Big Oil killed those Texas children

It's time we started saying so

More than 100 people are confirmed to have been killed over the weekend by cataclysmic flash flooding in Texas, with many more still lost and unaccounted for. Dozens of the victims were children, including 27 girls from Camp Mystic, a summer camp that was consumed by the catastrophically fast-rising waters.

While dangerous flash flooding can occur naturally, this tragedy was not a “natural” disaster. Over 1.8 trillion gallons of rain fell on Texas Hill Country on Friday. In just 90 minutes, the Guadalupe River ballooned from a depth of three feet to 34 feet; its volume shot from 95 cubic feet per second to 166,000 cubic feet per second. As David Lucas, a resident whose house was swallowed whole in the lethal storm, put it: “I’ve been here close to 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Though we’ll have to wait for a weather attribution study to confirm the exact causal connection between this weekend’s flooding and human-caused climate change, it is clear that global warming was at the very least a key driver of this disaster. “With a warmer atmosphere, there is no doubt that we have seen an increase in the frequency and the magnitude of flash flooding events globally,” explained Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist with AccuWeather. That’s because hotter air holds more water vapor that can fall as rain, meaning warming air temperatures produce bigger downpours. Rainfall intensity in central Texas has been increasing for decades, and this weekend’s storms were further super-charged by the off-the-charts, climate-driven temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico, which created record-high atmospheric moisture content over central Texas.

Of course, MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene were quick to respond to this tragedy with conspiracy theories. One GOP congressional candidate, Kandiss Taylor, actually wrote, “Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.”

What makes these cries of “fake weather” extra crazy is that, in important ways, the carnage in Texas this weekend is the result of a conspiracy — a conspiracy by Big Oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP to deceive the public about climate change, despite their own internal understanding that their products would cause disasters just like the floods that swept over Camp Mystic on Friday.

To be clear, this internal knowledge isn’t conjecture. We know that Big Oil understood that their fossil fuel products would cause catastrophic climate change because they said so, in dozens of internal research reports and memos. For example, in 1989, Shell Oil Company produced a confidential planning document that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative” assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather — more storms, more droughts, more deluges.” In other words, precisely what we just saw in Texas.

Excerpt from the Shell report, page 36.

By the time of this Shell Report, the American Petroleum Institute had already spent years predicting that climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels would be “catastrophic” and have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival,” while Exxon was forecasting that global warming would do “great irreversible harm to our planet,” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.”

In fact, these companies actually used their climate predictions to inform their own business decisions, building their pipelines with extra strength to deal with expected increases in extreme weather and raising the level of their offshore oil rigs to account for expected sea level rise. To take just one example, engineering documents written in the mid-1990s for a gas field jointly owned by Shell and ExxonMobil specified that “an estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters may be assumed” over the course of the project.

Oil rig in the Sable gas field specifically designed to account for sea level rise.

At the same time that these companies were internally preparing for the harmful climate effects that they knew were coming, they were also developing and orchestrating a multi-decade, coordinated campaign to defraud the public about climate dangers and block solutions that could have prevented deaths like those of the Camp Mystic girls.

Again, this is not conjecture. There are piles of internal strategy memos and external materials outlining Big Oil’s massive disinformation campaigns designed, in the words of one climate deception coalition’s mission statement, to “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”

From one fossil fuel coalition’s internal strategy memo.

Documented tactics that Big Oil companies used to deceive regulators, investors, and consumers about climate change include publishing deceptive advertisements with false claims about climate; directing bought-and-paid-for scientists to fraudulently undermine the clear scientific consensus on climate; harassing and attempting to discredit scientists and activists engaged in researching and communicating the actual climate science; deceptively attacking renewable energy efforts and policies; and “greenwashing” to falsely promote Big Oil products and brands as climate solutions.

There is substantial evidence of the impact this conspiracy has had in delaying climate mitigation and adaptation measures that could have prevented the Camp Mystic deaths. For example, a recent Pew Research survey found that only 27 percent of Americans believed that almost all scientists agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.

Compare this to the most recent analysis of the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change, which found that there is a greater than 99 percent consensus among scientists on this point — out of the 88,125 papers surveyed, just 28 were skeptical, mostly authored by the same few, discredited, industry-funded individuals.

In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who co-sponsored the resolution that prohibited the U.S. from ratifying the international climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol, “I was misled. Others were misled. When [fossil fuel companies] had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly — I mean, they lied. … It would have changed everything [had they told the truth]. I think it would have changed the average citizen’s appreciation of climate change. … And mine, of course. It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It’s cost this country, and it cost the world.” For the children of Camp Mystic, this cost could not have been higher.

And so, I would argue, we should reconsider how we talk about tragedies like this weekend’s flash flooding. These are not just natural disasters happening to us — they are, in a very real sense, crimes that have been committed against us, by corporate actors that made trillions of dollars from their schemes of denial.

This is the work I do now as a lawyer — fighting to use our legal system to hold Big Oil companies accountable for their climate crimes. Because climate victims like the Camp Mystic girls deserve justice, and the fossil fuel corporations behind their deaths should pay for their lethal misconduct.

In this one way, I actually agree with Kandiss Taylor, the MAGA candidate quoted above, when she wrote, “If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder.”

The tragedy here wasn’t caused by fake conspiracies like cloud seeding, geoengineering, and manipulation, but rather by Big Oil’s very real conspiracy of climate denial. But the conclusion — “that’s murder” — fits. If climate attribution analysis confirms that the flash floods this weekend were substantially caused by climate change, then victims like the Camp Mystic kids did not passively die — they were killed, by the recklessness of corporate actors that knew their conduct was catastrophically dangerous and went ahead and did it anyway. It’s time we started saying so.