Climate change isn’t going away, in fact it’s impacting the planet more and more each year. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 2015-2022 were the warmest years on record, and July of 2023 was the hottest month on record. The WMO also states that “Between 1970 and 2021, there were 11,778 reported disasters attributed to weather, climate and water extremes, causing over 2 million deaths and US $4.3 trillion in economic losses”.
Currently, the effects of climate change are most drastically affecting coastal areas and populations, such as the state of California, where 85% of citizens live in coastal counties. Due to the tremendous impact that climate change has in California, the state has chosen to sue five of the world’s biggest oil companies for decades of downplaying the impact that fossil fuels have on climate change.
ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP, colloquially referred to as “Big Oil”, are being sued for a portion of the billions of dollars that the State of California has lost due to climate disasters. An article by Scientific American, released in 2015, reveals that Exxon knew about the risks of climate change as early as 1977. The company then went on to support research that discredited the validity of climate change and helped prevent the U.S. from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, a UN initiative to limit greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries. According to Scientific American, Exxon has spent tens of millions of dollars on climate denial.
California’s lawsuit brings attention to the growing movement to hold large oil companies accountable for their impact on climate change. This 2023 lawsuit adds California to a list of other states, including New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, that have pursued or are pursuing legal action against these companies. Many of these other cases have resulted in a ruling in the favor of oil companies, dismissal of the case, or being remanded to lower courts, where the cases were not continued. So far, no state has successfully sued an oil company for claims related to climate change.
Arguments against the case come primarily from representatives of the oil companies being sued. It is commonly claimed that the courtroom is not the place to address climate change, and that by attempting to sue these companies California is ignoring a better solution of working with the companies to stop climate change. However, the track record of companies such as ExxonMobil makes it seem unlikely that cooperation would occur if the suit did not happen.
Arguments for litigation include the belief that litigation can impact climate change in a way that policy change has so far been unable to accomplish. The pro-litigation side also argues that the public deserves some kind of retribution for the harm that has been done to them by climate change, and a successful court case may provide that. Regardless of the outcome of this specific court case, it is clear that climate change is an issue that needs to be promptly addressed, and the public attention that this case has received may positively benefit the fight against it.
