Center for Climate Integrity Archives

August 1, 2024

Legal battle over fossil fuels and climate heats up

By Dana Drugmand

As climate change fuels increasingly damaging extreme weather events across the United States, litigation is growing against fossil fuel companies accused of being to blame for the devastation. But a series of recent legal moves by the industry and mixed judicial decisions underscore the challenges that local and state government plaintiffs face in the multi-billion-dollar battle.

Just last month, the industry scored a significant win when a Maryland circuit court judge tossed out a six-year-old climate liability case against more than two dozen of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. The case, filed in 2018 by Baltimore officials, accused the companies of hiding the climate-harming impacts of their products, causing rising sea levels, severe storms, flooding, heatwaves and other “dire effects on the world.”

The fossil fuel companies successfully argued, however, that because the legal claims center on global greenhouse gas emissions, they stretch beyond the bounds of state laws. Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and federal law – particularly the Clean Air Act – preempts state law claims pertaining to those emissions, according to the industry.

“Regulation of interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions is beyond the role of state law,” Phil Goldberg, special counsel for an industry initiative working to combat climate litigation, said in a statement.

September 20, 2023

Postcard from California: State takes on Big Oil for decades of climate lies

By Bill Walker

California fired its opening salvo against the oil and gas industry two years ago, with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order banning the sale of new gasoline-powered cars and trucks after 2035. In April, the offensive escalated, as the California Air Resources Board (CARB) ordered a phaseout of diesel trucks and locomotives starting in 2036. The state opened another front in June, establishing a watchdog agency to investigate gasoline-pump price spikes and recommend fines for oil companies deemed guilty of gouging customers.

Now the state has dropped its biggest bombshell yet: a monumental lawsuit against five of the world’s largest petrochemical companies for their “decades-long campaign of deception” about the harm of their products to the planet’s climate, and the disastrous and costly impacts of the climate crisis on California.

The 135-page lawsuit, filed last week in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleges that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP (formerly British Petroleum) knew since the 1950s that burning fossil fuels would heat up the climate with devastating consequences, but covered up the truth instead of alerting the public. The suit also names as a defendant the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry’s trade association. The defendants are accused of fraud, negligence, product liability, false advertising and creating a public nuisance.

“Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment,” state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a news release. “From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.”