(Los Angeles) California on Friday 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 energy-related climate risks. fossils.
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 (API) is also targeted by the complaint, consulted by AFP.
“For more than fifty years, “Big Oil” (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 Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, in a statement Friday.
“California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable,” he added.
An API spokeswoman criticized California’s suit, arguing that climate policies should be “the purview of Congress, not the judiciary.”
This ongoing, coordinated campaign to bring baseless, politicized lawsuits against a founding pillar of American industry and its workers represents nothing more than a distraction […] and a huge waste of California taxpayer resources.
A spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute (API)
In a statement, Shell said it “agrees with the need to act now on climate change”, but also rejects recourse to the courts, saying that “smart public policies and actions from all sectors are the appropriate way to achieve solutions.”
Representatives of the other targeted groups did not immediately respond to requests from AFP.
These companies and their associates have “intentionally minimized the risks posed by fossil fuels for the population, even though they were aware that their products could lead to significant global warming” since the 1950s, the complaint points out.
“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 reliance on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they have deprived the public and policymakers of this information by actively promoting misinformation on the subject.
Excerpt from the lawsuit
“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 complaints of this kind against oil and gas companies began about six years ago, the sector has sought to counter the attacks by playing on the procedure, to avoid lawsuits.
But that effort suffered a major setback last May, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider an appeal in two cases, 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.