updated 11-06-2018
“Big oil knew for decades …” yet lied and bought politicians (who appointed “business friendly” judges). Now cities and states are going to court.
“ExxonMobil’s conduct – promoting uncertainty about climate science it knew to be accurate”
Nov 6, 2018
Fossil Fuels on Trial, Major Climate Change Lawsuits: fraud investigations
From a trove of internal Exxon documents, a narrative emerged in 2015 that put a spotlight on the conduct of the fossil fuel industry. An investigative series of stories by Inside Climate News, and later the Los Angeles Times, disclosed that the oil company understood the science of global warming, predicted its catastrophic consequences, and then spent millions to promote misinformation.
From 1977 to 2014, 83 percent of the company’s [Exxon Mobil] peer-reviewed studies and 80 percent of its internal communications acknowledged that climate change is real and caused by humans…
In October 2018, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood sued Exxon, stating in the lawsuit that the oil giant engaged in “a longstanding fraudulent scheme” to deceive investors by providing false and misleading assurances that it was effectively managing the economic risks posed by policies and regulations it anticipated being adopted to address climate change. The lawsuit said the alleged fraud reached the highest levels of Exxon, including former Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, who it said had known about the misrepresentations for years.
… the oil and gas companies have known for decades that burning fossil fuels is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Instead of acting to reduce harm, the cities charge, companies attempted to undermine climate science and mislead the public by downplaying the risk posed by fossil fuels.
“The industry has profited from the manufacture of fossil fuels but has not had to absorb the economic costs of the consequences,” Koh said. “The industry had the science 30 years ago and knew what was going to happen but made no warning so that preemptive steps could have been taken.
“The taxpayers have been bearing the cost for what they should have been warned of 30 years ago,” Koh added. “The companies are now being called to account for their conduct and the damages from that conduct.”
a few Key Events:
Nov. 4, 2015: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issues first Exxon subpoena.
April 4, 2016: Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker issues subpoena to Exxon and the Competitive Enterprise Institute in a climate change investigation.
April 19, 2016: Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey serves Exxon with civil investigative demand (similar to a subpoena).
Jan. 11, 2017: Massachusetts state court rules Exxon must comply with attorney general’s civil investigative demand seeking climate change information.
May 19, 2017: Investigators disclose former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson used a secret alias email under the name “Wayne Tracker.”
June 2, 2017: New York’s attorney general calls Exxon’s climate accounting a “sham” under Tillerson.
Sept. 12, 2017: New York highest court denies Exxon’s request to keep PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting records secret.
Oct. 24, 2018: New York’s attorney general sues Exxon.
March 16, 2018: Federal judge rules some of the cases should be tried in state court, creating a conflict with another judge who ruled similar cases belong in federal court.
April 17, 2018: In Colorado, the city of Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County file a lawsuit in District Court seeking to hold Exxon and Suncor accountable for costs related to climate change.
June 11, 2018: In Colorado, Boulder and San Miguel counties and the City of Boulder add a claim of “civil conspiracy,” alleging Exxon and Suncor Energy worked together to promote the use of fossil fuels while dismissing the consequences of climate change.
July 20, 2018: Federal appeals court again rejects a government request to halt a lawsuit.
see full article at
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04042018/climate-change-fossil-fuel-company-lawsuits-timeline-exxon-children-california-cities-attorney-general
October 6, 2018
The former governor of the state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has recently announced that he will be suing different oil companies for their decisions to “knowingly kill people” through climate change. … Schwarzenegger’s announcement of his intention to file a lawsuit against oil companies comes shortly after a similar announcement was made by New York City.
Comparisons were made to the tobacco industry, which had argued against the assertions that their products harmed people’s health.
The globe’s warming is leading to deadly heat waves and rising sea levels which threaten to swallow up oceanside communities. Furthermore, the combustion of fossil fuels also releases chemical compounds like nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and various forms of particulate matter which are correlated with the development of respiratory and cardiovascular ailments, as well as cancer.
Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, recently opined that it would be up to local government to drive forward reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases and pursue alternative forms of energy. Bloomberg was critical of the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement …
US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recently said that the agency should work closely with energy companies who are aiming to drill for gas and oil on public lands.
Republican Lies:
Zinke also recently argued that alternative forms of energy like wind turbines were bad for the environment, saying wind turbines contribute a “significant” amount of carbon to the atmosphere and kill hundreds of thousands of birds a year. (Estimates of the pollution released by wind turbines are less than 3% of the pollution generated by coal and natural gas plants. Oil pits are also credited with killing far more birds every year than collisions with wind turbines.)https://sciencetrends.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-plans-to-sue-oil-industry-over-climate-change/
Jul 2, 2018
Rhode Island Sues Oil Companies Over Climate Change, First State in Wave of Lawsuits
Standing atop a seawall in Narragansett, state Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin compared the case to the lawsuits filed decades ago against tobacco companies and said it would hold the companies—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—accountable for harm they have caused.
“Big oil knew for decades that greenhouse gas pollution from their operations and their products were having a significant and detrimental impact on the earth’s climate,” he said. “Instead of working to reduce that harm, these companies chose to conceal the dangers, undermine public support for greenhouse gas regulation and engage in massive campaigns to promote the ever increasing use of their products and ever increasing revenues in their pockets.”
Rhode Island is already seeing the effects, and taxpayers are left to pay the costs.
Rhode Island is known as the Ocean State—it has more than 400 miles of coastline—and officials stressed the risks that coastal communities face as a result of rising seas. Kilmartin noted that the area where he was standing could be underwater if a major storm were to hit later in the century, when the seas are several feet higher.
Latest in a Wave of Lawsuits
More than a dozen cities and counties in California, Colorado, New York and Washington have filed similar lawsuits against major fossil companies in recent months in attempts to hold them financially responsible for the effects of climate change. Many of those cases involve coastal communities—such as New York City and tiny Imperial Beach, California—that have seen the damage sea level rise can cause and are now looking for how to pay for protective infrastructure.
The fossil fuel industry has been fighting to have these cases dismissed or moved to federal court, where it faces better odds of having the cases thrown out.
State courts, where other lawsuits are still being handled, may take a different view.
‘A Greater Burden on States to Take Action’
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who spoke at the press conference announcing Rhode Island’s lawsuit, said the courts are an appropriate venue.
“The fossil fuel industry is fond of saying, you’re in the wrong forum, you shouldn’t be going to the courts, you should be going to Congress,” he said. “The reason they say that is because they have Congress locked up with their political power and their money and their influence.”
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo said the Trump administration’s inaction on climate change means that states must do more.
“Given that we have a president in the White House who denies climate change and has pulled out of the Paris climate accord, it puts a greater burden on states to take action,” she said. “If the federal government isn’t going to do their job, we’ll do it for them.”
see full article at
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02072018/rhode-island-climate-change-lawsuit-fossil-fuel-industry-rising-sea-levels-heat-waves-storms
The Fighting Has Begun Over Who Owns Land Drowned by Global Warming.
America’s coastal cities are preparing for legal battles over real estate that slips into the ocean.
A charter boat captain out of Grand Isle, La., took some clients to catch redfish on a marsh pond that didn’t use to exist.
Suddenly, another boat pulled up beside Carpenter’s. “You’re trespassing,” the other driver declared, before chasing him and his clients down the bayou. The sheriff’s office later threatened to arrest Carpenter if he ever returned to the pond. There was just one problem: Under Louisiana state law, any waterways that are accessible by boat are supposed to be public property.
political dilemma: As seas rise and coasts wash away, who owns the land that goes underwater?
For centuries, a body of law called the public trust doctrine has stipulated that, when it comes to coastal property, anything below the average high-tide line is owned by the government for the use and benefit of the public. Those rules also cover what happens when the high-tide line moves. If that movement happens suddenly—for example, if a portion of beach is washed away by a storm—the land owner retains title to the property provided he or she restores it to dry land.
By contrast, if the high-tide line moves slowly, state ownership moves with it. And because it’s Mother Nature taking the land, not the government, there’s no legal requirement for the government to compensate property owners. Legal scholars say climate change has scrambled that distinction. “How do you characterize sea level rise? Is it fast or slow?” asks Josh Eagle, a University of South Carolina professor who specializes in coastal law. “Those rules don’t really make as much sense anymore.”
That uncertainty has compounded the awkward politics of governments taking control of private land without paying for it—especially in Southern and Gulf states with a tradition of protecting private property, and where sea level rise is happening fastest. In North Carolina, the state has blocked attempts by local officials to demolish homes whose foundations are underwater. In Florida, the legislature just made it harder for counties with shrinking beaches to intrude on homeowners’ private land. And in Alabama, owners of lots that are now completely underwater want the government to restore their land, even though nobody knows who would then own it.
Around the country, the combination of rising seas and political stalemate will eventually force courts to intervene, says Peter Byrne, faculty director of Georgetown University’s Environmental Law and Policy Program. Asked how those court fights are likely to unfold, Byrne responded: “We’re going to find out!”
Louisiana is losing land faster than anywhere else in the country. Its bounty of oil, gas, and fisheries has made coastal landowners especially reluctant to relinquish their rights to property that goes underwater.
The state has, in turn, been reluctant to claim these newly created waterways, critics charge, depriving the public of access for fishing and other activity, as well as revenue from any future oil and gas discoveries. Jacques Berry, a state spokesman, says Louisiana asserts its claim to submerged lands whenever it believes, “after scientific and historical analyses, that it has a valid legal claim.” That’s easier said than done: Louisiana employs a single person who’s qualified to survey water bottoms.
Others say the real explanation for Louisiana’s reluctance to claim ownership of submerged land is that officials are loath to antagonize coastal landowners, many of which are the same oil and gas companies that are the core of the state’s economy. In March, Kevin Pearson, a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, introduced a bill making clear that the state’s navigable water bodies are public property. To his surprise, the bill made it out of committee in April—and then died on the floor. “The landowners are so freaking powerful,” he says.
see full article at
www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-25/fight-grows-over-who-owns-real-estate-drowned-by-climate-change
The lying and the buying of politicians to enforce their vested interests
The current political stalemate is no accident. Rather, it is the result of a well-financed and sustained campaign by vested interests to develop and promulgate misinformation about climate science.
a group of fossil fuel corporations, utilities and automobile manufacturers banded together to form the Global Climate Coalition. The group was convened to prevent the U.S. adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In its public statements, the coalition’s official position was to claim global warming was real but that it could be part of a natural warming trend. [the lie]
The corporate drive to spread climate misinformation continued beyond fighting Kyoto. In 1998, API, Exxon, Chevron, Southern Co. and various conservative think tanks initiated a broad public relations campaign with a goal of ensuring that the “recognition of uncertainties of climate science becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’”
While that coalition disbanded in 2001, ExxonMobil reportedly continued to quietly fund climate misinformation, funneling donations through conservative, “skeptic” think tanks such as the Heartland Institute, until 2006, when the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists exposed its funding scheme. ExxonMobil – the nation’s largest and wealthiest company – continues to work with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a self-described public-private partnership of corporations and conservative legislators, to block climate change policies.
ExxonMobil’s conduct – promoting uncertainty about climate science it knew to be accurate
At a minimum, the U.S. needs to change the system of hidden funding, in which companies such as ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers use pass-through organizations to camouflage donations to climate denial efforts. Current U.S. tax rules for nonprofit organizations, including climate-denying think tanks, do not require them to reveal their donors, enabling them to support large-scale political activities while remaining unaccountable.
The Declaration of Independence states that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But when vested interests with outsize economic and cultural power distort the public debate by introducing falsehoods, the integrity of Americans’ deliberations is compromised.
If corporations and public relations firms can systematically alter the national debate in favor of their own interests and against those of society as a whole, then democracy itself is undermined.
see full article at
http://theconversation.com/30-years-ago-global-warming-became-front-page-news-and-both-republicans-and-democrats-took-it-seriously-97658
the Earth Science Communications Team at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The debate among scientists is effectively already over – 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.
According to NASA data, 2016 was the warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. The 10 warmest years in the 138-year record all have occurred since 2000, with the four warmest years being the four most recent years. Credit: NASA/NOAA.
Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree*: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.
A few examples:
American Association for the Advancement of Science
“The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.” (2006)
American Geophysical Union
“Human‐induced climate change requires urgent action. Humanity is the major influence on the global climate change observed over the past 50 years. Rapid societal responses can significantly lessen negative outcomes.” (Adopted 2003, revised and reaffirmed 2007, 2012, 2013)
American Meteorological Society
“It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide.” (2012)
American Physical Society
“The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” (2007)
see full article at
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Landmark Global Warming Lawsuit Settled
Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the city of Boulder, Colorado, filed the suit (Friends of the Earth, Inc., et al. v. Spinelli, et al.) in August 2002 and were later joined by the California cities of Arcata, Santa Monica and Oakland. The plaintiffs alleged that Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation illegally provided more than $32 billion in financing and insurance to fossil fuel projects over 10 years without assessing whether the projects contributed to global warming or impacted the U.S. environment, as they were required to do under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Fossil fuel projects financed by the two agencies from 1990 to 2003 produced cumulative emissions that were equivalent to nearly eight percent of the worlds annual carbon dioxide emissions, or nearly one third of annual U.S. emissions in 2003.
In August 2005, a federal judge found that the U.S. cities suffering economic and other damages from climate change had standing to sue under NEPA, opening up the courthouse doors for the first time to those injured by climate change. Testimony from the case, which successfully asserted that climate change is real and caused by human activities, later informed the Mass. v EPA decision, in which the Supreme Court held that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
Under the settlement agreed to today, the Export-Import Bank will begin taking carbon dioxide emissions into account in evaluating fossil fuel projects and create an organization-wide carbon policy. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation will establish a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with projects by 20 percent over the next ten years. Both agencies will commit to increasing financing for renewable energy.
The settlement represents an important victory in the continuing campaign to hold both agencies accountable for their contributions to climate change. The settlement agreement was filed this morning in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
When we launched this lawsuit in 2003, we were deep in the Bush global warming dark ages. We were able to prove that climate change harms American cities and citizens and we forced these agencies to change their behavior. Now that we have entered the brighter Obama age, Greenpeace hopes that sweeping reform of global warming policy will reach every corner of the government.
Kert Davies, Research Director, Greenpeace
The city of Boulder is pleased with the outcome of this lawsuit. As the first city to enact a carbon tax to address climate change, the Boulder community is committed to the principles of environmental sustainability and this result will further that impact. The coalition forged in the lawsuit demonstrates that together, committed organizations can make a positive difference toward protecting our planet.
Boulder City Manager Jane S. Brautigam
see full article at
https://foe.org/news/2009-02-landmark-global-warming-lawsuit-settled