National:
End subsidies, “bailouts” and liability waivers for polluting industries

End a variety of investments and mechanisms that artificially prop up polluting industries and insulate them from addressing the damage they’ve caused, including but not limited to subsidies and perverse incentives, bailouts, and liability waivers.

What does this look like?

  • Reject outright any policies or proposals that seek to waive the liability or culpability of corporations, whether it be past, present, or future.[1][2][3] Guard against these clauses being embedded in otherwise positive climate action legislation.

  • Reject any and all “bailouts” that incentivize polluting industries when they must instead be severely regulated and phased out.[4][5] Rather, fund the relief and recovery people and nature need by advancing liability measures in this roadmap that require corporations to pay for the damage they’ve knowingly caused and the broken systems they have intentionally helped create.

  • Stimulus and relief packages such as those responding to the COVID-19 pandemic should be harnessed as opportunities to advance liability measures at the national level and invest in just, resilient systems that are truly in harmony with nature.

  • End government subsidies to polluting and destructive industries and corporations,[6] with no incremental phase-out period.

  • Require financiers such as banks, asset managers, and insurance companies to immediately divest from fossil fuel and deforestation projects.

 

 Implementing the measures of the liability roadmap

Decision-makers and movements at all levels should keep the following in mind when implementing the measures laid out in this roadmap:

  • Enacting these policies and measures is simply the first step to holding polluting and destructive industries liable: There will be much work for government officials, decision-makers, activists and civil society alike to do to ensure these measures are fully implemented and move us toward the transformative change the world needs.

  • Liability should be applied to all industries and corporations that make business decisions that contribute to climate change and its impacts, or that cause harm to people and nature. In addition to the fossil fuel industry, these industries include but are not limited to agribusiness, forestry, mining, and the energy sector. 

  • Many of these measures could equally apply to State-owned corporations. Because the national contexts and unique needs vary from country to country, it is worth considering where to apply and how to adapt the principles and measures listed in the liability roadmap to address State-owned polluting corporations. Factors to consider when doing so could include but are not limited to the degree of democratic control over the entity, role and use of funding from oil/gas revenues, and responsiveness of the entity to transition to regenerative, renewable energy sources. 

  • Measures implemented at the national level should support and reinforce, rather than contradict, measures implemented at the sub-national and local, and vice versa.

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1 Lee Wasserman and David Kaiser, "Beware of Oil Companies Bearing Gifts," The New York Times, July 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/opinion/carbon-tax-lott-breaux.html. 

2 Oliver Milman, "Microsoft joins group seeking to kill off historic climate change lawsuits," The Guardian, May 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/01/microsoft-joins-group-seeking-to-avoid-climate-change-lawsuit.

3 Amy Westervelt, "Fossil Fuel Companies Are Lobbying Hard for Protection from Coronavirus-related Lawsuits by Workers," Drilled News, August 7, 2020, https://www.drillednews.com/post/fossil-fuel-companies-are-lobbying-hard-for-protection-from-coronavirus-related-lawsuits-by-workers.

4 InfluenceMap. Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Are Dominating Climate Policy Battles During COVID-19: An InfluenceMap Briefing, July 2020, accessed August 25, 2020, https://influencemap.org/report/Fossil-Fuel-Lobbyists-Are-Dominating-Climate-Policy-Battles-During-COVID-19-a78b11aa1be42aef5d7078d09457603b.

5 Chloe Farand. "Coronavirus: which governments are bailing out big polluters," Climate Home News, April 20, 2020, accessed August 25, 2020, https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/04/20/coronavirus-governments-bail-airlines-oil-gas/. 

6 Oil Change International. "Fossil Fuel Subsidies Overview," Fossil fuel subsidies, 2018, accessed August 25, 2020, http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/.