Should Big Oil pay for California’s climate disasters? You may pay at the pump | Opinion

Remember when climate change was a big deal in California? You would never know it this week, as a signature bill supported by California’s environmental community couldn’t even make it out of committee in a Legislature dominated by Democrats.

It’s probably a good thing Senate Bill 222 by Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, lost. What’s not a good thing is that California is losing its focus on meeting ambitious climate goals to lessen or reverse the undeniable effects of climate change on our state: intense heat waves, unprecedented wildfires, rising sea levels, and noticeable changes in precipitation.

With SB 222, Wiener sought to create a new genre of litigation against oil companies, allowing any Californian with $10,000 in weather-related damage to sue for fossil fuel’s role in climate change.

Yet what was billed as a solution to two related crises — insurance and climate — got shelved due to concerns about the future cost of gasoline if oil companies faced thousands of annual lawsuits due to one weather calamity or another. Supporters claimed that the oil companies would not charge more for gasoline if they were held financially accountable for climate change, the money coming from profits rather than consumers. But the scale of what SB 222 was contemplating was simply too great a risk, and never a particularly serious idea in the first place.

Californians spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 billion a year on gasoline, according to statistics from the California Energy Commission. The Los Angeles wildfires that occurred in January, by one estimate from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, could cost more than $100 billion.

At a time when crude oil prices have been going down, California once again has the most expensive gasoline in the nation. Who knows how much oil companies would have to pay in lawsuits annually if they were automatically to blame for property damage thanks to SB 222. Whatever safeguards that now exist to keep gasoline prices in check aren’t working. If oil companies had to hire legions of lawyers to defend themselves in courthouses throughout the state every day, facing sure defeat, does anyone think they would eat the losses privately and go home?

“I wish I liked this bill better,” said State Senator Anna Caballero, D- Merced. She is a member of the senate’s Judiciary Committee, where the bill died on Tuesday with only three of the eight necessary “yes” votes to proceed. While it’s “great for attorneys, Caballero said, it “doesn’t solve the issue.”

SB 222 represented the latest salvo by Sacramento Democrats against “Big Oil,” the petroleum companies that provide the estimated 13 billion gallons of gasoline burned in the state last year. Attorney General Rob Bonta led the charge in 2023, supported then and now by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The basic charge is that these companies have, for decades, known that their products harm the planet, have stifled efforts to transition to cleaner fuels and should be held financially accountable.

This effort remains bogged down in court, however, with ExxonMobil fighting back this year with challenges of defamation of their own. Prospects of victory for Bonta long-term are unclear at best.

SB 222 sought to guarantee victory. It declares the financially responsible parties to weather damages worsened by climate change to be the “large companies in the fossil fuel industry.” And it authorizes any California resident or company to seek compensation for damages within three years of the incident.

The bill’s declaration of guilt raises all kinds of legality and constitutional questions that critics pounced on. The insurance industry, the supposed beneficiary of the legislation, vehemently opposed it. So did the building trade unions, a key constituency of Democrats.

“This absolutely will drive up the price of gas in California,” said state Senator Angelique Ashby, D-Sacramento, a judiciary committee member. “Too much money spent on lawyers and courts. I’m not going to support the bill today.”

This is a rare misfire for Wiener, one of the state senate’s most prolific and legislatively ambitious members. It was curious that he made SB 222’s passage a near impossibility by requiring a two-thirds vote in both chambers, so it could take effect immediately if Newsom had signed it. Although the committee voted to potentially reconsider the bill, Wiener should take Tuesday’s vote as a very strong and negative signal.

More broadly, SB 222 exemplifies the struggle for Democrats to settle on a Sacramento agenda. Is it affordability, as suggested by Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, who so far is short on specifics? If SB 222 isn’t the solution to the insurance crisis, then what is? And for climate change, does the environmental community have a rallying cry other than its opposition to Big Oil, as our looming targets to lower emissions and increase the sales of electric vehicles appear in jeopardy? If the next steps in Sacramento are to find new and creative ways to show the world how to dramatically lower emissions, the environmental community needs to shift its focus.

It’s a concern, to say the least, that the agenda of the party in power isn’t maturing into real-world solutions as these problems get worse. An early death of SB 222 gives Democrats most of this session to do better.

This story was originally published April 10, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Should Big Oil pay for California’s climate disasters? You may pay at the pump | Opinion."