In a desperate attempt to garner public favor, Attorney General Aaron Frey has filed a lawsuit against BP and other energy companies over climate change concerns. This suit was filed about two weeks before the new Legislature is set to be sworn in, the same Legislature that will decide whether Frey would continue serving as Maine’s attorney general.
Of course, this is a publicity stunt and nothing more, but it is also a tenuous lawsuit at best. Frey likely knows this. Due to his admission of unprofessional conduct with a subordinate employee, his political situation is unstable; he is using this suit to appeal to left-leaning lawmakers in a bid to keep his job. Hopefully, the Legislature will ignore this desperate appeal and replace him with someone more professional and less willing to abuse public resources for publicity stunts like this.
It’s apparent that Frey’s lawsuit is a publicity stunt when you examine its shaky legal underpinnings. The conduct he is suing over appears completely benign. In his complaint, he references a Super Bowl ad as an example of conduct that caused the suit. Furthermore, the injuries he alleges the public has incurred from climate change are impossible to prove.
The suit claims that due to the defendants’ advertisements not adequately warning of climate change, they influenced consumer behavior. However, this is also impossible to prove, as no one can know what American consumers would’ve done without advertisements being circulated. After all, who can honestly say they decided to go to the gas station to buy more gas because they saw an exciting new BP advertisement on TV?
Rising sea levels, extreme weather and flooding, extreme storms, vector-borne disease and economic harm are most of the injuries listed in the lawsuit, allegedly all due to the companies’’ actions. While some of these are caused by climate change, others seem to have many mixed causes or no apparent cause whatsoever.
Just because climate change is happening currently does not mean that everything that happens is wrong because of climate change. Frey is trying in this lawsuit to blame BP and other energy companies for almost every bad weather event in Maine. He’s even arguing that these companies are at fault for ticks spreading Lyme disease.
Furthermore, even the injuries connected to climate change make a weak case here. Sure, rising oceans are linked to climate change, and fossil fuels create a lot of carbon dioxide. However, to determine damages here, a court would have to determine not only how much ocean rising will occur due to fossil fuels, but even more, they will have to determine how much climate change occurred because of these particular defendants. After all, we can’t blame BP and other companies for 100% of climate change, can we?
Additionally, in measuring costs to the public and private Mainers, Frey fails to account for the increased expenses that switching to nonfossil fuels would have. At one point in the suit, he asserts that the costs of these emissions are not worth the money made from fossil fuels. However, these profits are not only for the companies, as lower energy costs are partly passed on to energy consumers. Furthermore, a recent report on the cost of renewable energy in New England found that the costs of renewable energy outweigh the Biden administration’s social cost of carbon calculations per pound of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
Blaming these defendants for the entirety of climate change is absurd on its face and completely unfair. Suppose a judge hypothetically decided that Maine’s ocean will rise 4 inches above sea level due to climate change, a difficult decision. In that case, they will have to determine the exact injuries incurred. This is also quite difficult to ask due to Maine’s massive coastline. Still, the last, effectively impossible question to answer, is this: How much of the hypothetical four inches is from each defendant’s actions?
Furthermore, how much of the damage is from each part of the ocean’s rise? Remember, the ocean level is, in many ways, the easiest to quantify the effect of climate change; there are much harder ones. If a court agreed with Frey in this case, it would have to calculate many other injuries and their associated causes.
The legal basis behind this lawsuit is flimsy, and I would not be surprised if it did not work to change the Legislature’s minds on ousting Frey. If someone does replace him, I hope that they do not use their position of power to pull political stunts like this and behave more professionally in an office as important as the attorney general.