As one climate lawsuit gets thrown out of court in New York, another one takes its place in Baltimore.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh announced the lawsuit Friday in joining about a dozen other cities and states in suing fossil fuel firms for their role in causing global warming.
“The East Coast’s 5th largest city today joined a growing number of communities that are trying to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for knowingly contributing to what one of the industry’s own experts described as the ‘potentially catastrophic’ consequences of climate change,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
The lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court of Baltimore, targets many of the energy firms that dot the landscape around Charm City. Most notably, Consol Energy’s coal export terminal, the only one like it on the East Coast, that handles much of the U.S. coal industry’s shipments abroad.
The lawsuit also targets oil giants BP, Marathon, Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Citgo, and many others.
The lawsuit was filed about 24 hours after a court in New York rejected a similar lawsuit in New York filed by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Manhattan Federal Court Judge John Keenan rejected the claim that the oil firms were to blame for increasingly powerful storms, such as Superstorm Sandy, and other harms that threatened the city by exacerbating the effects of global warming.
Keenan said that climate change, an international issue, is outside the court’s jurisdiction. “Climate change is a fact of life, as is not contested by Defendants. But the serious problems caused thereby are not for the judiciary to ameliorate,” Keenan wrote in his decision. “Global warming and solutions there to must be addressed by the two other branches of government.”
A court in California rejected similar lawsuits ahead of the New York decision, throwing out suits by San Francisco and Oakland.
Manufacturing groups that represent the oil firms have been urging cities with remaining lawsuits still pending in court to withdraw their claims in the wake of the court defeats.
The groups blasted Pugh on Friday, calling her lawsuit “frivolous” and an “abuse of our legal system,” according to the National Association of Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, which was set up to track the climate suits.
Friday’s lawsuit “does nothing to advance meaningful solutions, which manufacturers are focused on every day,” said Lindsey de la Torre, executive director of the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project.
“It’s time for politicians and trial lawyers to put an end to this frivolous litigation,” she said. “Taxpayer resources should not be used for baseless lawsuits that are designed to enrich trial lawyers and grab headlines for politicians.”
