Members of Congress in Wyoming and Texas tout the bills as protecting energy security, but opponents say they amount to a corporate handout that will cost taxpayers billions and harm human and environmental health.
Members of Congress from Texas and Wyoming introduced bills recently that would grant fossil fuel companies sweeping legal immunity and shield energy producers from stricter compliance with the Clean Air Act.
Hageman’s statement included quotes from fossil fuel lobbyists and executives thanking her and Cruz, whose bill in the Senate is co-sponsored by Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, for introducing the legislation. The bill is being referred to as the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act.”
The FENCES Act, which Lee also cosponsored in the Senate, passed on April 16 in the House, where it was co-sponsored by Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and Rep. Jeff Crank, R-Colo.
“I’m thrilled to see the FENCES Act move one step closer to becoming law,” Lummis said in a press release. “This legislation will help drive innovation and economic growth across Wyoming by cutting unnecessary red tape. At the same time, the FENCES Act preserves strong Clean Air Act standards while implementing commonsense policies that account for pollution beyond a state’s control.”
The American Petroleum Institute, the largest fossil fuel trade group in the U.S., has lobbied in favor of each bill, according to recent disclosures.
A spokesperson for Lummis said the fossil fuel industry did not lobby her to write the FENCES Act or help her craft the legislation. None of the other lawmakers supporting these pieces of legislation responded to questions over whether they had heard from industry lobbyists.
Republican Harriet Hageman, Wyoming’s only member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, spearheaded legislation that would protect fossil fuel companies from liability for damages caused by storms, wildfires and other climate-fueled disasters. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, collaborated on another bill called the FENCES Act, which would make it easier for states to claim that foreign emissions are driving local pollution.
“Energy security is national security, and we will not self-sabotage our critical industries with a cascade of costly lawsuits and extreme penalties that jeopardize American drilling,” Hageman said in a statement accompanying her bill’s announcement. “America’s energy producers should be protected from the dangerous legal precedent that would be set by the retroactive punishment of lawful activity.”
Immune Corporations, Vulnerable Citizens?
Hageman and Cruz’s bills shielding fossil fuel companies from climate superfund laws and lawsuits seeking damages for weather disasters linked to climate impacts of their products are being viewed by some as part of a campaign to delegitimize climate science.
“It’s part of a broader attack on attribution science”—research that quantifies how much emissions from fossil-fuels contributed to a specific climate disaster—said Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign director with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Attribution science has “been recognized by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a critical tool for understanding the impacts of climate change.”
This year, those impacts manifested in one of the warmest and driest winters ever for many parts of the West.
Across the Colorado River basin, irrigators, cities and industrial users are reckoning with record low snowpack, an ongoing megadrought and the possibility that federal dams will not be able to provide water and electricity to the 40 million people in the U.S., Mexico and 30 tribal nations that depend on them.
“People are really worried about what the summer is going to look like” in Wyoming, said Emma Jones, associate organizer for the Sierra Club’s Wyoming chapter. “It’s really frustrating that [Wyoming’s congressional delegation] is going to just continue giving handouts to these industries that have already harmed our communities for a really long time.”
Texas has experienced a full spectrum of climate-related environmental disasters—from snowstorms to wildfires, heatwaves and flooding. In Corpus Christi, where petrochemical plants, oil refineries and other industries account for over half of the city’s daily water usage, schools and hospitals are drilling for groundwater as city officials stare down the prospect of running dry.
The cost of rebuilding after these events ultimately lands on Texans, whose burden could be reduced by damage payments from fossil fuel companies, Reed said. (Texas has not filed any lawsuits seeking damages for climate disasters from fossil fuel companies.)
“I’m disappointed that Cruz is using his position as Senator of the great state of Texas to do the bidding of large oil and gas and industrial companies instead of looking out for the health and affordability of average Texans,” he said.