Walters: California consumers will pay if their lawmakers penalize oil companies

A theory that oil companies should be held legally responsible for the effects of weather change has been circulating among California s left-leaning organizations and their political allies for several years The movement is gaining new vigor since deadly wildfires swept through Los Angeles County this year and it s taking two forms lawsuits and ordinance As a latest CalMatters article notes Across the country states cities tribes and environmental groups have filed dozens of lawsuits against oil companies alleging that they misled the community about the dangers of their products These cases share a core argument Oil companies knew fossil fuels were driving setting change and lied about it However as Michael Gerrard an environmental law expert at Columbia Law School described CalMatters reporter Alejandro Lazo There are a lot of lawsuits pending but so far not a single court in the world has held fossil fuel companies financially responsible for greenhouse gas emissions Meanwhile there are a couple of bills in the state Legislature that if enacted would open the door to hitting oil companies in the pocketbook Sen Scott Wiener a San Francisco Democrat introduced Senate Bill in January as the wildfires were still raging It would give homeowners and insurance companies the ability to sue oil companies for fire damages on the theory that their products created conditions for destructive blazes However the bill was sidelined during its initial hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee garnering just five votes The second measure SB would create a Polluters Pay Superfund Effort and empower a state agency to determine how much atmospheric damage has been caused by petroleum between and and impose the cost on oil companies Carried by Sen Caroline Menjivar a Democrat from Van Nuys the bill is pending in the Judiciary Committee The underlying assumption of both the lawsuits and the bill is that the oil companies would be forced to acknowledge their contributions to setting change and pay billions of dollars as compensation and punishment The theory however has an aspect that advocates never mention that corporations can pass on those costs to customers in the form of higher prices By happenstance California already has a mini-version of the polluter-pays movement called cap-and-trade and it proves the point that consumers eventually shoulder the financial burden Since California s Air Support Board has been setting limits on how much greenhouse gases can be emitted by certain industries and auctioning off emission allowances raising billions of dollars each year By paying for emissions it s deduced corporations have an incentive to reduce them Whether that s true is still an open question and one reason for doubt is their ability to shift the burden to consumers Related Articles Fishermen battling with changing oceans chart new module after Trump s push to deregulate Jay Leno pushes bill to end smog checks in California for vehicles years or older Trump administration retires database tracking billions of dollars of weather change-fueled weather damage California and other states sue Trump administration over wind vitality projects Less farmland is going for organic crops as costs and other issues take root The Legislative Analyst s Office which advises the Legislature on financial matters disclosed a review on the cap-and-trade system this week Among other things the record confirms that California motorists are already paying quite a bit more for fuel because of cap-and-trade It pegs the current effect at cents a gallon and if emission auction prices rise to their upper limit cap-and-trade would contribute roughly cents per gallon to gasoline prices The LAO summary estimates that at the higher level the average household would pay about per year as a product of the project adding such higher costs would be particularly burdensome for lower-income households as they tend to spend a relatively high share of their incomes on transportation fuels compared to wealthier households So there you have it Whatever California does to reduce its carbon footprint to zero will be expensive and California consumers will face even higher costs of living in the same way President Donald Trump s tariffs impact prices We shouldn t pretend otherwise as advocates for carbon reduction tend to Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist