California For the Win

Source: California For the Win  by Amy Westervelt

Amidst all of the outrageously bad news, a stream of good news from California has been piercing through the ol’ news feed. In the past week, California’s government passed climate disclosure requirements—a HUGE deal amidst all the anti-ESG tomfoolery, because even if the SEC walks back its climate disclosure requirements, California is requiring disclosure of Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions (that’s all of ’em!), and because of its size, that means a de facto nationwide standard; a contracting shift that enables large-scale offshore wind development in the state; and legislation mandating that oil companies (rather than taxpayers) pay to deal with abandoned and idle wells.

And then late on Friday, after hinting at it for A WHILE, the state joined the growing list of climate liability suits with a whopper, accusing the world’s five largest oil and gas companies (Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron), as well as the American Petroleum Institute and 100 as-yet-unnamed entities that include operatives, think tanks and front groups that contributed to the spread of disinformation about climate change, of a litany of offenses, including public nuisance, misleading advertising, misleading environmental marketing, failure to warn, negligent product liability…the gang is all here.

Not at all to downplay the states, cities and counties that moved earlier on this—cases in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Baltimore, Colorado, Puerto Rico and more all walked so that California could run, and none of those cases would have been possble without the first round of cases a decade or so (Kivalina, New Orleans, and AEP), not to mention all the journalism and attribution science that has continued to build up the evidence base for these cases over the past decade. What’s exciting about this case is that precisely because it is coming on the heels of those others, it’s taken the strengths of all of them—the fraud claims of Massachusetts AND the liability claims of Rhode Island, Hawaii, et all AND the collaborative enterprise of the Puerto Rico climate RICO—and rolled them all into a super-case. And then of course, California is massive: its the nation’s most populous state, the world’s fifth largest economy, and it faces every climate impact there is.

It’s also important to note that California’s case is being filed after the Supreme Court cleared the jurisdictional hurdle that’s kept these cases ping-ponging around the appellate circuit for the past five or so years when it opted not to hear oil companies’ appeals on this front in the Boulder case, and all but told the fossil fuel defendants not to bring them that argument again. That ruling got all 30-odd cases moving towards discovery—the period in civil cases when documents are subpoenaed and current and former staff are deposed—an exercise oil companies have been trying to avoid at all costs.