Highways snapped in half, houses disappeared, and entire communities were wiped off the map. Hurricane Helene’s fury jumped state lines from Florida, cutting a deep swath of destruction through Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, killing at least 227 people.
Roads, bridges, schools, cell towers, rail lines, utilities, and thousands of homes must be rebuilt in six states; many will be relocated. The cost will be staggering. One estimator puts the cost of repairing known damages (we won’t know the full extent for some time) between $225 and $250 billion. Multiply this cost by a factor of 10 to 20 severe weather events a year — a number that is climbing — times 20 or 30 years, and a harrowing financial reality emerges. Most cellphone calculators can’t even display that many zeroes.
Pointing the finger may look opportunistic or distasteful, but continuing to skirt the truth is worse. It means people will continue to die, and families will keep losing their homes. So here’s the finger: Big oil, and those who have made trillions from it, should pay to rebuild these communities. Middle class taxpayers should not.
Burning fossil fuels will continue to make it worse
The world is hotter today and warming faster than at any other point in recorded history. As Porter Fox, author of “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them,” wrote in the NYT, “We are witnessing a new reality. Supercharged hurricanes are no longer outliers, freak disasters or storms of the century. Fossil fuel pollution has made them a fixture of life around the world, and they are going to get worse — with millions of people in their crosshairs.”
U.N. scientists have declared climate change a global emergency, and catastrophic events like Helene have been forecasted for some time.
So why is the largest economy in the free world dragging its feet on climate action? Because politicians, mostly Republican, rely on unlimited campaign contributions from fossil fuels. In a nihilistic quid pro quo, conservative legislators refuse to act on climate because they are protecting their oil and gas donors. Some extremists, like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, have even adopted legislation that removes all references to climate change in state law, while also banning offshore wind-energy generation. Darwin is having a belly laugh, but the people who lost their homes and loved ones don’t think it’s funny.
Big oil’s deception campaign
Climate disinformation from conservatives and the fossil fuel lobby has gone on for decades. Like immoral slavers in the nineteenth-century south, immoral fossil fuel companies are fighting to protect obscene profits. In 2023, ExxonMobil and Chevron reported their biggest annual profits in a decade. Three of the largest oil and gas producers, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell, reported combined profits of $85.6 billion in 2023 alone, which would go a long way toward rebuilding destroyed houses and highways.
In May of this year, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability released Denial, Disinformation and DoubleSpeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change. The report uses Big Oil’s own internal documents to reveal their decades-long campaign of deception:
“Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and [that they] then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science.”
The solution can be found in ordinary negligence law: Make Polluters Pay
Aided and abetted by grandstanding morons like DeSantis and Donald Trump, who promised to gut environmental laws for $1 billion in campaign donations, the oil industry seems to have a death wish for the rest of us. Presumably, the uber-wealthy hope to relocate to Mars.
Under ordinary product liability law, when a company manufactures and sells a product it knows is dangerous, it is liable for damages caused by that product. The cases are legion: Philip Morris and big tobacco; Dow Corning and silicone implants; Owens Corning and asbestos, the list of dangerous products resulting in legal liability, is long.
Product liability law is over a 100 years old. If it turns out the manufacturer actually lied about its product, and undertook a massive campaign of consumer deception, as the fossil fuel lobby has done for decades, the plaintiff’s bar starts to salivate. Lying about a known danger can magically transform ordinary damages into punitive damages that even today’s SCOTUS radicals, with their deep ties to big oil, cannot dismantle.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
