Over three decades ago, climate scientist James Hansen laid out for a U.S. Senate Committee a specter of death and destruction that lay ahead if the the world were to continue its ferocious consumption of fossil fuels.
Catastrophic collapse of the ecosystems that sustain life on the planet looms on an increasingly visible horizon. At the sane time, the fossil fuel industries that are speeding us towards that horizon are thriving unchecked.
This website is about “owning” Chevron in two senses.
First, within the literal meaning of “owning,” we need a public takeover of Chevron in order to phase down its operations in a way that is not chaotic and indifferent to the impact on workers and communities. As long as Chevron remains a privately owned corporation, its managers will put extraction, accumulation, and profit ahead of all other concerns. That is their legal mandate.
This website advocates for nationalization of the U.S. fossil fuel industry as a necessary, though not sufficient, step to bring about a just and equitable transition for workers and communities. Private capital has neither the motivation nor the ability to organize such a transition, so, yes, we need to take away their keys to the kingdom. Otherwise, the fossil fuel industry will continue to dominate public policy around climate as it has for decades.
Some may believe that public ownership is too far out to be part of the conversation. We disagree. Look at how quickly “Medicare for All” became part of the conversation. We need to say quite loudly that we’re through conceding the rights of fossil fuel executives to steer us towards extinction because that is the only thing they know how to do.
Second, there is another kind of “ownership” that is just as important to embrace if we are to escape the fossil fuel era and make our way to a better world. We need to “own” Chevron and all the fossil fuel companies in the sense that we take full moral, political, social responsibility for their future.
We need to own the challenge of building a world beyond fossil fuels — a world guided by principles of social, economic, and racial justice.
We also need to own the responsibility of wealthy countries like our own that have achieved enormous economic gains based on fossil fuels to assist countries with fewer resources to develop without taking the approach that has brought all of us to “code red for humanity,” as UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned.
The fossil fuel barons cannot be stopped with market-based and technocratic scams.
This website is intended as a resource for those who are looking for the way to take away their license to kill.