New Jersey residents are no strangers to climate disaster. From the repeated bouts of flooding that have turned our streets into rivers, to storms like Ida and Sandy that racked up massive costs to our communities, we’re feeling the effects of our changing climate firsthand. And who can forget the terrifying orange air-quality crisis last June that made it dangerous to breathe? But New Jerseyans didn’t create the climate crisis; oil companies that put their profits ahead of public safety did.
Our attorney general rightly sued major climate polluters such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell in October 2022 to hold them accountable for deceiving consumers about the dangers of fossil fuels and to make the polluters pay their fair share of the climate costs facing our state. For decades, these fossil fuel companies knew their products were accelerating climate change in our communities, yet they denied the reality of the crisis and lied to the public, all in the pursuit of profits. The attorney general is fighting to recover billions of dollars in past damages and those yet to come as climate impacts worsen.
Holding oil companies accountable by suing them for their climate harms is just one step in a long line of necessary climate actions. New Jersey should also hold oil and gas companies accountable by no longer investing in the very companies we are suing.
We should not be investing, especially not with our hard-earned taxpayer contributions to the state pension fund, having the horrible effect of fueling climate destruction with our own tax dollars. It is time to align our state’s climate goals with our state’s investment policies. And it is past time to acknowledge that climate risk is an unacceptable investment risk and puts the future of the entire pension portfolio and even the global economy in jeopardy.
Accountability is not only the right thing to do. Holding fossil fuel companies accountable also makes financial sense for the people of New Jersey. If not for the lies that fossil fuel companies have spread, we could have acted on the science much sooner to avoid the huge costs from the extreme threats that we are facing today — to our health, safety, economic vitality and irreplaceable natural resources.
Regardless of how many times fossil fuel companies and their spokespeople insist that they are the ones who will bring us a clean-energy future, the truth is that they spend a pittance of their collective budgets on climate solutions — less than 1% from 2008 to 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.
The fossil fuel industry is a dying sector, one that must be phased out quickly if we are to survive. It is not the future. It is the past. And because of this it is a terrible investment for a long-term institutional portfolio such as our state pension fund which provides for the retirements of more than 800,000 public employees in New Jersey. Taxpayers have already borne the burden of disaster relief; they should not be forced into terrible fossil fuel investments which will yield a future of declining value, stranded assets and more disaster relief.
Just like lawsuits against tobacco companies and opioid manufacturers, our state’s lawsuit against Big Oil is an important way to hold bad actors accountable for the devastating — and expensive — harm they’ve knowingly caused our communities. Divestment is another way to hold these companies accountable by calling out a business model that has been deemed “incompatible with human survival” while demonstrating absolutely no interest in changing. It would be hard to make a worse investment than continuing to invest in fossil fuels.
Responding to climate change is already costing New Jersey taxpayers dearly, and these costs will only increase as climate change worsens. Taking Big Oil to court and divesting from these companies are responsible climate actions which are both the right things to do and a significant way to save taxpayer dollars.