States are not just suing oil and gas companies; they are also lodging climate-related lawsuits against food companies.
As U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies struggle under an array of regulations and permitting roadblocks, they also face new challenges from climate activists in the form of lawsuits, fines, taxes, and shareholder activism from blue-state pension funds.
Meanwhile, U.S. states increasingly are set against each other, with liberal states leading the charge against fossil fuel companies, while red states attempt to defend them.
Starting in 2018, states including New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Delaware, Connecticut, California, and the District of Columbia began filing lawsuits against energy giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Sunoco, BP, and others.
Oil companies also face legal action from dozens of cities, including Honolulu, Hawaii; Chicago; Baltimore; New York; Charleston, South Carolina; San Francisco; Oakland, California; and Boulder, Colorado.
Analysts say there are multiple goals driving these suits.
“It’s partly ideological, trying to drive these companies out of business,” Kenny Stein, policy vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Epoch Times. He also believes it has to do with consumers’ use of fossil fuels.
“These governments are trying to mandate that people use less oil and less natural gas, but people want to heat their homes as much as they want, they want to drive as far as they want,” Mr. Stein said. “If the state banned the sale of oil, the population would revolt, so this is their backdoor way of trying to impose their will.”
Many of the climate lawsuits assert that pollution caused by oil companies creates a “public nuisance” and the companies intentionally deceived the public about the harmful effects when they caused global temperatures to rise.
The activist organization Climate Analytics tried to calculate the alleged damages.
But it’s not just about money.
“This is simply a strategy for the left to accomplish what they’ve been unable to do in Congress through the ballot box,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told The Epoch Times, “and that is to implement a nationwide climate policy that’s consistent with their green agenda.”
“Their actions imperil access to affordable energy everywhere and inculpate every State and indeed every person on the planet,” the attorneys general wrote. “Consequently, [they] threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among States, but our basic way of life.”
States are not just suing oil and gas companies; they are also lodging climate-related lawsuits against food companies.
The Climate Litigation Industry
The potential for enormous payouts from these lawsuits has attracted not only a seemingly endless supply of plaintiffs, but also numerous law firms and even wealthy investors who are placing bets that the lawsuits will succeed.The plan to potentially wrest trillions of dollars out of energy companies has been developing for more than a decade. A 2012 workshop hosted by the Climate Accountability Institute sought to draw on prior successes that states had in suing tobacco companies.
Over the past decade, an entire industry has emerged to bring the climate litigation plan to fruition on multiple fronts, and to raise millions of dollars to fund it.
A tug of war over jurisdiction has ensued between the states and the oil companies, with the companies pressing to defend themselves in federal courts and states fighting to have the cases remain within their borders.
“If you’re the state of California, you want a liberal judge hearing your argument about these cases,” Mr. Marshall said. He argued that federal courts are the appropriate forum to decide on national issues and to provide “a fair opportunity for both sides to be heard.”
According to Mr. Stein, these lawsuits are unlikely to survive in federal courts, given the paucity of evidence tying specific weather events affecting states, such as floods to CO2 emissions, but also the challenge of quantifying the specific contributions of energy companies, given all the other endeavors that emit CO2, such as farming, animals, and people breathing.
“When you’re using political slogans to try and blame a company for something, you can talk in generalities, but when you’re going to try to charge somebody money in a court of law, you have to be able to defend that charge,” he said.
“The actual attribution of trying to claim that a certain amount of damages were caused by a certain oil company, the evidence just doesn’t exist for that.”
Teaching Judges About Climate
Climate activists also have developed an advocacy network to instruct judges on the merits of climate lawsuits. One such effort is the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), founded in 2018 by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI).The project “provides unbiased, objective continuing education courses to judges about climate science and the law,” ELI spokesman Nick Collins told The Epoch Times.
“The judges came away [from the Judicial Leaders in Climate Science program] steeped in facts about the science of climate change, deeply impressed with their consequences, and committed to working together and reaching out to fellow judges to convey what they had learned,” the report stated.
The most recent example of this was an effort at the end of May by blue-state pension funds, led by the California Public Employment Retirement System (CalPERS), and joined by the states of New York and Illinois.
The states demanded to replace the entire board of Exxon Mobil after its management blocked a proposal by climate activists, such as Arjuna Capital and Follow This, that would have committed the oil and gas company to curbing greenhouse gas emissions and shrinking the size of the company.
Nineteen red-state financial officers also expressed opposition, in some cases getting their own state funds to cast votes against CalPERS.
“This is really an unprecedented and ridiculous move to attack the core business of Exxon, which, by the way, provides $145 million of revenue to the state of Louisiana through taxes,” Louisiana State Treasurer John Fleming, who led the movement against CalPERS, told The Epoch Times. “This would be damaging to households all across the country.”
While shareholders ultimately rejected CalPERS’s attempt, but the battle is far from over.
“If they continue efforts like this, they could begin to reach critical mass, or even if they only have a sizable minority, they can influence positions on these boards and leadership,“ Mr. Fleming said. ”I think it’s a very dangerous and destructive thing.”