:
The draft resolution, pushed by the Institute for Energy Research and backed by groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, opposed all federal, state and local efforts to subsidize vehicles, fueling infrastructure or fuels. That would have put up major roadblocks for states looking to expand their electric vehicle sales to meet climate or energy independence goals and for utilities looking to build the infrastructure to fuel the new cars.
The Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities, fought the legislation, which was eventually tabled.
It’s perhaps just a small victory for EVs. But it points to the long-term political trend of Big Oil meeting their match in Big Utilities. While economic forces can help make electric vehicles competitive with gas-powered engines, it will also take this kind of political support to accelerate the transition — and weaken the oil industry’s hold over transportation in the U.S.
