Fossil Fuel Industries Pushing For Total Climate Immunity With Trump's Congress, Similar To Shield For Gunmakers

[hatrack]

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Over the last decade, states and municipalities have brought more than 30 lawsuits accusing big oil of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products, and seeking potentially billions in damages. The defendants have worked to kill the cases, with limited success. Now, with Republicans in control of the White House and both congressional chambers, advocates fear the industry will go further, pursuing total immunity from all existing and future climate lawsuits. To do so, they could lobby for a liability waiver like the one granted to the firearms industry in 2005, which has successfully blocked most attempts to hold them accountable for violence.

“Lawmakers must decisively reject any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to evade accountability and ensure both justice today and the right of future generations to hold polluters responsible for decades of deception,” said the missive, which is addressed to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer.

Fossil fuel companies have vied for such a get-out-of-jail-free card for years. In 2017, a coalition of Republican officials, economists and oil companies proposed legal liability as a condition of a carbon tax, arguing the industry could not weather both. When the council abandoned the waiver proposal two years later, Exxon threatened to leave the group, documents subpoenaed by the Senate show.

Then, in 2020, a waiver was quietly included in a draft of a Covid-19 spending package but was later removed, the investigative climate outlet Drilled found. Such a waiver could only pass through the Senate with supermajority support, requiring backing from some Democrats. In a January interview, Michael Gerrard, a climate law expert at Columbia University, said it is “hard to imagine” it winning bipartisan backing. But the advocates fear oil companies could lobby officials to once again quietly tuck the proposal into a larger, must-pass piece of legislation.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/13/fossil-fuel-lobby-immunity-lawsuits

[Irish_Dem]

1. The billionaires given permission to destroy the planet and the humans on it.