Drawing Down to reverse global warming
requires leaving lots of oil, gas and coal in the ground. This will be met with corporate pushback, led
by the fossil fuel industry and its funded think tanks and corporate-connected
environmental groups.
The political power of fossil fuel corporations is rooted in their Supreme Court-granted constitutional First Amendment "free speech" rights that has defined corporations as "persons" for purposes of spending money to influence elections. Corporations have also been granted First Amendment "commercial speech" rights by the courts. One can only imagine the millions, if not billions, of dollars fossil fuel corporations will spend "educating" the public on the pitfalls of the virtually eliminating the use of fossil fuels by 2030. So long as corporations continue to have First Amendment "corporate personhood" rights, they will continue to disproportionately influence legislators and legislation.
The political power from their First Amendment "free speech" and "commercial speech" granted rights is only one of several ways fossil fuel corporations can oppose the massive energy and behavioral changes we need to put in place by 2030. If, despite this enormous political influence, laws are passed to (for example) tax carbon, fossil fuel corporations can also run to the courts claiming that these laws violate other Supreme Court granted constitutional rights.
Corporations could conceivably try to claim, for example, that government subsidies of renewable energy corporations or any number of prohibitions of fossil fuel companies “discriminates" against fossil fuel corporations under the 14th Amendment, which was intended solely to protect freed slaves from racial discrimination. (Don't laugh - they've made the same argument and won for government support to small businesses over chain stores).
More likely, fossil fuel corporations will assert that by forcing the end of carbon-producing, climate-destroying fossil fuels, their claims on coal and oil in the ground or at sea -- worth tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars -- are "takings" without just compensation under the 5th Amendment -- a constitutional "right" intended solely for human beings but granted to corporations nearly a century ago. This, too, is not theoretical. Corporations have deterred the passage of laws preventing the extraction of natural resources based on the threats of lawsuits under the 5th Amendment.
Ending the use of fossil fuels can only happen by ending the abuse of “fossil” constitutional rules -- rules that have permitted corporate entities to hijack the constitution to protect their property rights over human rights...and the right to a sustainable environment.
A parallel path to ending the use of fossil fuels is promotion of the trans-partisan We the People Amendment (H.J.R. 48), a Constitutional Amendment that would end all forms of corporate constitutional rights and the constitutional doctrine that money is equal to First Amendment-protected "free speech."
Hundreds of communities have passed either municipal resolutions or passed citizen-driven ballot initiatives calling for such an amendment. Hundreds of organizations have endorsed Move to Amend, the organization behind the Amendment -- believing that whatever different issues these organizations work on, the same, identical strategy of legalizing democracy by ending “corporate personhood” and “money as speech” will make it easier for all of these organization to achieve their respective goals.