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Two Democratic legislators have introduced a bill allowing residents damaged by wildfire to sue oil and gas companies for producing products they say cause global warming. The same companies provide the fuel for the helicopters and planes needed to fight the fires.

Two Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation in California to allow residents who have damages from natural disasters to sue oil and gas companies. The proposed bill claims that the oil industry intentionally deceived the public about the risks of fossil fuels, which they say appear to have intensified storms and wildfires and caused billions of dollars in damage in California. California would be the first U.S. state to allow such lawsuits if approved. According to supporters of the bill, these disasters have driven insurers to raise rates, limit coverage, or pull out entirely from regions susceptible to wildfires and other natural disasters. Of course, there is no mention of the benefits of fossil fuels, including supplying life-saving heat in winter, air conditioning in summer, food on the table, and economic prosperity from supporting industrial activity.

In California, utility companies are liable for damages if their equipment starts a wildfire. Some believe the same idea should apply to oil and gas companies because the products they make available to the public when consumed by the public, emit carbon dioxide that produces global warming and climate change, which they allege leads to catastrophes such as those recently experienced in California. The proposed bill aims to alleviate the financial burdens on victims of these types of disasters and insurance companies by allowing them to sue the oil industry to recover their losses. It would also allow the state’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, created for homeowners who could not obtain insurance from the private sector, to sue for damages so the plan does not become insolvent. The plan is primarily funded by policies sold to customers, but insurers are currently required to pay into the fund if it is insolvent or to keep it from going insolvent.

The recent multiple fires that tore through sections of Los Angeles and burned more than 12,000 structures were labeled the most destructive in the modern history of the city of Los Angeles and estimated to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. California lawmakers voted to spend $2.5 billion to help rebuild the area. President Trump visited the devastation and indicated that the federal government would supply aid as long as California changes its voter ID laws and enacts water reforms.

Oil companies have already survived several climate lawsuits claiming that they have deceived the public regarding the risks of fossil fuels. More lawsuits from U.S. municipalities, eight states, and Washington, D.C., against oil and gas companies over their role in climate change are pending, including one filed by California more than a year ago. The civil lawsuit also seeks the creation of a fund — financed by the companies — to pay for recovery efforts following devastating storms and fires. Another blue state, New York, has a new law mandating that the largest fossil fuel companies deemed responsible for carbon dioxide emissions contribute $3 billion annually to a climate mitigation fund for the next 25 years. The NY legislation will increase consumer energy costs by imposing a punitive fee on fossil fuels that supply roughly 80% of U.S. energy needs.

California is trying to convince insurers to continue doing business in the state by giving them more latitude to raise premiums in exchange for issuing more policies in high-risk areas. Seven of the top 12 insurance companies doing business in California in 2023 either paused or restricted new business in the state after assessing that the state was ill-prepared to prevent and respond to wildfires and that its cap on rates exposed the companies to too much risk, given those conditions. The state now allows insurers to consider climate change when setting their prices and will soon allow them to pass on reinsurance costs to California consumers.

California Misplaces Its Priorities

As Los Angeles burned from the wildfires, Newsom’s administration was working on a mission to protect a supposedly endangered form of trout. The state employs about 5,300 workers in conservation and wildlife protection vs. 570 in the fire agency’s wildland management — a 9 to 1 dichotomy. Weeks before the fires, the 110-year-old Santa Cruz Wharf collapsed into the ocean because the California Coastal Commission had delayed repairs so that they would not interfere with seagulls’ mating season. In 2017, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife implemented a policy requiring owners whose pets or livestock have been attacked by mountain lions first to try nonlethal means of deterrence. Only after the third attack could they obtain a permit to kill the predator.

California chose to protect the 3-inch delta smelts rather than allowing water available to farmers and for other uses. According to the Wall Street Journal, “runoff from mountains in Northern California feeds into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is connected to the San Francisco Bay. Pumps at the south push water to farms in California’s Central Valley and Southern California cities — but because smelt sometimes gets trapped in the pumps, federal and state governments have restricted how hard they can run,” allowing billions of gallons of water to flow into the Pacific Ocean. The smelt population, however, has continued to decline due to nonnative predator fish and other delta dwellers that outcompete it for food. The smelt appeared to have gone extinct in 2020, but in 2021, more than 12,000 smelts were released into the delta, perpetuating the excuse to limit water flows to farmers.

These problems began with the passage of the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA), a federal law championed by green NGOs which began to shift the focus of the federal and state water management projects from moving water from north to south to dumping water into the Pacific in the Northern part of the state.

Conclusion

California lawmakers are considering allowing residents affected by natural disasters to sue oil companies under the guise that they have not exposed the risks of fossil fuels to climate change. This is a continuation of blaming everyone but themselves for the devastating wildfires that have hit the L.A. area. It appears that California has continually put protecting animals ahead of humans as a species of supposedly endangered trout was being studied for protection by the Newsom administration, which employs many more workers in conservation and wildlife protection than in wildland management during the L.A. wildfires. The state’s top-heavy government permitting system also dissuades residents from clearing their land of fire-prone brush buildup.  And, while the fires burned, the fire hydrants in the affected area of L.A. were empty, as were the reservoirs, so the wildfires could not be easily contained. President Trump has repeatedly argued that California officials could have boosted water flow to Los Angeles from the northern part of the state by pumping more of the resource. Two Democrat legislators, however, prefer to sue oil and gas companies that provide the fuel for the helicopters and planes that are needed to fight the fires.

*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.