Sheldon Whitehouse: Sue Fossil Fuel Companies For Climate Fraud

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has a new plan to combat climate change: sue fossil fuel companies for fraud.

In a May 29 op-ed in The Washington Post, Whitehouse argued that the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to discredit climate science and attack environmentalists may constitute deliberate deception of the kind the tobacco industry perpetrated in previous decades. In 2006, a federal judge found the tobacco industry guilty of fraud in a civil lawsuit brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Cigarette companies' efforts to hide the health effects of tobacco consumption included lying about the findings of their own studies on smoking.

Fossil fuel companies may be a ripe target for a civil lawsuit under RICO as well, Whitehouse wrote. The industry coordinates with conservative think tanks to disseminate industry-funded research contradicting the scientific consensus on man-made climate change. The use of think tanks may be “designed to obscure” the industry's own role and to lend intellectual credibility to otherwise unfounded scientific claims, Whitehouse wrote. And the industry’s direct funding of climate-denying scientists like Harvard’s Willie Soon could be evidence that it may be trying to buy favorable climate science.