In November, the Duwamish Longhouse held what is called a “climate café,” a get-together to talk about climate change. The Duwamish Longhouse climate café aimed to inspire action.

Another kind of climate café is specifically not about solutions. The no-solutions climate cafés remind me of people who complain about their spouses when all they want is for someone to listen, not having someone jump in to give them a solution.

I can relate to needing someone to listen. I recently needed someone to listen to a work situation. I was being gaslit by a coworker. “Gaslighting” is stating things that are obviously wrong and acting as if the other person is crazy for disagreeing. 

Our boss would complain angrily about something, and my coworker would then say our boss was happy. (He wasn’t.) Gaslighting is disorienting. You worry you don’t know what is real. Before I understood I was being gaslit, I mentioned my confusion to my spouse. She started telling me how to solve the problem. It was too soon for me to talk about solutions. I didn’t yet know what the problem was. I just wanted someone to listen to me talk it through.

The no-solution kind of climate cafés might be helpful if you aren’t sure what is creating the weird and dangerous weather around the world. If you’re still trying to figure out, it can be annoying to have people throw solutions at you.

The same goes for our federal government just now. Last year, there were conversations that started with folks astonished at something Donald Trump said. The reply was that Trump didn’t really mean it.  

For example, Trump said he would be a dictator on day one. His supporters then said he didn’t really mean he would be a dictator. This conversation happened on multiple topics. Now it’s hard to say what is coming from the federal government. It’s challenging to talk about solutions before you know what the problems are. Maybe we need “federal government cafés.”

Rather than talking through it, I am tempted to ignore the federal government for a while and check back after the new administration starts actually doing things.

Oil companies paying for their damage

While I’m waiting, I understand there’s more going on than just the federal government. New York and Vermont have passed laws requiring oil companies pay for the states’ costs of coping with climate change. This legislation is like the charges to Purdue Pharma to cover states’ costs of coping with oxycontin. 

In the Purdue Pharma case, the idea was that the company caused the damage, and the company should pay to clean it up.  The same idea is now being applied to oil companies. 

In Washington state, maybe the most obvious cost to citizens is the 40% rise in homeowner’s insurance from 2022 to 2024. Some of that is related to things like the recent bomb cyclone that toppled trees onto homes, and the atmospheric rivers that caused flooding and landslides on the Olympic Peninsula last month.  

Then there are the costs of moving uphill, away from rising sea levels. By the end of the century, the Port of Edmonds will need to relocate some of their facilities. Like New York and Vermont, we might get help paying for that from the oil companies.

Since the 1970s, oil companies have paid public relations agencies that continuing to burn gasoline is harmless. I thought, “Well, it’s not illegal. It’s just public relations.” I may have been mistaken. Businesses misleading people is illegal in many places. Many places have laws against lying to your customers.  

Now there are over 30 lawsuits around the country suing oil companies for damages related to climate change. In Washington state, the Shoalwater Bay and Makah Indian Tribes are suing oil companies for being a public nuisance, harming consumers and failing to warn consumers about the climate harm of their products. The tribes are trying to get the oil companies to pay to move homes away from sea level rise and higher storm surges.

The foundation of these misrepresentation cases is that the oil companies intentionally misled people into thinking that fossil fuels were safe. Do we here in the Seattle Metro Area have evidence for a similar claim? Probably.  It would be hard for the oil companies to argue that they educated everyone here about the damages of global warming. If they had, we would have no need for climate cafés.