Faced with the desperate slowness of the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the legal weapon recently came to complete the arsenal to attack climate change. Faithful to our proverbial Colbertism, it is through the actions brought against the State that the idea of ”climate trial” has reached our regions. But in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, otherwise more fond of an offensive use of the law, the first lawsuits brought against large private companies for endangering climate stability have been underway for more than a decade already.
It is mainly the oil and gas majors that are in the line of fire. These companies produce and market a large share of the fossil fuels used in Western countries – which have led to our present emissions. They therefore hold an essential part of the responsibility in the current climate catastrophe, motivating the lawsuits brought against them by nearly 20 American states and cities.
Three decades of intense lobbying later…
But beyond the production of fossil energy, it is also the action of oil companies to slow down the decarbonization of our economies at all costs that is on the dock. This methodical disinformation campaign, carried out with particular vehemence in the United States over the past thirty years, has made climate change a particularly polarizing and inflammable subject on the other side of the Atlantic. It was not, however, inevitable – who today remembers George Bush senior closing the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, a few minutes after announcing the signing of a climate convention (which was to launch the COP process), declaring “The United States is committed to being a leader in protecting the global environment”?
Three decades of intense lobbying later, American public debate on climate issues remains tainted with the slow poison of confusion. It is easy to understand the motivation of the oil majors: they quickly understood that a world out of fossil fuels would very quickly do without their services. But what did they really know about the risk that greenhouse gas emissions posed to the planet?
A report with prophetic conclusions
It should no doubt be recalled here that the very mechanism of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, at the root of climate change, has been known since the end of the 19th century and its formulation by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius. But the magnitude of the human contribution, its inextricable link to the industrial use of fossil fuels and its destabilizing effects on the global climate system were not understood until later. Now it is here that the documents revealed by the ongoing trials are edifying.
We discover, thanks to the work of an American lawyer, Carroll Muffett, and his International Center for Environmental Law, that, in the 1960s, the American Petroleum Institute had commissioned a group of researchers associated with the Stanford University a report on the risks that carbon dioxide emissions could pose to climate stability. The conclusions of the report, presented only to the Institute’s executives in 1968 by its two co-authors, Bob Robbins and Elmer Robinson, are remarkably prophetic. The two researchers say that “the potentially serious damage to our environment does not seem to be in doubt”. Better, that it was “likely that substantial temperature increases will occur”. Even more incredible, in an additional report from 1969, the authors projected an evolution of atmospheric CO2 to 370 ppm in the year 2000…against 369.71 in reality!
It is therefore difficult for the fossil fuel industry to claim that it did not know. These documents remind us of the clarity of scientific conclusions on the subject already more than five decades ago. Worse, the reports brought to light by the ongoing proceedings confirm how much the fight that the fossil industry has been waging against the energy transition since the 1990s is carried out in full awareness of its consequences for the climate. Since 1968 and the writing of this secret report, the cumulative emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution have quadrupled – so many years lost for the safeguard of our climate.