Maybe it's Time to Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark

During the major oil bust of the mid-1980s, the bumper sticker shown above became popular on pickup trucks and Cadillacs alike in Texas. With prices for Texas oil hovering near zero as a flood of Middle Eastern oil inundated the market, Wall Street investors and policymakers in Washington DC seemed fine with letting the state’s once-powerful oil and gas industry, along with its banking industry, wither and die.

So, many Texans lashed out, advocating the industry withhold oil, gasoline and its many related products from Eastern states and let them try to survive without it. Obviously, that didn’t happen, and would be pretty much impossible to do in any event. But the sentiment was real.

I bring this all up in response to a story out of Vermont, where governor Phil Scott signed a bill last Friday that would attempt to force oil companies to pay for alleged damages to the state resulting from “climate change” through a new set of penalties and fees.