https://www.wired.com/story/courtroom-climate-science/“From Chevron’s perspective, there’s no debate about climate science,” Boutrous said. “Chevron accepts what this scientific body—scientists and others—what the IPCC has reached consensus on.”
The follow-up questions, though, will be the tricky part. Because what was at stake in that courtroom was not whether the effects of climate change—sea level rise, ocean acidification, weather extremes, wildfires, disease outbreaks—are people’s fault. It was whether a lawsuit could show that specific effects (floods) are specific people’s fault. Specifically, the people at Chevron.
...and BP and ExxonMobil, because San Francisco and Oakland are suing those companies for money to build seawalls and other protective infrastructure.
If that seems a little bit like the “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” of petrochemical capitalism, well, Judge Alsup did start the morning by saying today was a day for science, not politics.
Outside the usual procedural kabuki of the courtroom, the truth is no one really knew what to expect from this court-ordered “tutorial.” For a culture based in large measure on precedent, putting counsel and experts in a room to hash out climate change for a trial—putting everyone on the record, in federal court, on what is and is not true about climate science—was literally unprecedented.
Now things might get even more real. If a court attaches culpability for sea level rise in California to petrochemical companies, that might establish causation for a planet’s worth of damage, any disaster someone can plausibly connect to climate change. That’s wildfires, drought, more intense hurricanes. Attribute it to climate, and it could attribute all the way to fossil fuel companies’ bank accounts.
