Apr 25, 2021 Hot Take

Accountability Means Abolition

Hey Hot Cakes!

Welcome to Hot Take! Your weekly (at least) newsletter surveying the state of the climate crisis and all the ways we’re talking—and not talking about it! We give you a round up of the latest climate stories and articles of the week, plus exclusive original reporting and commentary from us. Oh, and who are we? Amy Westervelt, long-time climate journalist with more seasoning than an everything bagel, and Mary Annaïse Heglar, a literary writer known for her essays on climate, race, and emotion—and her enthusiasm for dad jokes!

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Accountability Means Abolition

By Mary Annaise Heglar

This Tuesday, our regularly scheduled BP-trolling was interrupted by the late-afternoon announcement that the jury in the Derek Chauvin trial had reached a verdict, less than 24 hours after entering deliberation. When the verdict was read I couldn’t believe my ears: guilty on all counts. All three.

Lots of people rejoiced, some going so far as to gloat about the horrors of sexual abuse that likely await Chauvin in prison. However, as an aspiring prison abolitionist, with exceptions, I couldn't find any joy or comfort here. It’s not that I want to see Chauvin walk free, I just think the prospect of justice left the room the minute that Chauvin put his knee on George Floy’s neck. This isn’t accountability for Chauvin either. He’s going to prison to be punished, not to atone.

What I want to see is bigger than Chauvin, anyway. I want to see accountability for the entire policing system, the entire criminal justice system. And, much like the fossil fuel industry, I don’t see a way to hold that system accountable without admitting that it has no right to exist. I would not be satisfied, for example, with Bernard Looney going to prison while the rest of the fossil fuel industry is still out here fucking shit up. I want BP, as a company, and all its ilk gone. Same with the police. Abolish them both.

And let’s not forget the sordid ties between the two. Last summer, a story Amy wrote in Hot Take led to the revelation that fossil fuel companies have been funding police departments all over the country. Just this week, it was revealed that Enbridge, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, has been lining the pockets of the police who’ve been nothing short of brutal with protesters there for years. Of course. The worst people are always the same people.

The same day the Chauvin verdict came out, the police in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed a teenage girl. Clearly, we are a long way from accountability. When you have this much blood on your hands, true accountability means abolition. I want them gone.

The Week in Greentrolling: #FUBPDay

By Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt

While Thursday was the big day this week for most brands and environmental/climate groups, at Hot Take, we were more excited for Tuesday, April 20, which we’d dubbed #FUBPDay in honor of the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We talked in our last issue about exactly why BP, despite its truly masterful greenwashing, deserves all the smoke we can give it, and it was absolutely delightful to see so many people get in on the fun and much-deserved public shaming.

BP was smart enough not to tweet on the anniversary of its big disaster, but folks dug back into the older tweets and Instagram posts to mark the occasion. Evidence here, here, here, here, and all over here. We wrapped the day up on Clubhouse to talk about the ugliness of Deepwater Horizon and the glory of #FUBPDay. Big thank you to all of you who joined us that day.

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California Just Made a Fracking Ban Politically Viable

By Amy Westervelt

When I was living in SF in my 20s, then-mayor Gavin Newsom and his wife (Kimberly Guilfoyle back then, current partner of one Don Jr.) were notorious swingers and Newsom spent most weekends doing drugs and "DJ-ing" at one of the clubs he was part owner of. He was 100% that dude. No one thought he had serious political aspirations. But time wore on, he cleaned up his image, married a Stanford grad feminist, started doing and saying more of the right things. And then Trump came along and obliterated quaint ideas about what might disqualify someone from holding political office.

For a moment in the early days of Covid, it looked like Newsom might be headed for the stage and, despite his seemingly progressive politics, California environmentalists groaned. Because for all his talk of acting on climate, Newsom, like every "liberal" California governor before him, was still propping up an oil state.

Few people outside the state, and even fewer outside the West, realize that California was built on oil at least as much as gold. The city of Los Angeles literally grew atop oil fields, at one point supplying a quarter of the world's oil.

Which is why it is a huge fucking deal that amidst a well-funded and aggressive recall effort, and in the lead-up to an election year, Newsom announced the country's first statewide fracking ban this week.

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Oil Companies Are Being Sued for Greenwashing in Four Separate Cases—Where's the Media Coverage?

By Amy Westervelt

The state of Massachusetts sued Exxon more than two years ago for fraud, related to the company's years of climate denial and greenwashing. Last year Minnesota sued a whole bunch of people, including Koch Industries and the American Petroleum Institute for the same thing. Just two days after that suit was announced, the city of Washington D.C. filed almost the exact same suit. Did you hear about them at all? Somehow not a single national paper gave any space to those stories. But this week New York City announced a similar suit against Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute and suddenly the media has discovered that climate lawsuits exist. Can you say "New York media bias"?

The pandemic has made it even worse, with growing layoffs across newsrooms and restrictions on travel. But there's something else going on here, too. These four cases, all of which lean on state or local consumer protection laws to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for greenwashing—aka lying about climate change and what they're doing about it—came on the heels of more than 20 climate liability cases filed all over the country. Those cases are slightly different, they invoke nuisance laws in an attempt to hold fossil fuel companies liable for some of the costs associated with adapting to climate change at this late date. It's their fault the problem was unaddressed for so long, that delay has increased costs, so they should shoulder some of the bill, the thinking goes. Otherwise, who pays for all those seawalls and extra firefighters? Taxpayers. Between the liability suits and the fraud suits, there are at least 25 active climate lawsuits in the U.S. alone right now, why do we almost never hear about it?

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