California’s Senate Targets Oil Companies, Proposing Law Allowing Wildfire Victims to Sue
California’s politicians have spent the past couple of decades targeting fossil fuel companies as part of “climate cult” theater.
These antics have had consequences. For example, energy giant Chevron relocated its headquarters to Texas, after having been headquartered in California for over 140 years. It had strong roots in this state.
However, the toxic policies of California’s lawmakers and regulators have killed those roots.
More recently, Phillips 66 announced plans to stop operations at its Los Angeles-area refinery in the fourth quarter of 2025. It decided after Governor Gavin Newsom decided to mandate fossil fuel companies create a stockpile of gasoline.
Now, California lawmakers have introduced a new bill allowing victims of wildfires and insurance companies to sue oil companies for damages caused by storms, wildfires, and other disasters (often exacerbated by the lack of infrastructure, preventative maintenance, and adequate response resources…otherwise known as “climate change”).
The proposed legislation, introduced by Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener, provides a new pathway for recovering damages that doesn’t include tapping into an already deficit-laden state budget.
The clear solution from the California state Senate is to drill into the deepest pockets possible, the oil companies, by directly linking the historic wildfires to climate change.
State Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, unveiled the proposal at the state capitol alongside consumer protection and environmental groups.The bill, SB 222, would allow those impacted by natural disasters, private insurance companies, and California’s state insurance program known as the FAIR Plan to recoup losses from natural disasters by taking oil companies to court. The proposal would apply to oil companies that operate in California….The proposal comes as California braces for the impact of the devastation left by the destructive and deadly wildfires in Los Angeles County that began burning more than two weeks ago. Many victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires were on the state’s insurance program, the FAIR Plan, because private insurers would no longer provide them with coverage. The FAIR Plan has been at risk of insolvency with a major disaster in California.
California legislatures are now realizing the magnitude of the unintended consequence of trying to force insurance companies to accept the elevated risks of wildfire disasters without a commensurate increase in rates. Insurance companies said “no deal” and canceled policies.
No company is forced to do business in this state. This is a free market concept Sacramento should reflect on before targeting fossil fuel companies further.
Meanwhile, let’s check the status of the Moss Landing Lithium Battery Plant, which was storing electricity as part of California’s “green energy utopia”.
All signs point to a tremendous environmental problem stemming from the massive fire that occurred there recently.
Scientists from San José State University found alarmingly high concentrations of heavy metals (nickel, manganese, and cobalt) in soil samples at the nearby environmentally sensitive estuary.
The toxic metals threaten to upset the delicate ecosystem at the Elkhorn Slough, which is the state’s second-largest estuary and plays a key role in sequestering carbon emissions and protecting the coastline from sea level rise, said Ivano Aiello, chair of the university’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.Aiello, who has monitored environmental conditions at the slough for more than a decade, said he was shocked by the results.The concentration of nickel, manganese and cobalt measured on the surface of the soil is hundreds to thousands of times as much as the levels in the surface soil prior to the fire or compared with levels measured deeper in the soil.“I was wondering whether there was anything associated with this fire that could have been impacted,” said Aiello. “I didn’t know I was going find such a high concentration of those metals.”
Ironically, California Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) has introduced Assembly Bill 303, the Battery Energy Safety & Accountability Act, mandating local engagement in the permitting process for battery storage facilities and establishing safety buffers.
So, another Democrat chases down a solution to the unintended consequence of forcing new and not fully developed technologies onto society, using pseudoscience and political pressure.
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