California has just filed lawsuits against five of the world’s biggest oil companies, alleging they caused billions of dollars in damage while misleading the public by downplaying the risks to the climate from fossil fuels.
This legal action, revealed by the New York Times and confirmed by the governor of the state, follows numerous others launched by American cities, counties and states against interests linked to fossil fuels because of their environmental impact, against a backdrop of accusations of decades of disinformation campaigns .
The civil complaint was filed Friday in San Francisco Superior Court against oil giants Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, which is headquartered in California. The American Petroleum Institute is also targeted, specifies the New York Times.
“For more than fifty years, Big Oil (all the giants of the oil sector, Editor’s note) lied to us, hiding the fact that they knew for a long time how dangerous the fossil fuels they produced were for our planet,” declared the governor of the state, Gavin Newsom, in a statement released Friday.
“California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable,” he added.
Representatives of the targeted entities did not immediately respond to requests for reaction from AFP.
These companies and their associates have “intentionally minimized the risks posed by fossil fuels to the population, even though they were aware that their products could lead to significant global warming”, this since the 1950s, underlines the complaint, according to New York Times.
“Deceptions”
With this legal action, California aims to create a fund to deal with future damage caused by climate change in this state, victim of forest fires, floods and other extreme phenomena fueled by global warming.
“Oil and gas company executives have known for decades that dependence on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they have deprived the public and policy makers of this information by actively promoting misinformation on the subject,” adds the complaint is 135 pages long, according to the newspaper.
“Their deceptions have delayed the response to global warming,” with “a high cost to people, property and natural resources, which continues to weigh every day,” the text continues.
“By downplaying the scientific consensus regarding global warming and emphasizing the existence of uncertainty, Defendants hoped to delay any regulatory action to reduce or control emissions [de gaz à effet de serre] de facto threatening the profits of the sector”, it is further argued.
Since the wave of such complaints against oil and gas firms began about six years ago, the sector has sought to counter the attacks by gaming the procedure to avoid lawsuits.
This effort suffered a major setback last May, however, when the US Supreme Court in two cases refused to consider an appeal, thereby allowing the complaints to proceed in court.
The prosecutions are inspired by those successfully brought against the tobacco giants, or against the pharmaceutical industry in the case of the proliferation of opioids.