Sample Climate Accountability Letter to Chevron Corporation
A template letter designed for local governments to request fossil fuel companies pay their share of climate change costs.
Chevron Corporation 6001 Bollinger Canyon Road San Ramon, California 94583 United States of America
Attn. CEO of Chevron
Dear Sirs/Mesdames:
Re: Chevron’s fair share of climate costs in Highlands, BC, Canada
We write as the Mayor and Council of the District of the Highlands, a municipality on the south end of Vancouver Island. Like other communities around the world, we are increasingly concerned about the harmful effects that climate change will have on our community and on other communities around the world.
We are being forced to prepare for progressively more serious impacts. We are already facing increased fire risk, summer droughts (most of our residents’ are on wells) and extreme winter rain events. Increased winter precipitation is impacting our roads and stormwater management and increasing our costs as a local government. A coastal community, we are concerned about rising sea-levels and coastal eriosion as well, although most of our lands are well above sea-level.
We expect the climate-costs facing our community to rise as global temperatures increase and as we examine how best to help our residents withstand the current and expected impacts.
Climate change — as a result of fossil fuel pollution — is now inevitable, and growing more severe as you continue to market your products without aggressively moving to a different, more sustainable business model. Because of this pollution, we need to plan for and adapt to ongoing changes in our local climate, caused by rising global temperatures, so as to avoid future economic and other impacts of climate change on our District.
As we move forward with preparing our community and infrastructure for climate change, we will be incurring additional costs and inconvenience as a result of the increased severity of climate change attributable to your products and operations.
While we recognize that individual consumers, and our community, do play a role in the fossil fuel economy, your company has had the power to lead the transition away from that economy, but has instead profited to the tune of many billions of dollars from products that you have known, or should have known, would harm our communities.¹ You cannot make billions of dollars selling your product, knowing that it is causing
¹ https://www.smokeandfumes.org/fumes, last accessed 23 September 2016.
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