Source: In a Numbers Game, Justice Wins
“Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher,” she said. “Do you know them?”
Subscribers to this newsletter, listeners to the Drilled podcast, or anyone who’s read my work in recent years probably recognizes that name. Gibson Dunn is Chevron’s law firm. They represented the oil giant against the Ecuadorian tribes and farmers who sought compensation for oil spills in the Amazon. They also represent the company in more than two dozen climate liability and fraud cases making their way through U.S. courts at the moment. And they don’t just represent Chevron. Gibson Dunn is a favorite of the fossil fuel industry in general; it has represented the American Petroleum Institute, Energy Transfer, Enbridge, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, and many more. And it’s even better known for its work expanding free speech protections for corporations. We did a miniseries last year on the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to expand corporate free speech at the same time that it is criminalizing protest. Today the firm is playing both sides of the free speech coin in the most literal of ways, arguing on behalf of Chevron that anything oil companies have ever said about climate change was “petitioning speech”—that’s legalese for political speech—and should thus be given the highest level of First Amendment protection—and on behalf of Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, that protests of that pipeline amounted to an “unlawful, malicious, and coordinated attack” that was “designed to inflict damage, cause delay, defame Energy Transfer and Dakota Access, and disrupt Energy Transfer as much as possible.”
So of course my response to Rebecca’s question was “Oh shit. Yeah I know them; it’s very interesting that they’ve shown up here.” As we worked together over the next two years to piece together how the Bradley Foundation, a conservative foundation that’s spent even more than the Koch universe to roll back regulations and civil rights across the U.S., had backed this attack on an obscure piece of family law that had been passed unanimously and scarcely challenged in decades, for about the 100th time I thought about how silly it is that so many folks in the climate movement are hell-bent on separating climate change from both the world that created it and the world it is impacting. While a large and vocal segment of the climate movement works very hard to separate climate from things like workers’ rights or civil rights, the organizations and corporations that bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the problem and all of the responsibility for thwarting action combine their obstruction of climate policy with their obstruction of every other kind of public good. The very same organizations fund and support the anti-union agenda, the general suppression of democracy, the anti-trans agenda, the war on women’s rights, and the obstruction of climate action. They see these things as interconnected, because they are. In a weird way, dark money-funded rightwing orgs are a helluva lot more woke than most liberal foundations.
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