Members of Congress from Texas and Wyoming introduced bills recently that would grant fossil fuel companies sweeping legal immunity and shield energy producers from stricter compliance with the Clean Air Act.
Republican Harriet Hageman, Wyoming’s only member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, spearheaded legislation that would protect fossil fuel companies from liability for damages caused by storms, wildfires and other climate-fueled disasters. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, collaborated on another bill called the FENCES Act, which would make it easier for states to claim that foreign emissions are driving local pollution.
“Energy security is national security, and we will not self-sabotage our critical industries with a cascade of costly lawsuits and extreme penalties that jeopardize American drilling,” Hageman said in a statement accompanying her bill’s announcement. “America’s energy producers should be protected from the dangerous legal precedent that would be set by the retroactive punishment of lawful activity.”
Hageman’s statement included quotes from fossil fuel lobbyists and executives thanking her and Cruz, whose bill in the Senate is co-sponsored by Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, for introducing the legislation. The bill is being referred to as the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act.”
The FENCES Act, which Lee also cosponsored in the Senate, passed on April 16 in the House, where it was co-sponsored by Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and Rep. Jeff Crank, R-Colo.
“I’m thrilled to see the FENCES Act move one step closer to becoming law,” Lummis said in a press release. “This legislation will help drive innovation and economic growth across Wyoming by cutting unnecessary red tape. At the same time, the FENCES Act preserves strong Clean Air Act standards while implementing commonsense policies that account for pollution beyond a state’s control.”
The American Petroleum Institute, the largest fossil fuel trade group in the U.S., has lobbied in favor of each bill, according to recent disclosures.
A spokesperson for Lummis said the fossil fuel industry did not lobby her to write the FENCES Act or help her craft the legislation. None of the other lawmakers supporting these pieces of legislation responded to questions over whether they had heard from industry lobbyists.
“Homegrown Pollution”
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA maintains thresholds for ozone and regional haze, two types of harmful pollution. If states or cities fail to meet these standards, they have to submit “regional haze plans” detailing how they will cut down on pollution. Emissions from other countries can migrate to the U.S. and play a role in poor local air quality, but they are not always the primary cause.
“That argument is very typically a red herring to distract from the realities of homegrown pollution that is harming national parks—air pollution that is very much controllable,” said Ulla Reeves, the Clean Air Program director for the National Parks Conservation Association.
One such homegrown source can be fossil fuels, which generate pollution even before their combustion when they are mined, fracked, pumped and refined. Texas is the U.S.’s largest energy producer, while Colorado and Utah rank in the top 17.
Scientists have long known about the impacts of air pollution on human health. Brian Moench, president and co-founder of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, said prolonged exposure to ozone pollution can have a similar impact on a person’s lungs to smoking cigarettes.
“The idea that life-saving, health-protecting clean air standards burden people and penalize them is just nuts.”
— Brian Moench, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment
He estimated as many as 8,000 stillbirths occur in the U.S. annually as a result of air pollution.
On April 21, the day before Earth Day, Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency proposed downgrading the severity of air quality infractions in the greater Salt Lake City area.
“It doesn’t matter where the ozone originates, it’s going to have the same public health consequence regardless,” Moench said. “The idea that life-saving, health-protecting clean air standards burden people and penalize them is just nuts.”
In Colorado, pollution along the front range has vexed residents and regulators for decades, and while the state has taken steps to address the problem, it must redouble its efforts, said Andrew Klooster, a Colorado field advocate with Earthworks.
“Colorado is a state that bills itself as an outdoor paradise. Outdoor activities and outdoor recreation is really the selling point of Colorado,” he said. “If you’re relegating a subset of the population to not being able to safely recreate outside, beyond just being a public health issue, that’s an equity issue as well.”
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Donate NowIn Texas, where a large industrial presence and growing population are taking their toll on air quality, the FENCES Act would be a step back for human health, said Cyrus Reed, legislative and conservation director of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter.
“It just means you’re going to have more sick people and have more of an impact on health care costs, more early deaths, more problems with asthma,” he said. “We feel like, as a government, we should be trying to protect our people and have good air quality, not look for excuses not to do our jobs.”
Immune Corporations, Vulnerable Citizens?
Hageman and Cruz’s bills shielding fossil fuel companies from climate superfund laws and lawsuits seeking damages for weather disasters linked to climate impacts of their products are being viewed by some as part of a campaign to delegitimize climate science.
“It’s part of a broader attack on attribution science”—research that quantifies how much emissions from fossil-fuels contributed to a specific climate disaster—said Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign director with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Attribution science has “been recognized by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a critical tool for understanding the impacts of climate change.”
This year, those impacts manifested in one of the warmest and driest winters ever for many parts of the West.
Across the Colorado River basin, irrigators, cities and industrial users are reckoning with record low snowpack, an ongoing megadrought and the possibility that federal dams will not be able to provide water and electricity to the 40 million people in the U.S., Mexico and 30 tribal nations that depend on them.
“People are really worried about what the summer is going to look like” in Wyoming, said Emma Jones, associate organizer for the Sierra Club’s Wyoming chapter. “It’s really frustrating that [Wyoming’s congressional delegation] is going to just continue giving handouts to these industries that have already harmed our communities for a really long time.”
Texas has experienced a full spectrum of climate-related environmental disasters—from snowstorms to wildfires, heatwaves and flooding. In Corpus Christi, where petrochemical plants, oil refineries and other industries account for over half of the city’s daily water usage, schools and hospitals are drilling for groundwater as city officials stare down the prospect of running dry.
The cost of rebuilding after these events ultimately lands on Texans, whose burden could be reduced by damage payments from fossil fuel companies, Reed said. (Texas has not filed any lawsuits seeking damages for climate disasters from fossil fuel companies.)
“I’m disappointed that Cruz is using his position as Senator of the great state of Texas to do the bidding of large oil and gas and industrial companies instead of looking out for the health and affordability of average Texans,” he said.
Hageman and Cruz’s bills have been referred to each chamber’s Committee on the Judiciary. The FENCES Act is awaiting a hearing before the Committee on Environment and Public Works in the Senate, on which Lummis is a member of the Republican majority.
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Jake Bolster
Reporter, Wyoming and the West
Jake Bolster reports on Wyoming and the West for Inside Climate News. Previously, he worked as a freelancer, covering climate change, energy, and the environment across the United States. He holds a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University.
