Big Oil faces a flood of climate lawsuits—and they’re moving closer to trial

A man rides his bike passed a gas station as smoke fills the sky during the Dixie fire in Greenville, California on July 23, 2021.

A man rides his bike passed a gas station as smoke fills the sky during the Dixie fire in Greenville, California on July 23, 2021. JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

 

Connecting state and local government leaders

A quarter of Americans now live in cities and states taking companies to court over lying to the public.

This article first appeared in Grist. Read the original.

It’s been six years since cities in California started the trend of taking Big Oil to court for deceiving the public about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. The move followed investigations showing that Exxon and other companies had known about the dangers of skyrocketing carbon emissions for decades, but publicly downplayed the threat. Today, around 30 lawsuits have been filed around the country as cities, states, and Indigenous tribes seek to make the industry pay for the costs of climate change.

Until recently, most of these cases had been stuck in limbo. Oil companies were trying to move them from the state courts in which they were filed to federal courts, a more business-friendly setting. But just in the past year, the Supreme Court declined to hear their arguments to relocate these cases on three separate occasions, most recently clearing the way for Minnesota’s case to proceed in state court. That means executives from Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil giants may soon have to defend their actions in front of a jury.

“Last year was a really pivotal year in terms of getting past the industry’s big push and their delay tactics,” said Alyssa Johl, vice president for the legal program at the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization that provides support for these cases. “That issue and that effort has been put to rest, and now they have to face the music.”

The long delays might have strengthened the legal arguments against fossil fuel companies. Researchers have uncovered more details about what oil companies knew about climate change and when, and the science connecting fossil fuel emissions to climate disasters has matured, arming cities and states with more evidence. All the while, the effects of climate change — the heat waves, the blazes, the wildfire smoke — have only grown more obvious, and more costly. Last year, the U.S. recorded a billion-dollar disaster every two weeks.

“With each month and with each year that these cases are stalled, the impacts for communities just grow,” said Delta Merner, the lead scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ litigation hub. “I think that’s important context for understanding these cases, and for understanding the additional cases that have been filed over the last six years.”

That might explain the spread of lawsuits from coastal cities and states to inland areas like Minnesota, Colorado, and most recently, Chicago. With the third-largest city in the country suing BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and other oil titans for lying about climate change, a quarter of Americans now live in cities and states that are taking fossil fuel companies to court, according to the Center for Climate Integrity.

One of the cases that’s furthest along, filed by Massachusetts against Exxon Mobil in 2019, is already in the process of “discovery,” the last major step before a trial. In this stage, both sides try to uncover evidence that could help their case in court. The discovery process could unearth further details of oil companies’ deception, such as what individual CEOs or other company executives did with the information they learned about climate change, Johl said. 

“It’s really what the industry fears the most,” Johl said. “They don’t want anyone digging through their archives and divulging their innermost thoughts and secrets.” Much of what the public learned about the tobacco industry’s effort to cover up the link between lung cancer and smoking, for example, came out of the discovery process, made public as part of a major settlement in 1998, when Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and other tobacco giants agreed to pay states $206 billion over the next 25 years. 

The discovery phase of the Massachusetts case is expected to wrap up later this year, and it could head to trial as early as 2025, Johl said.

Oil companies have plans to fight back, though. In response to the new lawsuit from Chicago, industry representatives characterized the lawsuits as a “waste of taxpayer resources” and contended that climate change should be addressed by Congress, not the courts. “They’re going to raise issues every step of the way and raise defenses every step of the way,” Johl said. 

Another case that’s at the front of the pack is Honolulu’s suit seeking damages from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Sunoco, among others. In October, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court dismissed the companies’ appeal to throw out the suit, clearing the way for a trial. Last week, the companies asked the Supreme Court to toss that ruling.

The industry’s current line of argument in the Honolulu case (and others) is that these lawsuits are about the broader issue of emissions and pollution, and that the federal Clean Air Act preempts any claim brought by cities and states. So far, this approach has seen some modest success. In January, Delaware’s Superior Court denied oil companies’ motion to dismiss the state’s case against them while granting a few concessions, including that out-of-state emissions were the territory of the Clean Air Act, beyond the limits of state law. Emissions that originated in Delaware, however, were fair game.

As these climate cases have slowly begun to proceed, recent months have brought lawsuits from California, cities, and tribes. Last September, the state of California demanded that oil companies fund efforts to recover from extreme weather. In December, the Makah and Shoalwater Bay tribes along the coast of Washington state became the first Native American tribes to take oil companies to court over the costs of responding to climate-related risks from rising seas, flooding, and ocean acidification. Meanwhile, Hoboken, New Jersey, and a collection of cities in Puerto Rico have added racketeering lawsuits to the mix, alleging that oil companies engaged in a conspiracy of deception.

New research has made it harder for oil giants to say they couldn’t have known the outcome of burning so much fossil fuel. A study published in the journal Science last year found that Exxon’s scientists predicted the effects of climate change with startling accuracy in the 1980s. Exxon’s models nearly matched actual temperature changes over the past several decades.

Then there’s the blooming area of scientific inquiry that connects climate change to extreme weather events. Researchers are now able to quantify how corporate emissions have fueled climate disasters, a critical development for these cases, Merner said. “This is the cutting edge where the science is moving towards — to be able to look not just at these global averages, but to see what is happening regionally.”

A study Merner coauthored last year found that 37 percent of the forests burned in the Western United States since 1986 can be linked to carbon pollution from a group of 88 of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. Last June, Multnomah County — home to Portland — cited the research in its lawsuit against oil companies over their contributions to a deadly heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021. In newer cases, like Multnomah’s and the ones filed by Indigenous tribes, the oil industry is sticking to its strategy of trying to move the case to federal courts, according to Margaret Barry, who maintains a climate litigation database at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center.

The new and improved science linking climate change to weather disasters has been a game changer for all of these cases, Merner said. “We can’t sit back and argue whether or not climate change played a role in extreme weather or public health problems that we’re facing today, because attribution science shows that it does and can calculate what that role was.” 

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

X
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Learn More / Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Accept Cookies
X
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.

Allow All Cookies

Manage Consent Preferences

Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.

Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.

Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.

Save Settings
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Functional Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Performance Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Social Media Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Targeting Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.