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As climate costs mount, US communities look to the courts

11 US states, dozens of cities and counties file lawsuits

Published: Tue 4 Feb 2025, 3:45 PM

Updated: Tue 4 Feb 2025, 3:46 PM

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  • Reuters

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Demonstrators march across Brooklyn Bridge rallying to call to an end to the era of fossil fuels, as part of global day of action on 9/20 calling on Polluters, Funders, and Leaders to ditch fossil fuels, from Foley Square in New York City, US, on September 20, 2024. — Reuters file

Demonstrators march across Brooklyn Bridge rallying to call to an end to the era of fossil fuels, as part of global day of action on 9/20 calling on Polluters, Funders, and Leaders to ditch fossil fuels, from Foley Square in New York City, US, on September 20, 2024. — Reuters file

As floods wash away roads and bridges, high temperatures buckle train rails and wildfires wipe out neighbourhoods, the direct costs of climate change are increasingly being borne by local governments and residents.

Now the US Supreme Court has given a tacit green light to legal efforts allowing local officials, often using public nuisance or consumer protection laws, to seek funds for climate change-related losses and needed upgrades from major oil and gas companies.

"The Supreme Court's decision creates a clear path forward for communities and states to seek climate justice through state courts," said Richard Wiles, president of the Centre for Climate Integrity, which has been supporting such local options.

"With Los Angeles burning and climate damages impacting communities across the country, we expect that more state and local governments will go to court."

Coming just days ahead of President Donald Trump's return to the White House, the January 13 decision offers an additional avenue for local climate action at a time when federal focus on the issue is quickly changing course.

Among Trump's first actions was to declare an “energy emergency” that could allow for sidestepping certain environmental regulations and speeding up approvals for oil and gas production.

The court decision came in response to a lawsuit by officials in Honolulu, Hawaii, claiming oil companies have known about the climate impacts of their products for decades but concealed their dangers — which are now causing problems for local government such as flooding, erosion and water system concerns.

A lower court had already said the case could proceed, and the Supreme Court declined to halt that process, prompting disappointment from oil industry groups.

“This ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless lawsuits against companies providing affordable, reliable and cleaner energy is nothing more than a distraction from these important issues and waste of taxpayer resources,” Ryan Meyers, general counsel with the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said in an emailed comment.

“Ultimately, climate policy is an issue for Congress to debate, not the court system.”

Alongside Honolulu, lawsuits from 11 states and dozens of cities and counties have either sought damages to pay for adaptation efforts or claimed that oil industry firms have deceived the public about their products’ effects on climate change.

"Big oil companies have spent decades perpetuating a misinformation campaign about climate change, prioritising profits over people and knowingly endangering communities like Hoboken," Mayor Ravi Bhalla of Hoboken, New Jersey, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"As a result, our residents face the devastating consequences of increasingly severe storms, persistent flooding and rising costs to protect our city’s infrastructure."

Hoboken filed a “climate accountability” lawsuit in 2020, which last year was added to a similar state suit.

'Game changer'

The locally led accountability lawsuits have been made possible in part by scientific advances that backers say offer insight into whether a particular weather event was caused by climate change — and even the source of emissions that prompted such change.

Such “attribution” science “is a game changer for addressing climate change,” said Delta Merner, who leads the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a think tank.

Advances in the past five years can even help researchers understand how specific climate changes are affecting ecosystems, human health, crop yields and more, she said.

That has been a powerful tool for local communities, Merner said, with the new lawsuits seeking a precedent that could help transform how to address corporate responsibility for climate change.

“These cases highlight direct harms felt by local communities,” Merner said.

“We’re localising an approach that really translates to these global climate issues, and it helps us see the tangible costs of climate change on local communities.”

Still, the legal strategy remains complicated.

Days after the Supreme Court’s ruling, a state judge threw out a lawsuit from New York City claiming major oil companies had deceived residents on climate change. Last year a circuit judge in Maryland tossed a similar case from Baltimore.

“Lawsuits like this drive up energy costs for all Americans when most reasonable Americans understand there is an ongoing national power grid crisis,” said Mark Miller, a senior attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed a brief with the Supreme Court in the Honolulu case.

He and others say the issues at play are the prerogative of the federal government rather than local jurisdictions.

“The energy grid crisis, and whether local and state governments can make that crisis worse through lawsuits like this one or whether this is a policy-area reserved to the federal government ... certainly rises to the level of a question of national importance.”

‘Legal duty to protect’

To many local officials, the costs of climate change — financial and otherwise — are already high and only going to get worse.

In 2021, a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest caused hundreds of deaths in Oregon and Washington state, pushing officials in Multnomah County, which includes Portland, to declare a climate emergency.

“This heat dome event caused loss of life and injury, stretched county resources, and had a tremendous impact on productivity and infrastructure — basically, electrical wires melted,” said Roger Worthington, an attorney with Worthington & Caron.

Worthington is now spearheading a lawsuit on behalf of the county, naming oil firms, industry groups, consultancies and even a local gas utility as responsible for the heat event.

“Multnomah County has a legal authority and legal duty to protect its people and its property,” Worthington said.

The suit is seeking civil damages of $50 million, plus $1.5 billion in future damages, along with an estimated $50 billion to upgrade infrastructure and health care services.

Worthington said the county looks at the case as a matter of fairness.

“Is it fair for taxpayers to foot the bill for wildfire smoke, flood damage, extreme heat that takes lives, longstanding drought that’s affecting water supply? All of these impacts we’ve seen accelerating in the past decade, costing taxpayers billions of dollars.”



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