Former New York Mayor-turned anti-oil activist Michael Bloomberg has yet to render a judgement about his successor’s highly-publicized climate change lawsuit against oil companies.
Bloomberg refuses to address the controversy, while other prominent activists take a skeptical approach toward the pursuit against Exxon Mobil and other companies criticized for producing emissions some argue contributes to global warming
“Fundamentally, solving the climate problem is about looking to the future, not the past,” Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Axios in an interview Thursday. BPC receives funding from many of the groups pushing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s litigation.
“It’s hard to see from a climate perspective how these lawsuits help solve the problem,” Grumet noted, adding that the campaign would be better aimed at getting Exxon and other companies to actively push for a tax on carbon emissions. Andrew Logan, who leads the gas program at environmental group Ceres, mirrored Grummet’s position in an interview.
“I hope we don’t spend the next 10 years mired in litigation,” Logan told reporters. “Not that you can’t do both. I just see a lot more potential in focusing on where money is being spent today and tomorrow rather than what someone said in an internal memo a couple of decades ago.”
Bloomberg’s silence is telling, especially considering his high-profile anti-coal position. He poured more than $64 million into an environmentalist group’s political war chest to help activists fight President Donald Trump’s efforts to resuscitate the fortunes of a beleaguered coal country.
“The Trump administration has yet to realize that the war on coal was never led by Washington — and Washington cannot end it,” Bloomberg said at a press conference in October of last year. “Communities in both red and blue states who are tired of having their air and water poisoned” were the ones leading the charge, he added.
Bloomberg’s announcement came a day after the Trump administration began repealing former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants. The former mayor has dumped money on similar efforts in the past.
He gave New York University a $6 million grant in August, for instance, to create a center helping attorneys general prevent Trump from nixing climate rules. The grant will go toward the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, which seeks to escalate attacks against Trump.
De Blasio, for his part, believes the five largest oil companies contributed to climate conditions that he says fed the destructive force of Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Several cities in California and across the country have kicked off similar lawsuits.
Sandy killed 53 people and caused nearly $19 billion in damage. New York’s recovery has included resiliency projects to strengthen the city against future natural disasters. De Blasio, a Democrat, wants the oil companies to pay for the improvements.
His lawsuit is fashioned around similar ones leveled against tobacco companies’ decades ago. “The tobacco lawsuits were crucial to changing the public understanding about tobacco,” de Blasio said at a press conference after announcing the decision. “So these actions today we see as crucial to changing the assumptions.”
De Blasio’s lawsuit also comes on the heels of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s probes into Exxon’s climate history – his investigation has taken many twists and turns. One of the turns prompted the Washington Post to report last year that “New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has gotten very far away from where he started in his office’s investigation into Exxon.”
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