PDAMERICA • Started streaming 9 minutes ago There is no more powerful voice on the progressive left than Senator Nina Turner, and she will join us for this week’s PDA Town Hall, to let us know about her new radio show co-hosted by an equally visionary progressive, Dr. Cornel West. The show is called Truth Time and it airs on KBLA 1580 Monday through Friday at 3pm ET/Noon PT, and is available worldwide online and through the KBLA1580 App. Nina will let us know about the origins of the show and why it meets the needs of our moment so well. One of the primary explanations for the ascendency of the Trumpian right has been the rapid growth of well-funded right-wing media. We, at PDA, feel that Truth Time represents a great firsyt step towards negating MAGA’s advantage over the airwaves and online. Of course, Nina will also share her reflections on the major issues of the day and how we can build a more powerful and victorious progressive movement. We’ll also be joined by fantastic progressive Candidate for Congress Josh Weil, running in the special election in FL-06, with the primary January 28th.

By Freddy Brewster & Lucy Dean Stockton

January 9, 2025 (editor@levernews.com)

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Fossil fuel companies are profiting off an obscure state tax break depriving California of up to $146 million of annual tax revenue that could be used to combat climate change-fueled wildfires, according to a new report released amid an inferno tearing through Los Angeles. The tax break has persisted for decades in the Democrat-controlled state even as California has faced deficits and cuts to wildfire preparedness — including recent cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget.

During the first night of the fires, firefighters struggled to obtain water from fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood that had been set ablaze in western Los Angeles. A city council member who represents the Palisades neighborhood blamed the lack of water on “chronic underinvestment.”

The new report, released Wednesday by the Climate Center, a think tank focused on California climate solutions, details how oil and gas companies and their allies used campaign donations, lobbying dollars, and legal pressure to establish a tax loophole that allows corporations to reduce their taxable state taxable income by avoiding reporting foreign profits and losses, if the company elects to do so. 

This tax loophole, called the “water’s edge election,” is California’s largest business tax break. The loophole allows corporations to avoid paying more than $4.3 billion in state corporate tax revenue each year and specifically gives oil and gas companies upward of $146 million in annual tax breaks, researchers found. 

In 2023, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell made more than $83 billion in profits. In 2024, Chevron announced that it would be moving its headquarters out of California, but will continue operating in the state. The oil company is also one of California’s largest greenhouse gas polluters.   

“California is in a climate crisis,” said Ryan Schleeter, communications director for the Climate Center. “We get reminder after reminder [about] these fires, and a wildfire happening in the middle of January is really unprecedented and quite scary. Investing now in climate solutions will save more lives and save more money down the road than if we wait.”

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The report comes as fires devastated multiple neighborhoods in Southern California, prompting widespread evacuations and burning trees and structures all the way to the ocean’s edge. The report also comes as the state struggles with an estimated $46 billion budget deficit and $16 billion in spending cuts to wildfire preparedness, climate initiatives, and a slew of other state programs. 

On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a prominent figure in the Democratic Party, proposed new spending cuts in the first draft of the state’s budget. These cuts could slash funding for wildfire preparedness, coastal resiliency projects, solar and wind projects, and other endeavors, nonprofit news outlet CalMatters reported. 

As the Midwest and East Coast are bombarded with snow this week, California is facing the opposite throes of climate change. California’s weather has become increasingly arid, causing the state’s May-through-October wildfire season to effectively morph into a year-round risk. Currently, more than 8,500 fire personnel are battling 35 wildfires burning more 5,700 acres across the state. 

“The water’s edge tax loophole allows multinational fossil fuel corporations to dodge paying their fair share of taxes that can help fund vital environmental projects, which could include wildfire preparedness,” California Assemblymember Damon Connolly (D) told The Lever in a statement. “It makes no sense to continue to subsidize these polluting corporations, which have been making record profits, while state and local governments face significant deficits and cuts to critical infrastructure.”

California’s Big Shortfall

For decades, California has experienced a budget whiplash. While the state operates as the world’s fifth-largest economy, it has faced recurring budget shortfalls since the early 1990s, which some experts blame on tax cuts that undercut ambitious social programs. 

In 2023, the state faced an estimated $46.8 billion budget deficit, up from a $32 billion budget shortfall the year before. Currently, nearly a third of the state’s budget comes from federal funding, which could be cut if incoming President Donald Trump follows through on promises to cut spending.

On Jan. 6, Newsom announced a $322 billion state budget that would likely include cuts to social programs to avoid another shortfall. The details of his final budget proposal will be released on Friday, Jan. 10.

In 2019, after vowing to expand California’s firefighting initiatives during his gubernatorial campaign, Newsom’s budget allocated $355 million for wildfire prevention and resource management. But by 2021, Newsom had slashed that by more than 40 percent to $203 million. As wildfires consumed the state that year, Newsom changed course, announcing a $2 billion investment in wildfire prevention for 2022 following a budget surplus.

But in early 2024, as California’s budget again fell short of its expected revenue, Newsom proposed major cuts to climate projects, including reducing funding for wildfire prevention and forest resilience by $100 million and cutting funding to all climate programs by about 7 percent.

California’s fire prevention efforts, which experts consider the only way to meaningfully reduce the mounting fire risk, have repeatedly fallen victim to the state’s budget whiplash. 

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In 2024, the state allocated $4 billion to support California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), nearly double the state budget for the department 10 years ago. The budget increase allowed Cal Fire to nearly double its personnel from the previous decade.

Los Angeles, where the blaze has ripped through the city’s outer neighborhoods as hurricane-force winds exacerbate drought conditions, is facing its own budget crisis. In January 2024, the Los Angeles Controller’s Office found the city was on track to overspend its budget by $297 million, and the city’s general fund — which pays for many city services like firefighting — was about $158 million short of what Los Angeles expected to collect in tax revenues.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), meanwhile, is facing backlash for the cuts she made to Los Angeles’s firefighting force. In April of last year, her proposed budget included more than $23 million in cuts to the department. Those cuts were eventually whittled down to $17.6 million in the city council’s budget process.

Separately, Bass’s budget also called for the elimination of positions within the city’s emergency management agency, which responds to crises like wildfires. These proposed cuts came as Los Angeles increased funding for the city’s police department by $123 million. While fire risk in the region reaches an all-time high, crime remains relatively low. Critics of the increased law enforcement spending say much of it will be allocated to positions that will likely remain vacant amid department-wide recruitment struggles. 

Much of the city’s current budget shortfall is connected to the four-year contract the police union representing members of the Los Angeles Police Department reached with the city in 2023. City Controller Kenneth Mejia has also blamed excessive payouts for police liability claims.

As firefighters battle the blazes in Los Angeles, the city’s fire department has called on all off-duty firefighters in the area and in neighboring cities like San Diego and others statewide to join the efforts to fight the inferno. 

“The chronic underinvestment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure and our public safety partners was evident and on full display over the last 24 hours,” said City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the burning Pacific Palisades neighborhood, during a news conference on Wednesday. “I am extremely concerned about this. I’m already working with my team to take a closer look at this, and I think we’ve got more questions than answers at this point.”

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials said the lack of water could be due to an increased demand to fight fires in lower elevations that prevented water storage tanks in hillside neighborhoods from refilling.

Water’s Edge Is Draining The Budget 

As California has fought both drought and budget cuts, the 1986 “water’s edge” law might be in part to blame. The law, which enables multinational corporations to avoid taxes from earnings they designate as beyond the “water’s edge” of the borders of a state in which they operate, has cost California potentially billions of dollars in revenue each year. 

The law was first discussed in 1978 and was immediately criticized by state officials, with the state controller at the time calling it “a king-size loophole… for the giant multinational corporations — specifically the big oil operators,” researchers found in the new Climate Center report. At the time, state lawmakers and officials successfully blocked industry pressure to implement the loophole. 

Then, in 1983, the California Franchise Tax Board, a state agency tasked with collecting income tax, won a Supreme Court case that upheld states’ ability to tax multinational corporations as a single entity — meaning that states could earn tax revenue from corporations’ foreign profits. This high court decision led executives from Exxon to join a 1984 working group spearheaded by the Ronald Reagan administration to create ways to get around the new ruling and to adopt water’s edge tax loopholes. 

Climate Center researchers found that the Shell Corporation and Exxon funded multiple groups that focused on enacting the loophole in California. The water’s edge legislation finally passed in 1986 and has been a core staple of California tax loopholes ever since. 

“The water’s edge [tax policy] has become seemingly embedded in the California tax system at a time when use of separate accounting for transactions with foreign affiliates has become the subject of much controversy at the federal level,” a California Franchise Tax Board report states.

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California lawmakers have taken steps to eliminate the loophole, but oil and gas interests have fought back. In 2024, California lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting oil and gas companies from removing foreign subsidiary dividend income from state tax reporting, generating an estimated $17 million in tax revenue for the state. 

But the California Taxpayers Association — a low-tax advocacy group whose board of directors features representatives from Chevron, Koch Industries, Marathon Petroleum, BlackRock, and other businesses — filed a lawsuit in August challenging the constitutionality of the new bill. The lawsuit is still pending. 

New Mexico rolled back some of its water’s edge tax loopholes last year, but the state’s new legislation does not apply to U.S.-based corporations such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, Climate Center researchers found. 

Vermont and Minnesota legislatures have considered legislation that would roll back the loophole or authorize a study looking into the economic impact of removing the water’s edge exceptions. Alaska, where oil and gas industry taxes provide up to 85 percent of the state’s revenue, prohibits oil and gas companies from using a water’s edge loophole. 

For California, rolling back such loopholes could dramatically improve the state’s volatile budget situation. 

“Every dollar lost to this tax giveaway is a dollar that could be invested in climate solutions that save lives and dollars,” said Barry Vesser, chief operating officer at the Climate Center, in a press release on the new report. “Eliminating all fossil fuel tax breaks and subsidies would not only align with California’s climate goals but also free up hundreds of millions to address the state’s dual climate and affordability crises.”

• Kira Rao-Poolla | Staff
• Jan 10, 2025 (dailycal.org)

Beverly Dove, or “Bev-l,” a longtime Berkeley resident and activist, died at the end of December at the age of 77.

She was known for her vibrant personality and commitment to social justice causes, including Palestinian liberation, environmental justice, animal rights and People’s Park activism.

Diana Gwinn-Cirrito first met Dove in the early ’80s. She described a shared love for music and dancing, frequently visiting Ashkenaz on San Pablo and even traveling to Jamaica together for a reggae festival as well as political activism.

Up Next – Thousands protest Romania’s canceled presidential election

“She really believed in a better world, a peaceful world,” Gwinn-Cirrito said. “She was very much against war, exploitation of the poor and the vulnerable. She was always on the side of the oppressed.”

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More recently, as Dove was protesting the barricading of People’s Park, Rico Marisol recalled that she was shoved to the ground and still had scars on her palm months later. In an Instagram post, they characterized Dove as a “freedom fighter” who was “willing to- and did- square up with the police and get arrested for the things she believed in.”

Dove’s longtime friend of 40 years, Jessica Montiel, described as a “pioneer.” She said Dove’s activism began as a student at the Boston Museum school where Dove found one instructor’s presentations “boring,” and when she told him so, he challenged her to do better. So, she carried on a lecture using color images, changing how the institution allowed instructors to present.

Montiel was coming down from the Berkeley hills when she saw Dove on campus, protesting against a biology lab that was conducting animal testing.

“I learned a lot from her about the various things that she was involved in throughout my knowing her, and she was very political,” Montiel said. “I am grateful, because even though it was a challenge in my mind and very overwhelming to hear all this, it was more enlightening than what they were telling me in college.”

Another friend, Taiwo Koyejo, met Dove around 15 years ago when they both moved into the Ashby Lofts. They said in an email that Dove was incredibly kind to the children and “always made them feel loved,” and they would sit outside together and sunbathe.

Marisol added that a GoFundMe has been established to help cover Dove’s burial expenses. Additionally, a vigil will be held at Haste and Telegraph at 6 p.m Saturday, as well as a vegan potluck in her honor on Jan. 19 at 4 p.m at The Long Haul on Shattuck, according to Montiel.

“She was very caring for all things, for animals, people, the environment,” Montield said. “Hopefully all of us will continue her fight.”

The others dropped out as all the factions came to terms with an unusual unanimous vote. Here’s the back story.

B yTIM REDMOND

JANUARY 8, 2025 (48hills.org)

Just a day ago, several candidates were in the running to be the president of the Board of Supes. Today, Sup. Rafael Mandelman won the job unanimously, with no other nominations.
How did that happen?

For starters, the other two potential contenders, Sup. Myrna Melgar and Sup. Shamann Walton, clearly didn’t have the votes. So the board could have gone through what happened last time around, where after 15 rounds of voting there was no winner. Instead, in a series of discussions and backroom deals, the progressives and the conservatives came to a consensus on Mandelman.

Sup. Matt Dorsey nominated Mandelman. Then Sup. Connie Chan took the floor—and a lot of us expected her to nominate Sup. Myrna Melgar. Instead, she said she would support Mandelman—and at that point, the outcome was clear.

Melgar told me she knew she wouldn’t win, so she took one for “Team San Francisco.”

She said she really wants to work on regional transportation issues, and hopes she will be the board’s appointee to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. (It’s hard to imagine that she won’t get that job.) She could also, and probably will, chair the County Transportation Authority (she’s vice-chair now).

But the big deal was the Budget Committee—which, by all accounts, will once again be chaired by Chan. Some of the more conservative supes, I am told, wanted anyone but Chan, but Mandelman didn’t take that deal. It would have been hard to defend, since labor, a key constituency if Mandelman, as expected, runs in the future for state Legislature, was set on keeping Chan in that job.

On the other hand, the committee starts out with three members, and you can expect the other two will be from the conservative bloc. Then in the spring, when the budget work really starts, it expands to five—and Mandelman will be able to put his stamp on the budget with those two additional appointments.

But the progressives, including Walton and Sup. Jackie Fielder, also spared Mandelman some grief, and I’ll be interested to see what committee assignments they get.

It’s going to be a more conservative board. But I don’t think Mandelman can or will entirely cut the progressives out of leadership roles.

We shall see.

Tim Redmond

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.

January 9, 2025 (info@democracyatwork.info)

This study group organized by friends at the Marxist Education Project is led by Russell Dale to read and discuss Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s explorations of the s0-called labor theory of value, the rate of profit, what determines commodity prices and other issues provide crucial background for understanding Marx’s critique of political economy. Russell Dale teaches philosophy at Lehman College, CUNY. He was a founding member of the Marxist Education Project and serves on the Editorial Board of the Marxist journal Science & Society. RSVP here!

Then-U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on wildfires with local and federal fire and emergency officials in Sacramento, California on September 14, 2020. 

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

One observer blasted MAGA’s “conflagration of lies and disinformation.”

BRETT WILKINS

Jan 09, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.

On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called “Newscum”—of refusing “to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water… to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”

Newsom’s office responded to Trump’s accusation by correctly noting that “there is no such document as the water restoration declaration.”

Trump also accused Newsom of wanting “to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water,” a red herring and false statement given that the state’s plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.

Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got “nothing right” in his post.

Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:

Without getting into too much detail, here’s what did happen… During Trump’s first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.

This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.

Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles’ fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

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Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA’s “conflagration of lies and disinformation.”

“Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we’re getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future,” Pahwa said.

“In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes,” Pahwa added. “Climate change doesn’t just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too.”

Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.

As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen’s Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that “a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”

“This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil’s conduct,” Regunberg asserted.

As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, “This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon’s own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels.”

According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

BRETT WILKINS

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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NBC Bay Area • Jan 8, 2025 • Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s 46th mayor, delivered his inauguration speech Wednesday.

But we lose only if we stop fighting

Trump and his MAGA allies are already targeting the four major pillars of resistance to Trump during his first term.

As we prepare for Trump’s second regime — which promises to be far worse than the first — it’s important to do what we can to protect and fortify these four centers of opposition.

1. Universities

University faculties are dedicated to finding and exposing the truth — which has often meant calling out Trump’s lies. But Trump has warned that he’ll change the criteria for university accrediting in order to force university faculties into line.

In a campaign video, he said, “Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system … When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs.”

Authorized by the federal government, these accreditors are essential to college operations. If a college isn’t accredited, it can’t get federal funds.

Trump’s Project 2025 calls for replacing the current system of independent, nonpartisan accreditors with more politically pliable state accreditors. This would have disastrous effects.

Many of the worst educational gag orders at the state level, along with DEI bans and faculty tenure bans, have been voted down or toned down because state legislators realized they were putting their schools’ accreditation status in jeopardy. If Project 2025’s recommendations are adopted, that guardrail disappears.

Trump has also threatened to increase taxes on university endowments.

Republicans in Congress believe they were instrumental in getting the presidents of Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard to resign over their alleged failures to stop protests against Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza. Some are eager to resume their attacks on major universities.

2. Nonprofits

America’s nonprofits have been at the forefront of efforts to protect the environment, voting rights, and immigrants’ rights. Trump and his allies are seeking to stop nonprofit activism.

The Republican House has already passed a bill that would empower the Treasury to eliminate the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit it deems to be supporting terrorism. An identical or similar bill could come across Trump’s desk after being reintroduced in the next Congress.

The legislation doesn’t distinguish between foreign and domestic terrorism — whether real or imagined — thereby making it easier for Trump’s authorities to intimidate nonprofit personnel and donors.

We’ve already seen something like this at the state level. In Texas, state authorities have attempted to shut down charities that assist immigrants. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has launched a probe of nonprofits, including the God Is Good Foundation, that have allegedly conspired to bring noncitizens to the state.

3. The media

I’ve been a critic of the mainstream media’s tendency to give “both sides” credence even when one side is clearly in the wrong and to “sanewash” some of Trump’s and his enablers’ rants.

But journalists are an important bulwark against tyranny — which is why Trump and his allies are seeking to intimidate news outlets that have criticized or questioned Trump.

The flurry of defamation lawsuits — such as Trump launched against ABC (and ABC caved to) and the Des Moines Register — is the latest sign. Trump and his allies have also discussed revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television.

Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, has threatened to “take on the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen, and no it’s not Washington, D.C., it’s the mainstream media and these people out there in the fake news. That is our mission!”

Already social media platforms such as Musk’s X and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have caved to Trump, allowing vicious authoritarian lies to be magnified unimpeded.

4. Organized labor

In the 1950s and 1960s, labor unions were viewed as a source of countervailing power because of their activism on behalf of the working class and their significant political clout.

In those days, a third of workers in the private sector were union members. But today, only 6 percent of private-sector workers are union members, and it’s far from clear that organized labor will be an active source of resistance to Trump. (If government workers are included, the percentage of American workers who are members of unions is around 10 percent.)

Trump has warned organized labor that he will oppose their efforts to organize. The president of the Teamsters Union even appeared at the National Republican Convention in support of Trump.

***

Each of these centers of resistance to Trump has been a powerful source of truth-telling in America. It’s no surprise that all have been targeted by Trump and his allies.

We need to be vigilant and do what we can to protect and fortify them. Remember: We lose only if we stop fighting.

Why the fossil fuel billionaires are more dangerous than any serial killer…

Public Citizen would like you to know that there are killers among us.

They wear $2000 suits and travel in private jets, unbothered by the TSA or the teeming masses. Their children attend the finest universities in the world, and they vacation on private islands and yachts. Many “earn” more in a day than most Americans take home in a year; their positions ensure their heirs will never have to work a day in their lives.

Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week they’re arguably responsible, in part, for billions of dollars in losses, numerous deaths, and thousands of shattered lives in Southern California.

Illegitimate president-elect Trump is trying his best to cover for them, claiming that the fires ripping through the Los Angeles area are the fault of California’s Democratic governor, calling Gavin Newsome by a childish name to draw more attention to Trump’s efforts on behalf of the Republican Party’s most generous donors.

Mainstream media is largely going along with Trump’s charade, choosing not to even mention — in the vast majority of their reports on the crisis — the role of climate change in the fires. And never, G-d forbid, mentioning the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate change that has turned these fires from an annual nuisance into a hellscape.

It’s as frankly absurd as a TV news person reporting on a plane crash and, instead of asking aviation experts what caused it, simply lifting their collective shoulders with a helpless “shit happens” shrug.

But these fires — and the droughts and changing weather patterns that made them so severe — aren’t something that just happens by random happenstance, any more than an airliner crash.

And the oil industry has known for decades this day was coming.

In November, 1959, the famous scientist Edward Teller — the “Father of the H-Bomb” — was the keynote speaker at a conference on “The Energy of the Future” in New York, organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The news he conveyed to the assembled oil industry executives was stark:

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. … The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect …

“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

This shocking news apparently provoked a scramble in the oil industry, probably similar to when the asbestos industry learned in the 1930s that their product caused lung cancer (the mesothelioma that killed my father), or in 1939 when the tobacco industry learned that smoking also killed people.

They set out to determine if Teller’s prediction was true. He’d predicted that CO2 levels would reach the point where they’d begin to seriously melt the polar and Greenland ice caps and alter weather patterns within a few decades, telling the oil executives at that 1959 meeting:

“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the [heat] radiation leaving the earth.”

For the next decade, industry scientists went to work along with studies commissioned by major universities. One of the most well-known was a 1968 report the American Petroleum Institute hired the Stanford Research Institute to conduct. Its findings corroborated Teller’s prediction:

“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. … there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. … pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”

It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting pretty much exactly what’s happening right now in Los Angeles, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.

And then the “climate denial” began.

Fossil fuel billionaires and their oil companies funded think tanks to promote skepticism, pushed frontmen onto radio and TV to claim that climate scientists and people like Al Gore were “in it for the money,” and began funding the campaigns of politicians willing to exchange the future habitability of the planet for a few decades of power and wealth.

In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding, and detailing roughly three decades of lies foisted on the American Public. The industry and its executives’ efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their income stream and avoiding any liability for the deaths they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.

And now that day is here. Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in SoCal.

Two-thirds of voters, according to a 2024 poll, believe the fossil fuel industry and its pampered executives should be held civilly responsible for the damage climate change is causing, and a plurality want them to face criminal charges.

Public Citizen published a 2023 report titled “Charging Big Oil with Climate Homicide,” including legal rationales and possible strategies for holding the killers in suits accountable by state and local prosecutors.

Will Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or California Attorney General Rob Bonta have the courage to hold these companies and/or their executives accountable for the lies and deceptions they’ve funded that this week are killing Angelinos?

Will enough people call their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 to provoke investigations that could lead to congressional action?

Will our media ever begin to call out Trump and the alleged climate lies and deceptions of the industry that owns him?

Stay tuned.

Democracy Now! • Jan 10, 2025 • Latest Shows Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de… Former President Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29 at the age of 100, has been laid to rest in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, following a state funeral held in Washington, D.C. “He was the last president to actively encourage participation and involvement in governmental processes by the progressive civil community,” remembers the celebrated civil society and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader compares Carter’s progressive credentials to President-elect Donald Trump’s flouting of the law and embrace of dangerous beliefs like climate denialism. Carter “brought the best out of people,” Nader says, while “Trump brings the worst out of people.”