Richard Thomas of Waterville is a recently retired psychologist and climate activist.

The Supreme Court gave corporations all the rights of human beings, and now the Republican Party wants to give the fossil fuel industry even more rights than people have. If a person damages the environment that our children need to survive, that person can be sued and forced to stop causing this damage.

But Big Oil is causing terrible damage to our climate, and its proposed Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026 would prevent anyone from ever suing Big Oil to protect our children’s future. Even the name of this legislation is a lie.

Big Oil not only harms us, it also intentionally deceived the American people about the dangers of its product. This is what makes it financially liable. This industry knew 50 years ago that its waste product (greenhouse gases) would make our climate chaotic and dangerous. Rather than investing more and more in clean energy, the industry has given billions of dollars to politicians and political media to tell us that climate change is a hoax.  

And now that most people know this is a lie, the Republican Party tells us that climate change isn’t really dangerous, and that clean energy is just virtue signaling at the expense of working people, and so government support for green energy must end. This is also a complete lie. Green energy would decrease energy prices for everyone.

The national Republican Party is already defunding the development of green energy, which would give us cleaner air (saving thousands of lives a year) and cheaper, more stable energy. In contrast, the price of oil can skyrocket in response to political events. That’s happening right now. We obviously need to use oil until we can ramp up renewable energy much more, but we should accelerate the construction of clean energy infrastructure, not block it. 

The Republican agenda to defund clean energy is intensifying the damage from climate change that American citizens have to endure and pay for. In a worst-case scenario, climate chaos could make it impossible to grow enough food, and then what happens to your family?

Maine has considered a Make Polluters Pay bill that would force the biggest oil corporations to pay for the climate change-fueled damages that our Maine taxes are now paying for.

The Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026 is designed to block Make Polluters Pay laws: to prevent states like Maine from holding these corporations responsible for the harm caused by their waste products.