Dems blame fires on climate change, target Big Oil

You knew this was coming. California’s Democrat legislators presented a bill Monday to allow insurers and homeowners impacted by the Los Angeles fires to sue oil companies for their losses. Senate Bill 222 aims to blame the fires on climate change caused by fossil fuels and make the oil companies bankroll the state’s underfunded insurance plan.

The move is a predictable response by the one-party state’s leaders seeking to deflect from their own gross mismanagement of the city and state, which is the real cause of the disaster. They destroyed the home insurance market by driving out insurance companies through onerous price controls. As a result, the state is on the hook for billions in damages covered by its “FAIR Plan” insurance, established as coverage of last resort for homeowners. The bill proposes that the oil companies serve as the backstop for FAIR Plan.

Leaders bowing to environmentalists also created the conditions for huge wildfires by failing to properly manage the forests through basic brush clearance and controlled fires standard in other states. Also, through shear gross negligence firefighters ran out of water because city officials allowed the Pacific Palisades 117-million-gallon reservoir, built to fight fires, to sit empty for almost a year awaiting a minor, $130,000 repair. And they cut the L.A. Fire Department budget, leaving the city with the same number of firefighters and fire stations as it did in 1960. Quite incredible since it is these same leaders who are constantly warning us that alleged “climate change” will cause a lot more fires.

The assertion that oil companies are responsible for the damage caused by the fires and thus should pay for the damages is absurd, but in line with similar efforts by state Democrats. California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently sued the oil companies for huge damages based on the supposed effects of alleged climate change. The money is to go into an “abatement fund,” to be used to advance the goals of climate activists.

The new proposed legislation would allow insurance companies and insured to sue under the same theory. The merits of such cases are dubious. The state’s case, People v. Exxon, was filed in California state court in San Francisco in September. It should be in federal court. Alleged pollutants rising to the skies and allegedly changing the world’s weather is clearly a federal concern and preempted by numerous federal laws, including the Clean Air Act.

In addition to Exxon, Bonta sued Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. The complaint asks that the industry create “an abatement fund to pay the costs of such abatement.” To abate the effects of climate change one must stop the climate from changing, which only God has been able to accomplish. The cost is unknown, unknowable, and infinite.

The first sentence of the complaint reveals its absurdity. It reads, “In 2023 alone, the State of California has endured both extreme drought and widespread flooding, sprawling wildfires and historic storms, and an unusually cold spring and a record-hot summer.” Climate change, if it is to be believed, is a worldwide phenomenon occurring over about a hundred-year period. Thus, pointing to weather events in a single year in a tiny corner of the world makes no sense and proves nothing.

Further, the allegations are absurdly broad. The state asserts the weather has been both too hot and too cold. It says there has been both drought and storms/flooding.

The truth is, as President Trump has been highlighting, California’s leaders have been negligent in managing the state’s natural resources. They have exacerbated the effects of droughts because environmentalists refuse to allow the building of sufficient reservoirs to maintain water from wet years to get us through the dry years. They let the majority of water drain into the Pacific Ocean. California has severe wildfires because of forest mismanagement. Environmentalists block the proper care of our forests, such as managing brush, leaving them susceptible to bigger fires. The forests in Arizona are much warmer than in California, yet Arizona does not have California’s wildfire problem.

The complaint goes on, “These extremes are the products of climate change, and climate change is the product of widespread combustion of fossil fuels.” Not only are these weather events not evidence of climate change, but Bonta, and insurance companies under the new legislation, will not be able to prove fossil fuel is the cause. They would have to prove both that these weather events were caused by increased CO2 emissions in the state and that the increase was caused by these five companies.

Climate change, whatever that is and to the extent it exists, does not come from California or from five companies. It is a global phenomenon. The truth is, thanks in part to these companies, the U.S. has been producing less air pollution in recent years. Notably, however, smog levels are still rising in the West due to pollution from China and India drifting over the Pacific Ocean. “Scientists found Asian air pollution contributed as much as 65% of an increase in Western ozone in recent years,” according to one NPR report. Bonta and state legislators hope these cases will bury the U.S. oil industry, while leaving China free to pollute our state at will with the fossil fuels of their choice.

If anyone should act as a backstop to the FAIR Plan, it is the electric company, Southern California Edison, not oil companies. “Residents are chronically underinsured under the FAIR Plan policies,” said Alina Landver, an L.A. wildfire and insurance attorney representing victims of the Eaton fire, which struck the Altadena and Pasadena communities. “Edison disputes the claim that its equipment started the fire, citing ‘no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies’ until over an hour after the reported start time of the fire, but federal investigators now believe Edison suppressed evidence of its role in the 2017 Creek fire.”

Common sense is required to return California to good governance, not novel, far-fetched lawsuits.