In his WSJ column Holman Jenkins remarks about a New York lawsuit against Exxon:
Despite its general lack of merit, a lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office is an entertaining symbol of all that has gone wrong with the green movement in the era of climate-change politics.
Exxon is accused of failing to adopt sufficiently penitential accounting for its oil and gas projects in light of climate regulations that, ahem, don’t exist. Indeed, politicians around the world have declined to enact the green wish list even when given the chance, notwithstanding their endless verbal opposition to climate change.
Presume for a moment the accusations against Exxon are accurate. Then greens should actually be glad because Exxon has spared them future embarrassment when the company is forced to increase the recorded value of its assets to account for the failure of green politics to deliver the expected carbon regulations.
Words are challenged to express how laughable this case is. Before getting lost in distinctions that Exxon internally draws (and the attorney general muddles) between project-specific costs and policies that would suppress demand for fossil fuels generally, let’s remember a few things.
Like all businesses, Exxon seeks to take only those risks that will pay off, and has every incentive to anticipate future regulatory costs correctly. The attorney general’s office and its green backers have an entirely different purpose: They want Exxon to use its internal disciplines to prevent oil and gas development even if it would pay off.
This suit highlights a gripe of mine. How policy is constructed and how it relates to the real world are important. You have to consider actual conditions and how actual people and companies will behave. You can’t govern by The Think System any more than you can learn to play the bassoon by it.
It matters, for example, whether European governments have been calculating their countries’ reductions in emissions based on presumed inputs or based on measurements. If it’s the former, they may not have accomplished anything at all since we know that not just VW but other companies selling diesel-powered automobiles falsified their results. It matters whether the wood pellets that Germans are using to heat their homes to avoid coal or nuclear power were milled from recent growth or old growth. Having good intentions and wishful thinking aren’t enough.
Just what is that makes you think they have good intentions?
My own tired going stale gripe is that such suits keep the lawyers in money (since state AG’s farm these out to supporters) and burnish egos.