California has filed a major lawsuit against five of the world’s largest oil companies, saying they knew as far back as the 1950s that their products are major contributors to climate change, but they misled the public and now must pay billions to help the state grapple with wildfires, droughts, sea level rise and other disasters that climate change has made worse.
The lawsuit, filed late Friday in San Francisco County Superior Court, seeks to force the oil companies to create an “abatement fund” to pay for damages that California will experience in the coming decades due to hotter temperatures and extreme weather events.
“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom, “covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet. It has been decades of damage and deception. Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells. California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP, along with the American Petroleum Institute.
Along with lawsuits by other states, the legal blitzkrieg rekindled memories of the 1998 tobacco settlement, in which four major tobacco companies — Philip Morris Inc., R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard — settled a lawsuit with the attorney generals of 46 states. The companies agreed to pay $206 billion to the states and limit their advertising, to settle massive lawsuits that claimed they knew for decades cigarettes caused cancer and other health problems, but denied it and covered it up, costing the states billions in health care costs.
The oil industry on Saturday called the lawsuit misguided.
They noted it was filed just before Newsom is scheduled to speak Sunday at Climate Week, an annual event in New York City co-hosted by the United Nations. California officials provided the information Friday to New York Times reporter David Gelles, who will interview Newsom on stage at the event.
“That this lawsuit was set up to be the centerpiece of a political press event in New York City says a lot about what this is all really about,” said Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president and CEO of the Western States Petroleum Association. “Climate policy is too important to be accomplished by political stunts and meritless lawsuits.”
Environmentalists cheered the move and said it was long overdue.
“Holding Big Oil accountable for their decades-long deception is necessary and crucial to protect California communities from the effects of the climate crisis,” said Brandon Dawson, director of Sierra Club California.
The 135-page lawsuit alleges that the oil companies violated product liability laws, engaged in fraudulent business practices, produced misleading advertising, violated California’s pollution laws and created a public nuisance for decades.
It cites examples of when companies knew that burning fossil fuels traps heat in the atmosphere and could lead to, or was already, warming the planet, but then suppressed the information or funded public relations campaigns and industry groups to deny the science.
In 1959, famed nuclear physicist Edward Teller told a meeting of oil industry executives at the annual American Petroleum Institute conference in New York that “a temperature rise corresponding to a 10% increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge… coastal cities,” the lawsuit notes.
Later, in 1965, the suit adds, the president of the institute, Frank Ikard, relayed the findings of a recent report to industry leaders at their annual conference, saying, “one of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts. ” He quoted the report’s finding that “the pollution from internal combustion engines is so serious, and is growing so fast, that an alternative nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”
The lawsuit details how through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, oil industry documents show that scientists working for the oil companies, and for other agencies like Stanford Research Institute, clearly alerted the companies to the way that fossil fuels were changing the climate. The oil industry, however, funded organizations to downplay or deny the science, such as the Global Climate Coalition, which in 1996 published a report saying: “Most, if not all, of the observed warming is part of a natural warming trend which began approximately 400 years ago.”
In 2019, 10 California cities and counties settled a lawsuit with the makers of lead paint, saying they had known for years about the health risks of their product but covered it up. The companies — Sherwin-Williams, ConAgra and NL Industries, agreed to pay $305 million to Santa Clara, Alameda, Los Angeles, Monterey, San Mateo, Solano, San Francisco and Ventura counties; and the cities of Oakland and San Diego to address lead paint-related hazards that poison thousands of children each year.
More than two dozen cities and several other states already have sued the oil industry seeking redress over climate change costs.
The plaintiffs won a major victory in April, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that governments can file such climate change suits in state courts, rather than federal courts. The decision was key because in many cases, particularly in California, government agencies are considered to have a better chance of winning the suits in state courts rather than federal courts.
California’s lawsuit is likely to take years to work through the courts. The lead paint case took 19 years.
“With our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court,” Bonta said in a statement Saturday. “It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.”