Rep. Tony Caplan, Merrimack County, District 8 serves in the Science, Technology and Energy committee.
New Hampshire has never been afraid to take on powerful corporate interests, especially ones that knowingly sold dangerous products and lied about them to the public.
Over the years the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office has taken tobacco companies, opioid manufacturers, and other deceitful profiteers to courtand our state successfully made those bad actors pay for the harm they caused to our residents.
Now, I believe it’s time for New Hampshire to hold accountable those who have perpetrated one of the most harmful corporate deception campaigns in history: the fossil fuel industry. Major oil and gas companies knew decades ago that their products would fuel climate change, but they pivoted to a campaign of doubt and denial about the science, protecting their investments and their shareholders, instead of doing what they could to mitigate what they knew to be a possibly existential threat on a planetary scale.
A recent peer-reviewed study in the journal Science confirmed that scientists at Exxon have accurately predicted the rate of global warming since the 1970s, while at the same time, oil company executives carried out a sophisticated, decades-long public relations campaign to make the public question and doubt that science.
To this day, thanks to the fossil fuel industry’s deception campaign, members of our political establishment won’t fully accept climate science. In the halls of our own statehouse, members can be found who will recite fossil fuel propaganda.
Such an effective influence campaign has been astoundingly successful for the oil industry, which has raked an estimated $3 billion a day for the last 50 years, but tragic for the rest of us, who have been forced to pay the price for Big Oil’s deception.
As the planet warms, New Hampshire is experiencing milder winters, hotter and drier summers, increased flooding and sea-level rise, and other fossil-fueled damages that harm our local businesses, food systems, and public health and safety.
Who will pay the costs associated with this new climate reality? Currently it is us, the public and generations to come. But what if we made the polluters who caused this crisis — and lied about it for decades to protect their profits — pay instead? What would justice be in the case of such an extreme crime? Ultimately, that should be an issue for the courts to decide.
That is why several of my colleagues and I have introduced House Concurrent Resolution 5, which encourages the attorney general to take appropriate legal action for the harms caused by the oil companies’ fraudulent and costly campaign to sow doubt among us.
If New Hampshire were to sue oil companies for their climate deception, we’d be in good company. Seven other states, including four in New England (Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) and more than 30 municipalities across the country have taken major fossil fuel companies to court for lying to consumers and to make them pay for the damage those lies caused.
Massachusetts is now getting ready to put Exxon on trial, and last year Rhode Island won a major ruling against fossil fuel companies from the same federal appeals court that has jurisdiction over New Hampshire.
Our state has taken on oil companies before, and won. In 2013, ExxonMobil was ordered to pay $236 million for its role in polluting our water. After three months of testimony, the jury was able to reach a verdict against Exxon in less than 90 minutes. If and when a jury hears the overwhelming evidence of how that same company and others knowingly fueled the climate crisis and lied about it, leaving the rest of us to deal with the consequences, I predict it would take even less time than that to find them guilty.