So , who ’ s going to pay for this ? If an arsonist lit your house on fire , in addition to sending him to jail you could also sue his estate for damages . In this case , we have corporations and individuals who intentionally lied to us for half a century about the impact of their fossil fuels on global warming just to enrich themselves . Now they ’ re standing back with their hands in their pockets shrugging and whistling while people die and our homes are frozen , flooded or destroyed by tornadoes .
Those who perpetrated the lies that led to this must be held to account , both financially and with the force of criminal law .
On top of that , now that climate change is here and walloping us , we must harden our nation ’ s infrastructure and relocate both vulnerable people and those who lost their homes and communities to wild weather , drought , and floods .
Shouldn ’ t the fossil fuel companies and the millionaires and billionaires they ’ ve created pick up that bill , too ?
We ’ ve been having a similar conversation around other 20th century corporate crime for decades , and generally we ’ ve screwed it up .
America is pock-marked with mansions and estates owned by families enjoying multi-generational wealth that came from their ancestors or parents lying to the American government and the public in ways that killed people .
For example , in 1943 Samac Laboratory told the nation ’ s largest asbestos producer , Johns-Manville , that asbestos exposure definitely and predictably caused the excruciatingly painful and always-fatal lung cancer called mesothelioma . The company ’ s executives made the corporate decision to cover the science up and then lied about it to their employees , customers and the government for two generations .
That was eight years before my father dropped out of college in 1950 and went to work in a Grand Rapids steel mill because Mom got pregnant with me ; he was surrounded every day with a cloud of asbestos dust that his bosses told him was “ safe .” Dad died of mesothelioma in 2006 .
One of the best known of the many fabulously rich heirs to the Manville fortune was Tommy Manville , who became famous for marrying eleven blonde 20-something showgirls thirteen times . Seriously . The first paragraph of his obituary in The New York Times reads : “ Tommy Manville , who took 11 wives in 13 marriages and was heir to the Johns-Manville asbestos fortune , died of a heart attack yesterday at his estate in Chappaqua , N . Y . He was 73 years old .”
To this day , no asbestos fortunes have been attached and none of the criminal liars went to prison : we missed that opportunity a generation ago .
Similarly , thousands of million-dollar estates across our country are owned by heirs or current executives of the tobacco industry , which also knew their product killed Americans and lied to us . We missed that chance to do right , too : none of these wealthy executives have ever gone to prison , even though their product continues to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year .