There's nothing righteous about making it a crime to sell gasoline to willing customers.
Wall Street Journal (4/15/24) op-ed: "Federal courts have limited the Biden administration’s authority to set nationwide standards regulating emissions from power plants. But some cities and states are pushing to meet stringent climate goals by other means. In October, the Hawaii Supreme Court allowed the city and county of Honolulu, along with the local water utility board, to claim that oil and gas companies failed to disclose the risks their products posed to the environment. As a result, the suit alleges, buyers overconsumed oil and gas, which caused excess emissions, which increased global temperatures, which caused sea levels to rise, which then damaged Honolulu. The energy companies are now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to put a stop to this charade. It should, for several reasons...Energy companies have no statutory duty to talk about global warming when selling oil and gas. Even if they did, liability typically requires that asymmetric information exist between the speaker and its target audience. That situation arises, for example, with a latent product defect, like a missing bolt on an airplane door assembly. Here, however, Honolulu claims that the energy companies failed to disclose risks that carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions pose to the environment—matters of which virtually every member of the public is keenly aware. That alone should torpedo the case. If the unspecified misstatements or omissions mattered, they could at most cause a slight reduction in usage, which would have no environmental effects at all. Honolulu claims the right to milk energy companies for massive damages even though there is no meaningful connection between the lawful sale of gasoline products in Hawaii and the asserted harm caused by worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases.
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"The Biden administration’s current mineral policies in a nutshell: If the Ambler Access Project was in Africa, they’d probably be supporting it and subsidizing it. But since it’s in Alaska, and some of it crosses federal land, they’re politicizing and rejecting it."
– Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
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