The California cities of San Francisco and Oakland filed a pair of lawsuits Wednesday against the world’s five biggest oil companies, saying the industry knew their products contributed to climate change and should have to pay states for the costs of preventing flooding from rising sea levels.
“These fossil fuel companies profited handsomely for decades while knowing they were putting the fate of our cities at risk,” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in announcing his lawsuit, filed in state court. “Instead of owning up to it, they copied a page from the Big Tobacco playbook. They launched a multi-million dollar disinformation campaign to deny and discredit what was clear even to their own scientists: global warming is real, and their product is a huge part of the problem.”
The lawsuits, filed in state courts in San Francisco and Alameda counties, say that Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell, should have to pay billions of dollars to pay for infrastructure to fight rising sea levels. Many scientists blame greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels for driving manmade climate change.
Officials in the cities compared their litigation to lawsuits in the 1980s targeting tobacco companies for profiting off products that they knew harm human health.
“The harm to our cities has commenced and will only get worse,” Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker said. “The law is clear that the defendants are responsible for the consequences of their reckless and disastrous actions.”
Chevron rejected the basis of the lawsuit.
“Chevron welcomes serious attempts to address the issue of climate change, but these suits do not do that,” said Chevron spokeswoman Melissa Ritchie. “Should this litigation proceed, it will only serve special interests at the expense of broader policy, regulatory and economic priorities.”
California, whose economy by itself is the sixth largest in the world, is leading a coalition of states countering the Trump administration’s environmental and energy policies and trying to meet the terms of the Paris climate change agreement.
The U.S. Climate Alliance represent at least $7 trillion of economic activity and more than 36 percent of the nation’s population.
