Big oil is facing this A growing number of climate-related lawsuits, new research has found. It is a sign that Many communities are seeking accountability for corporate involvement in the climate crisis.
For the report, which was published on Thursday, Oil Change International and the climate research firm Zero Carbon Analytics extracted data from the Columbia University database, focusing on the issue of the largest fossil fuel producers in the world. 25 worlds as defendants.
The number of lawsuits filed against the companies worldwide each year has almost tripled since 2015 – the year the UN Paris climate agreement was signed – with 86 cases filed and 40 currently pending a, the authors found.
“No big oil and gas company promises to do the minimum to prevent climate change, so local people take them to court,” said David Tong, media manager at the research group and group said media outlet Oil Change International, who worked on the report. .
The petition was filed by local, state and other government bodies, as well as environmental groups, indigenous tribes and individuals. Fifty people were sued in US courts, while 24 were sued in European countries, five in Australia and four in Nigeria.
The largest number of lawsuits is in complaints seeking compensation for climate damage, which accounts for 38% of cases, the authors found. Thirty-three such lawsuits have been filed since 2015, 30 of them brought since 2017. The main reason for the increase in these cases is that “the science has gotten better”, Noah Walker-Crawford, research analyst and. The London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute, said in a press call Tuesday.
The science allows scientists to “link extreme weather events to climate change more broadly”, and also explain the climate impacts of some fossil fuel plants, explained Walker-Crawford. who did not work on the story.
No fossil fuel company has yet been forced to pay for climate damage, but the costs could be huge, and previous reports estimate that the region’s biggest polluters are making trillions of dollars in lost buildings, shelters and equipment.
The largest ongoing climate damage lawsuit was brought by a Peruvian farmer in 2015 against energy giant RWE, which he alleges is contributing to climate impacts that threaten Andean homes. play music. In an unprecedented move in 2022, judges from Germany traveled to Peru to determine the level of damage caused by RWE, which is also the largest wind turbine in Europe. RWE did not respond to requests for comment.
In the US, lawsuits seeking climate damage also accuse defendants of deliberately sowing the seeds of doubt about the climate crisis despite long-standing knowledge of the global warming effects of their products.
The story is The authors note an increase in other types of climate litigation, including challenges to allegedly misleading media. Such cases today account for 16% of all climate complaints against oil majors and are “prevailing legal systems”, the authors wrote. Nine cases have been decided, in which the judge convicted only one defendant.
Something about 12% of the climate lawsuits in the survey were against fossil fuel companies for their failure to implement emissions reduction policies in line with the Paris climate agreement. A landmark 2021 decision by a Dutch court ordering Shell to reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030 came in response to a similar case. Shell declined to comment.
Ryan Meyers, senior vice president at the fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute, said the study described “an ongoing, coordinated campaign to pay for the unfounded, political cost of corporate America and its employees”, and called the effort “nothing more than a distraction from the important national conversation and a waste of taxpayers”.
New forms of climate litigation are also emerging. This year, climate disaster victims and NGOs filed the world’s first climate lawsuit in France against the CEO and directors of the French oil company TotalEnergies; it alleges that the defendants contributed to the deaths of victims of climate disasters. TotalEnergies did not respond to requests for comment.
This assessment does not account for all climate complaints filed worldwide. Other protests have focused on companies operating in other parts of the oil chain, such as pipeline companies, and others challenging the government over their oil policies.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, who did not work on the investigation, said that although the fossil fuel industry faces “a large number of cases”, “it none of them broke” except some focused on the media. But he added that the coming years “may bring some important and possible things to this campaign”, and new legal ideas are being developed.
These protests “will not solve the climate problem alone”, said Tong of Oil Change International, but they can be an important vehicle to catch polluters.
“The increasing number of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies shows how their historical role and their continued role in driving and profiting from climate change is reaching them,” he said.
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