From Courthouse News
July 18, 2017July 18, 2017 Big Oil, California, Global warming, Greenhouse gas
LOS ANGELES (CN) — In a legal assault similar to the one that won multibillion-dollar awards from Big Tobacco, two Bay Area counties and a coastal city blamed Chevron, ExxonMobil and three dozen other oil, gas and coal companies for climate change and rising sea levels that threaten communities on the California coast.
In separate lawsuits in separate superior courts, San Mateo and Marin counties and the city of Imperial Beach claim the fuel companies created a public nuisance by hiding for nearly 50 years that fossil fuel production was heating and damaging the earth.
The first-of-their-kind lawsuits accuse the companies of knowingly carrying out a “coordinated, multi-front effort to conceal and deny … those threats” by discrediting scientific evidence about climate change and spreading doubt among the public and regulators.
The defendants — which include, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Citgo, Conoco Phillips and Peabody Energy (coal) — “promoted and profited from a massive increase” in the use of fossil fuels as that use “caused an enormous, foreseeable, and avoidable increase in global greenhouse gas pollution” that has led to “a wide range of dire climate-related effects, including global warming, rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, melting polar ice caps and glaciers, more extreme and volatile weather, and sea level rise,” the plaintiffs say.
None of the fuel companies was available for comment after business hours Monday and none had issued a statement in response to the lawsuits.
The three lawsuits, each just under 100 pages, are largely identical. They were all filed by the San Francisco law firm of Sher Edling, working with San Mateo County Counsel John Beiers, Marin County Counsel Victor M. Sher and Jennifer Love of McDougal, Love, Boehmer, Foley, Lyons & Canlas of La Mesa as city attorney of Ocean Beach. Imperial Beach’s lawsuit was filed in Contra Costa County Court. All the lawsuits were filed on behalf of the plaintiff entities and on behalf of the People of California.
The public nuisance claims are similar the lawsuits that states and cities brought in the 1990s against tobacco companies. But similar lawsuits have fared poorly against energy companies so far.
The Supreme Court blocked a lawsuit by nine states against six major energy company polluters in 2011, and the Ninth Circuit used different grounds in 2012 to toss a suit from a tiny Alaskan village against 22 energy companies.
Each new lawsuit provides about a dozen pages of scientific information, charts and tables showing that the use of fossil fuels exploded over the past 50 years, and tying the increase to rising pollution, temperatures and sea levels.
The municipalities say the 37 defendants “are directly responsible for 227.6 gigatons of CO2 emissions between 1965 and 2015, representing 20.3 percent of total emissions of that potent greenhouse gas during that period.” A gigaton is 1 billion tons.
“Accordingly, defendants are directly responsible for a substantial portion of committed sea level rise … because of the consumption of their fossil fuel products.”
Each lawsuit spends another 30 pages asserting that the defendants, particularly ExxonMobil, knew fossil fuels were warming the globe and raising the sea level as early as the 1960s, but tried to obscure the information to profit from it.
For instance, they say that ExxonMobil and Chevron developed taller, sturdier offshore drilling platforms and planned for structures that could withstand ice forces, “allowing for drilling in previously unreachable Arctic areas that would become seasonally accessible.”
ExxonMobil came under fire after investigative news reports made similar charges in 2015. After those revelations, officials in Massachusetts and New York subpoenaed the company for records related to the allegations.
What Exxon knew and when it knew is came up during Senate hearings to confirm former CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.
Marin, San Mateo and Ocean Beach say rising seas pose a significant threat to them because all are on the coast.
HT/Bob
If this was truly a serious matter in California, a lot of things would change. When I was in Anaheim, Rock & Brews was burning NG for decorative flames in front of the restaurant 24/7. Talk about a waste that can be corrected immediately (if this was a real crisis!). But seeing as this isn’t a REAL crisis, nothing is done about it in the state that claims to want to save the planet from fossil fuels. The hypocrisy will continue until all meaningful jobs are lost.
I was dealing with SCAQMD a few years ago, and their chief scientist said that they had to shut down all businesses in the basin to prevent NOx emissions. I was sorely tempted to tell him that he would not have a job if taxes were not available to pay him. But that probably was too deep a topic for him to understand.
I am so glad I left CA in the 1990’s before this insane mentality really took over. Now I can watch it from afar.
We’re here, just outnumbered…
I’m here….don’t launch the nukes at us just yet please. 🙂
we’ll tell you when we’ve evacuated so you can launch then 😉
Just target the coastal cities.! Those of us who live inland and in the foothills are all Rep., sane, working folks.
This is nothing more than a shakedown. Tobacco companies are doing just fine and have revenues in the $700 million range in the US. The states collect an equivalent amount in taxes on tobacco product ever since winning to tobacco lawsuit. Energy companies are a $ trillion market segment. Some US states have wanted to raise gas taxes to European levels for years but the pushback from voters is just too great. This lawsuit is nothing more than a vailed attempt to raise energy taxes indirectly through the cover of penalties on energy companies. There is no desire to put the energy companies out of business, just like there is little desire to put tobacco companies out of business. State and local government just want the revenue.
Life is fatal. How about suing the self-nominated representatives of the creator? /sarc
The Man Who Sued God
Not only have documentaries turned out comedies, but who’d thought vice versa?
Where to begin? Maybe we should start here, at the root claim:
“The public nuisance claims are similar the lawsuits that states and cities brought in the 1990s against tobacco companies.”
It’s important to note no empirical evidence was ever presented demonstrating, unequivocally, that tobacco was a public health risk. Barring the idea that tobacco may have been an unproven personal health risk, allegations of a public health risk in the form of “secondary smoke” was woefully absent proof of any kind.
But it moves even further. Much as the alleged “cause” of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has been laid at the feet of CO2, so was the rise in lung cancer laid at the feet of tobacco. Both were presented in the complete absence of any attribution study.
The purpose of an attribution study is to confirm cause; this is to say an attribution study accepts there is a correlation between, for example, smoking and lung cancer, but it goes on to demonstrate cause; it shows smoking causes cancer, not just that a rise in smoking is mathematically related to a rise in cancers. It demonstrates cause.
At the same time lung cancer rates were rising, above ground nuclear testing was also rising. Inhalation of radioactive plutonium is well known to cause cancers in humans. Oddly enough, as above ground nuclear testing stopped, the rates of lung cancers also declined.
Correlation, or simple coincidence?
The tobacco win was based on civil RICO after a showing that the tobacco cmanies had,imdeed conspired to hide the negative affects of smoking. This suit is on a very different premise, and will fail for three reasons. 1. The complaint predicts 17.4feet of SLR by 2100. Clearly wrongly modeled and such model damgages in the future are not subject financial penalties in the present. Injunctive relief might be possible, except. 2. Big Oil is not responsible for China /India coal. Wrong defendants. 3. San Fransisco Bay sea level isn’t rising much.
What these nutters wiil do, however, is provide another courtroom platform for exposing the shlocky climate science.
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All this indicates is that they foresaw a potential for expanding into previously unavailable regions, not that they caused the change.
This would be like blaming an individual because he brought an umbrella to the picnic and thereby caused the rain.
hey, lawyers want to suck up to the climate gravy trough too….
Skipped insertion of the initial quote:
For instance, they say that ExxonMobil and Chevron developed taller, sturdier offshore drilling platforms and planned for structures that could withstand ice forces, “allowing for drilling in previously unreachable Arctic areas that would become seasonally accessible.”
With global warming, wouldn’t that make the sturdier structures redundant?
there is precedent.
see what judge Learned Hand (not joking) had to say about Alcoa purchasing bauxite mines to ensure their supply.
so they were busted hard. it was so unfair to plan ahead. it put those who didn’t at a serious disadvantage.
There are greater similarities between the climate alarmists and the tobacco industry than it is between The Oil industry and the tobacco industry. To my surprise, the actions by United Nations fitted quite well the actions of the Tobacco industry (Warning – this is a piece of fiction):
Here are the Final findings of the court in the racketeering lawsuit against the major cigarette manufacturers: The U.S. Government’s racketeering case against Big Tobacco
This is my edited version adapted to United Nations climate alarmism:
Based on the evidence presented in a hypothetical case against United Nations, the court may rule that:
– United Nations knew for fifty years or more that CO2 is primarily a plant fertilizer, but repeatedly stated that CO2 caused adverse climate change. United Nations publicly distorted and maximized the hazards of CO2 for decades.
– United Nations concealed and suppressed research data and other evidence showing CO2 has little effect on climate, and withheld information from the public and governments.
– United Nations acted this way to maintain revenue by keeping people alarmed and attracting new supporters, to avoid liability, and prevent reformation of the United Nations.
– United Nations falsely denied that they can and do control the information intended to create and sustain climate change alarmism.
– United Nations falsely marketed and promoted CO2 emission as harmful, to keep governments alarmed to sustain and increase the revenue to United Nations for administration of the climate funds and arbitrary projects financed by these funds.
– From the 1980s to the present, United Nations, using different methods, have intentionally marketed CO2 as harmful to young people under the age of 21 in order to recruit “replacement alarmists” who would ensure the future economic viability of the United Nations.
– United Nations publicly denied, while internally acknowledging, that energy poverty is hazardous to the poor.
– At various times, United Nations attempted to, and did suppress and conceal scientific research relevant to their public.
What a waste of public resources.
Indeed. Local residents in these counties/city should sue the respective authorities for abusing public funds.
Worth remembering that when it came to tobacco the law firms made very big money indeed. So big that those involved never had to work again and could live in serious luxury. So if these guy think they can get a similar pay day they will not give up easily.
Plaintiffs conjecture that the defendants know/knew, 1960’s, that harm would be likely … CONJECTURE. Plaintiffs need to prove their conjecture.
Plaintiffs & State of California, KNOW and have known (for the last 20 years), that harm (as associated with subject product) is imminent; and yet they continued to profit off the product, and encourage the use of the product. The State, Counties, & Cities make a lot of money through taxes and permit licensing for cars, oil wells, sales taxes, etc..
Plaintiffs and the State of California are putting together the basis of a good future nuisance lawsuit against themselves … it is a lot easier to prove negligence & malfeasance when one party stands up and admits that they are absolutely sure that there was a problem, yet they continued to ignore it for the sake of profit for the last 20 years.
This will be an interesting trial if it gets to court, because California has already de facto adopted a sea level rise that would jeopardize the state’s own argument. The adopted sea level is 0.9 ft by 100 years from 1987, or very roughly a foot by 2100. See my response to WUWT “Recent Sea Level Changes at Major Cities at
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/03/29/recent-sea-level-change-at-major-cities/
Are there any arguments in the state’s favor? Two, if you accept cognitive dissonance.
1. Sea level rise will be lumpy. Locations a few hundred feet from each other will experience sea level rises several feet different.
2. The difference between measured sea level rise and prophesied sea level rise is “Latent Sea Level Rise.” Latent sea level rise is stored somewhere, perhaps the abyssal ocean, along with the missing heat. The coastal zone will be regulated based on prophecy, not reality.
My WUWT comment is reproduced below:
Neil Jordan March 29, 2017 at 2:18 pm
The plethora of numbers, predictions, projections, and whatnot are just that. Someone,
somewhere, will need to actually build something. Someone will need to make an
engineering decision to roll up his sleeve and scoop some numbers out of the stinking
quagmire of marginal statistics and use them to build something.
That happened in 2000, for a project that needed to consider future sea level rise.
The envelope, please.
(Opens envelope with great drama)
The winner is 0.9 ft by 2087.
Documentation is here:
Final EIR/EIS for the Bolsa Chica Lowlands Restoration Project
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4670333
http://www.worldcat.org/title/final-eireis-for-the-bolsa-chica-lowlands-restoration-project
/oclc/46913652
Appendix B – Preliminary Engineering Studies Section B.3.1.4 Hydraulic Control
“The National Council Marine Board (NMCB) has provided sea level rise predictions
over the next hundred years as summarized in Table B-4. For the 100-year interval, 0.9
feet would be added to the tailwater elevation. . .”
TABLE B-4 RECOMMENDED FUTURE SEA LEVEL
RISE VERSUS TIME INTERVAL
Interval (Years) Sea Level Rise (feet)
5 –
25 0.2
50 0.5
100 0.9
Source: NMCB, 1987
The should send CA a bill for the increased ag yields.
Tab N
Your point is acknowledged. The social benefits or carbon would have to be considered as well. If there are negative consequences from the combustion of ‘fossil fuels’ then the benefits were also known, to the individual consumers as well.
The basic claim is that ‘they knew there would be climate harm and suppressed it’. It is not illegal to suppress such ‘information’, more properly called speculations, as there was no assessment at the time about what the ‘warming’ might be.
What penalty was applied to the global collusion to make light bulbs burn out in less than one thousand hours, a scam which ran from 1925 to 1995 involving every major manufacturer in the world?
What penalty was applied to the global collusion to make lead acid batteries standard for all vehicular applications, suppressing (by buying and burying) patents for zinc-air batteries?
If those smoking guns yielded nothing, how about going after farmers? Farming causes a huge change in the net CO2 emissions of land (insects, forest clearing).
Judith Curry’s approach is more direct: prove the temperature rise 1920-1940 was not caused by human emissions and that the identical rise 1976-1996 was.
After all, the damage is not CO2 per se but the claimed temperature rise leading to increased sea level, right?
The chain is: CO2 leads to a temperature rise leads to sea level rise. The data available shows a correlation coefficient through that chain that is pathetically small. Something like 0.53*0.50.
If it goes to court, all 37 energy company’s should refuse to supply California with any products derived from fossil fuels…. until their names are cleared by the court.
Let them run on ‘green energy’ ( a week of blackouts should do it), no plastics, no fuel for transport, no oil for lubrication, no food, no pharmaceuticals,…..
A good test of the brave new ‘green’ world.
Hopefully the courts will award the oil companies court costs when this disaster is over.
Look at this story line, also from the Sacbee. It is a video of Brown giving a celebratory speech on the passage of renewal of cap and trade. …”Jerry Brown says climate change deal resulted from mystery, miracle and prayer.”, …http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article161905748.html
Well, at least Mr. Brown makes it very clear who we science realists’ enemy is.
Ephesians 6:12.
Thus, while the excellent research and writing of the science giants of WUWT (and elsewhere) are vital, our most effective weapon for truth will be: prayer. And not to the person Brown, et al. prayed to.
How do I know Brown was not praying to God? AGW is based on lies. Not mere honest mistakes, but carefully constructed lies. (See, e.g., Climategate 2009 documents) God does not lie. Thus, it is to the Father of Lies that Brown prays.
And why even dignify Brown’s hideous prayers with a comment on them?
Because the power he invokes is real.
Luke 4:5-7
Take heart, nevertheless! #(:))
I. John 4:4
God allows evil to triumph…. for a day…..
In the end: truth wins.
This may be a blessing in disguise by releasing evidence being hidden from the public.
Great point, MarkL. Thus, we know such lawsuits are merely done to harass and also to try to shore up the crumbling AGW sand castle (i.e., create the false impression in the public’s mind that AGW is truth and a noble cause to keep the wind and solar and Tesla/battery car and like sc@ms’ contrived market share regulations and the subsidies going). For discovery would be devastating to the AGWist’s. Their “science” would be seen for the junk it is.
If harassment is the motivation here, it is a fatal mistake. Mann may be able to harass individual scientists and writers with law suits, but no one can seriously believe that global companies will be bullied in this way. I’m hoping Big Oil goes for an early trial date, and destroys the man made global warming meme in court, where many GW scientists will have to be coached in how to answer truthfully, under oath.
Discovery will be very interesting. Bring it on!
A tobacco-type lawsuit? The only winners will be the lawyers.
Remember John Edwards?
Remember Jarndyce and Jarndyce, too. (And Charles Dickens based it on a real court case, with a similar ultimate result.)
During the previous interglacial period, the Eemian, temperatures were warmer than they are today with more ice cap melting and higher sea levels. Man’s burning of fossil fuels could not possible have caused climate change during the Eemian, more than 110,000 years ago. Mother nature was the culprit then and is still the one responsible for today’s climate change. Even more recently other warm periods during the Holocene have been warmer than the Modern Warm period and the burning of fossil fuels could not possilbe have been the cause. Rather then suing the oil companies, they should be suing Mother Nature. Lots of luck collecting a judgement against Mother Nature.
Based on the paleoclimate record and modeling results, one can coonclude that the climate change we have been experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and p[lenty of rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zerol If CO2 really effected climate then the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years should have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but that has not happened. The AGW conjecture is based on a radiant greenhose effect that has not been observed on Earth or anywhere else in the solar system. The radiant greenhouse effect and the AGW conjecture are hence science fiction.
If CO2 is really the problem then they should be suing those who have been actually adding it to the air, the consumer. It is the consumer that supplies the money that keeps the fossil fuel companies in business. It is the consumer that actually adds CO2 to the atmosphere by burning the fossil fuel that they bought from the fossil fuel suppliers. If CO2 is so bad then governent should make it illegal to add it to our atmosphere in any quantity but they have not done that. The fossil fuel companies by selling fossil fuel have not been breaking any laws here. Government further supports the sale and use of fossil fuels by taxing it. Beyond suing Mother Nature they should sue government and then the consumer. Anyone who breathes is guilty of adding CO2 to the atmosphere and should be named in the law suite,
The simple answer is to give California what it’s asking for. Zero fossil fuels or fossil fuelled energy for a trial month.
San Francisco CA sea level trend: No change since 1850
Redwood City Ca sea level trend (SF Bay) Spotty record, but no evident change since 1975.
Monterey CA sea level trend: (San Mateo coast) No change since 1975.
Where’s their case?
Pat Frank, thank you very much for providing us with three data points from California. Now, considering the fact that the Earth is 25,000 miles in circumference is it possible for you to give us maybe two of three data points that are not in California?
California is suing on behalf of China? Japan? Ireland? Iceland? Tuvalu?
California doesn’t have a case. What case would those have?
As Gunga Din pointed out, David, those points are in the regions from which the lawsuit was filed.
They’re filing for damages due to GHG-emissions-caused sea level rise. There is no such rise in evidence.
Where are the grounds for their case?
For the record, Monterey is in Monterey County, not San Mateo.
You’re right Bartleby. My oversight. Same coast, though. 🙂
Same old crap different coast. Much of San Francisco bay along the waterfront is built on landfill which is, of course, slowly compacting. It isn’t the water rising it’s the land sinking. And if these greenieloons would look at the liquefaction hazard maps for the San Francisco area (available on theUSGS website), they’d see that alleged climate change and sea level rise are not their real problem.
So a good part of SF is built on what’s essentially instant quicksand, just add enough earthquake to the right (wrong?) spots.
So – “two Bay Area counties and a coastal city blamed Chevron, ExxonMobil and three dozen other oil, gas and coal companies for climate change and rising sea levels that threaten communities on the California coast.blamed Chevron, ExxonMobil and three dozen other oil, gas and coal companies for climate change and rising sea levels that threaten communities on the California coast”
Does that mean that neighbouring states, who may provide California with power generated by fossil fuels, will now be re-considering their position in light of this legal action?
As a fully paid up ‘climate denier’ I am glad this case has been filed.
Why?
Because if in the unlikely event it succeeds, we will all know just how corrupt the US legislature has become. And with Trump as president that will be an excuse to change it.
If it fails, it will be because the ‘evidence’ simply doesn’t come up to legal standards, and that will send a huge message to everyone, that AGW is absolutely ‘not proven’