New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to do to big oil what big law did to big tobacco, from Washington Free Beacon [1]:
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D.) on Wednesday appeared to blame oil companies for the damage that Hurricane Sandy caused in New York in 2012.
[…]
De Blasio also said that New York City is suing five of the world’s most powerful oil companies—BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell—for what he described as contributing to climate change and covering it up.
“That’s why we’re suing five of the biggest petroleum companies, because like the tobacco companies some years ago, they understood this crisis,” de Blasio said. “They tried very intently to cover up the information about climate change and to project a propaganda campaign suggesting that climate change wasn’t real and go ahead and keep using your fossil fuels.”
Good luck to Mayor Bill to identifying the source to the carbon molecules that he supposed to have caused Sandy. Leaving aside natural carbon sources, such a Mayor Bill himself, petrochemical are minority contributor to human carbon emmissions, from What’s Your Impact [2]:
Fossil fuel combustion/use
The largest human source of carbon dioxide emissions is from the combustion of fossil fuels. This produces 87% of human carbon dioxide emissions. Burning these fuels releases energy which is most commonly turned into heat, electricity or power for transportation. Some examples of where they are used are in power plants, cars, planes and industrial facilities. In 2011, fossil fuel use created 33.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.1
The 3 types of fossil fuels that are used the most are coal, natural gas and oil. Coal is responsible for 43% of carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion, 36% is produced by oil and 20% from natural gas.5
Moreover, Mayor Bill’s five big oil defendants not particularly big in the global oil market. The largest oil companies are not privately owned but rather national oil companies. Only one of Mayor Bill’s defendants even make the top five, from Wikipedia [3]. Mayor Bill can cry, and sue, wolf. However can he show cause and effect?