Peter-Vincent Schuld

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that he wants to sue major oil companies such as ConocoPhillips, Shell, BP (Amoco), Chevron and ExxonMobil for allegedly knowing that their activities contributed to climate change and “keeping it under wraps”.

De Blasio is thus opting for a “collision course” instead of sitting down with the companies and looking at how to work with these oil companies. De Blasio forgets that his City of New York is a major consumer of fuel if we just look at the heavily fuel-consuming fleet.

Whether you like it or not, whether you deny it or not, without the use of fossil fuels, there would not have been a single metre of movement in the momentum of the peoples and progress.

A characteristic of progress is that as time passes, insights emerge that require adjustments in how a society functions and with what means this society functions.

New York and its stature was partly built by the prosperity brought by oil. Think for a moment of J.D. Rockefeller and his “Standard Oil”.
The Rockefeller empire brought prosperity but eventually collapsed due to the cartelizations and the legislation that curtailed it.
ExxonMobil and Chevron are now the “legal successors” of the once-mighty Standard Oil.

De Blasio’s “legal reasoning” is more like a “political reasoning” and really does not contribute to an improvement of the climate and is by no means constructive.

Yes, oil companies extract oil and gas from the ground and sell it. Crazy, huh? That is their core business.
A primary objective of a company is to make a profit.

Now you can think what you want about the capitalist system, you can think what you want about big corporations. But one of the most important characteristics of a large company is to have a long-term vision. What will a company look like in a few decades, especially when it comes to companies that are worth hundreds of billions of euros in assets and liabilities?

For oil companies, it is a question of how they can integrate the new energy and climate realities into their business operations.
This is not a process of days, weeks, months or years, it takes longer. It is also a total utopia to think that within a decade or so, we as a world will have completely abandoned the extraction and use of oil and gas. The wish is therefore also the father of all thoughts.

So de Blasio’s announcement to take oil companies to court is really more political than realistic.

Is de Blasio also going to sue the manufacturers of firearms because the consequences of the use of firearms are costing the New York City Police Department?

No, that’s definitely not “sexy” enough politically…. Right now, today, at the time of writing this piece.
Unless, that is, tomorrow there is a mass shooting at a school in New York City, for example, in which I know how many people are killed.