As a professor of both environmental law and torts, I have previously called for legal action to hold accountable the fossil fuel companies that have driven the world into a climate crisis. Their products have caused the vast majority of carbon dioxide emissions, and, worse, they carried out a coordinated, decades-long campaign of deception about it. Now I am proud and grateful that the state of Maine has officially joined the fight to make big oil companies pay for the harm their illegal behavior has caused to our residents, economy and environment.
Attorney General Aaron Frey’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and other giant polluters is the latest in a growing number of cases across New England and the United States that points to mountains of evidence that these companies have known and lied for decades about the disastrous consequences of their business.
Take Exxon. As early as 1982, Exxon’s own scientists warned top executives that carbon dioxide from the use of Exxon’s fossil fuels would warm the planet, which could lead to “catastrophic events,” and that staving off climate change would require a significant reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. As Exxon was publicly denying the reality of the climate crisis in the 1990s, its subsidiaries were simultaneously building coastal production facilities that could withstand climate change-induced sea level rise and ocean temperature changes that their scientists knew were on the horizon.
In the coming months, we can expect fossil fuel companies and their allies to attack Maine’s lawsuit because it poses a threat to their profits and reputation. But the reality is that climate accountability lawsuits such as Maine’s are based on sound, longstanding legal principles – which ensure that polluters pay and corporations that deceive consumers face consequences.
Indeed, judges in similar cases in New England have rejected fossil fuel companies’ efforts to dismiss them. Massachusetts is on the brink of a historic trial against Exxon, while cases from Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island have continued to move through the courts despite repeated attempts to delay, discredit and derail them. Attorney General Frey is right to join our neighbors in the effort to compel these companies to help pay for the damage their products inflicted upon our state and its people. As we set out on this path, we should be clear about what legal accountability can and cannot do, and why it is important to our beloved state.
Suing fossil fuel companies provides Mainers two important opportunities for some relief from the climate crisis. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, the attorney general is asking these companies to help defray the climate-induced costs of enhancing infrastructure and repairing property damage. These are costs our municipalities and their taxpayers (us) will be forced to bear without this lawsuit. They are also in line with what private citizens can traditionally demand when companies deceive and injure them, or when others interfere with their property. Secondly, the trial would force ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and other fossil fuel companies to face evidence of their climate deception in a state court before a jury of Mainers. That public process could provide moral and political accountability, important design features of the United States’ open civil justice system.
To be clear, this lawsuit will not rewind the clock and reverse the effects of the escalating climate crisis – the fossil fuel industry already stole that time from us – nor will the lawsuit attempt to regulate the oil companies’ ability to continue selling us their fossil fuel products. In other words, a lawsuit, this one or any other, is not going to stop climate change. But it might help us pay for it.
Mainers didn’t knowingly fuel the climate crisis, the fossil fuel industry did. As we face worsening climate threats from the defining challenge of our time, it simply makes sense that we demand accountability from the polluting giants that put us in this position. Mainers deserve their day in court with Big Oil, and Attorney General Frey and his office deserve our support.
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