Northwest Oregon has never seen anything like this before. Over the course of three days in June 2021, Multnomah County, the Emerald State’s most populous county, located swayback along Oregon’s northern border, recorded highs of 108, 112 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit.
The temperature is too high The metal in the cable car melted. and The asphalt of the road is warpedNearly half of the homes in the county had no air conditioning during Oregon’s typically mild summers, when average high temperatures soar to 81 degrees Fahrenheit. 69 people died of heatstroke, most of them at home.
when According to scientific studies The extreme temperatures were caused by heat domes, which experts say are the result of climate change, but rather than dismiss them as just a random weather phenomenon, county officials began investigating the big fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron, whose emissions are contributing to the climate crisis. Sued them.
“This disaster was not the result of an act of God, but of some of the world’s largest energy companies putting innocent and vulnerable lives at risk in order to sell as much oil and gas as they could,” said County Attorney Jeffrey B. Simon.
Now, 11 months after the lawsuit was filed, Multnomah County is preparing to move forward with the case in Oregon state court. After a federal court settlement in June Months of debate over where the case should be heard.
These Supreme Court decisions have made climate change even more difficult to solve.
About 30 lawsuits have been filed by states, counties and cities seeking damages from oil and gas companies for damages caused by climate change. Legal experts say the Oregon lawsuit is one of the first to focus on the public health costs associated with high temperatures during a specific episode of the “heat dome effect.” Most of the other lawsuits seek damages overall from ongoing climate-related impacts, including rising sea levels, increased precipitation, more extreme weather events and flooding.
Pat ParenteauThe Vermont Law School professor emeritus said a focus on heat and the heat dome effect could make the Multnomah case easier to prove.
“When it comes to the heatwave that affected Portland, scientists have looked at that event and the historical record of heat waves in the Pacific Northwest and concluded that it would not have happened in the absence of human-induced climate change,” Parenteau said.
“It’s the first time I’ve actually seen a climate scientist state that conclusion in such absolute terms,” he added.
Cory Silverman LohertySilverman Roherty, a research fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change, also said the lawsuit is unique in that it focuses on a specific event. “Many of the other lawsuits are alleging damages from longer-term effects of climate change, like sea level rise, which happens over decades,” Silverman Roherty said. “Whereas the Multnomah lawsuit is really about the 2021 heat dome disaster that they had to deal with.”
A group of young people forced Hawaii to take major climate action
The Multnomah County lawsuit alleges that Exxon, Shell, Chevron and others engaged in a variety of improper conduct, including negligence, pollution, fraud and deception.
In the lawsuit, These companies knew the harms of fossil fuels and “engaged in a scheme to greedily sell fossil fuel products and deceptively promote them as harmless to the environment, while knowing that the carbon pollution their products emitted into the atmosphere was likely to cause deadly heatwaves like the one that devastated Multnomah County.”
“We know that climate-driven weather events like the 2021 heat dome will harm Multnomah County residents and cause real economic losses to local governments,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement. “The court’s decision to hear this case in state court vindicates our argument that this case should be resolved here and is an important victory for our region.”
An Exxon spokesman declined to comment on the matter. Representatives for Shell and Chevron did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A common defense for fossil fuel companies is to argue that existing environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, are already responsible for regulating air quality, so they shouldn’t be allowed to take legal action under state law, Silverman-Loati noted.
In the lawsuit, officials from the county, which includes Portland, Oregon’s largest city with a population of about 640,000, argue that dealing with the effects of the heat dome in 2021 could ultimately cost more than $1.5 billion.
Vermont passed a bill that would force big oil companies to pay up. Here’s the hard part.
“We argue that this is no different to other public health crises or mass destruction of property caused by corporate malfeasance,” said Simon, the law firm partner. Simon Greenstone Panatier“We allege that these companies foresaw that polluting the atmosphere with carbon from the combustion of fossil fuels would cause extreme environmental damage, and that some of them knowingly misled the public about it.”
The lawsuit cites some of the company’s internal documents, including that Multnomah County officials say the industry Dating back to 1965 Contamination could have “catastrophic consequences.”
“No Multnomah County leader ever imagined temperatures in Portland would reach 124 degrees,” Simon said, “but we allege that defendants foresaw extreme changes, including such harm, and failed to tell the truth about them.”
Legal experts said the claims in the case are based on traditional tort law that has been cited in other cases alleging public health wrongdoing, but it’s unclear whether that approach will work in a climate change lawsuit.
Chris WaldThe environmental law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland said technological advances in weather modeling could help the county’s case. Greenhouse gases to “specific impacts in specific regions.”
“In the past, it’s been common to say, ‘We can’t link this hurricane or this heat wave to greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,'” Wald says. “Increasingly, we’re able to say this. Climate models are now good enough to say, ‘We can predict that these places will see these increases in temperature or these changes in precipitation.’ I think this will make it easier for plaintiffs to allege that emissions from certain companies are causing certain impacts.”
Accusing big oil companies of “climate murder” isn’t as far-fetched as it seems
Silverman Loati of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change also cited the role of improved modelling as a compelling factor in the argument.
“Scientists can say, ‘This heat dome wouldn’t have happened without climate change,'” Silverman-Loati says, “and the county can go to court and say, ‘You have to pay for all of the damages that this heat dome caused, and the companies that sold the products that caused this problem and claimed these products were fine have to pay a portion of all the damages that we have to pay in response to this heat dome.'”
Importantly, Vermont Law School’s Parenteau said modeling linking climate change to the June 2021 heat dome effect would be difficult to challenge in court.
“I would have no problem putting evidence before the jury and having the judge instruct the jury to tell them whether they agree with that evidence or not, leading to a finding of liability,” he said.
“When the average American thinks about climate change, they probably think about storms and floods and rising sea levels, but they probably don’t think about the fact that it’s killing people,” Parenteau said. Cases like Multnomah County “make the connection clear, because it is true that it is killing people. And it’s not just the heat that’s killing people.”
Jeff GoodellThe author of the New York Times bestseller “Heat Kills You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet” said it’s unclear how pending litigation will be affected by the Supreme Court’s recent decision. placed limits on the regulatory powers of federal agenciesBut Goodell said the trend of communities seeking compensation from the fossil fuel industry shows no signs of abating.
“The question of what accountability looks like and how it works is one of the most fascinating questions in the world of climate change right now,” Goodell said. “I think we’re going to see more and more calls for accountability, and, you know, we’re at the beginning of an epic battle.”
He added: “We don’t know what that will look like over the next few years, but we know it’s not going to be solved anytime soon, and the problems are going to get bigger and louder and more urgent.”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25697397/STK071_APPLE_N.jpg?w=150&resize=150,150&ssl=1 "Apple is reportedly working on developing “LLM Siri” to compete with ChatGPT")
