Professor Myles Allen of Oxford is an impatient, straightforward man, who’d like to ram the legal code right up the fossil industry’s ass. He recently talked to NewScientist (7 October 2017, paywall) about strategy when it comes to the problems of climate change:
In 2005, he called for action against “the 20 or so coal and oil companies” responsible for most carbon dioxide emissions in New Scientist. Since then, legal cases have been brought, but they have failed “because judges decided that because governments were regulating CO2, the courts had no role”. …
… he finds an intriguing silver lining in Trump’s crusade against climate science. “The law could come to our rescue. The US withdrawal from the Paris accord may change things for American companies.” Why? If there is no government-level emissions regulation in the US, he says, then legal liability could return. “Concern over that may be why the large fossil fuel companies in the US were arguing against withdrawal,” he says.
So would EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s consistent resistance to doing his job. Indeed, if Pruitt succeeds in dismantling the EPA, if only in spirit, the fossil fuel companies could be wide open to anyone angry enough in the court system. Not to mention that Pruitt’s failure to fulfill his duties could be interpreted as illicit.
But Professor Allen has a wide range on his criticism shotgun:
“Paris was strong on aspiration, but the progress since has been minimal.” He believes more in the power of courts, economics and public pressure – and above all in being direct. For that reason, he is frustrated by the efforts of environmentalists to turn climate change into a grand debate about how the world gets its energy, or the ethics of consumption and capitalism. Just ban greenhouse gas emissions and be done with it, he says, and require those who make and burn fossil fuels to prevent emissions in whatever way they choose – with carbon capture and storage likely to play a key role.
He has no time for gesture politics. “If I had to pick out a group who I am most frustrated with, it would not be the fossil fuel industry; it would be the environment movement for their demonisation of the fossil fuel industry.” Big oil isn’t going away any time soon, he says, so environmentalists need to stop holding their noses and engage with it. When the giant US coal companies Peabody Energy and Arch Coal hit hard times last year, Allen called for one of the many cash-rich environmental NGOs in the US to buy them. “They could have taken a substantial share of coal reserves into the hands of people committed to stabilising climate. Sadly that opportunity passed.”
I couldn’t find anything on why the opportunity passed without anyone taking advantage of it. Sure would love to see the debate on that idea, and why everyone with the power – and how many would that be? – refused to do it.
