As climate-related lawsuits multiply, at least one major oil company had planned to take legal action decades ago.
This ExxonKnews article is here as a component of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
When Bucks County, Pennsylvania, filed a lawsuit last week against major oil and fuel corporations for climate damages, Commissioner Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia pointed to “unprecedented weather occasions here in Bucks County that have put citizens and first responders at risk, harming the public. “and personal property and put undue pressure on our infrastructure. The county says oil corporations’ “campaigns to lie and mislead the public about the harmful nature of their fossil fuel products” have delayed climate action for decades, depriving communities of valuable time to mitigate the climate mistakes they now face.
One such crisis occurred last year, when a storm in Bucks County triggered fatal flash floods that engulfed cars and killed seven people, in addition to two children. Scientists said the deluge and its aftermath — the county’s first “100-year flood” in recent years — are a harbinger of the intense and damaging storms that global warming is making more likely.
As the science linking climate change to more common and severe weather events becomes clearer, it becomes clear that members of the fossil fuel industry have coordinated to downplay this link, evidence that could be useful in lawsuits seeking accountability.
Bucks County is just one of a developing list of communities taking legal action against fossil fuel corporations in the wake of fatal extreme weather events. Multnomah County, Oregon, sued big oil, gas and coal companies after a heat dome in 2021 that killed nearly 70 people. On the 10th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, New Jersey’s attorney general sued Exxon, Chevron and other oil giants, generating billions of dollars in hurricane damage and deaths in the state. Unlike the big oil corporations, Puerto Rico’s municipalities are seeking to recoup the prices caused by Hurricane Maria.
In those cases, big fossil fuel companies deserve to help communities pay the prices for climate disaster adaptation and recovery, given the industry’s early studies of the harms caused by their products – and their subsequent denial. “We are already seeing human rights and the monetary consequences of climate change start to increase,” said Commissioner Ellis Marseglia. “If we go by the oil companies’ own data, the trend will continue. “
It’s a trend that the fossil fuel industry has been experiencing for decades in ways that are hard to understand. A framework of evidence recently published in ClimateFiles. com shows the extent to which oil corporations and their industry associations have tried to deny and downplay the dating between climate change and climate. and excessive weather.
Nicky Sundt, a meteorologist and former communications director for the U. S. Global Change Research Program under President George W. Bush said he had tried to speak publicly about the link between the sciences, but had been “blocked over and over again” by industry interests around the world. and outdoors at the White House, an experience he spoke about with The Guardian and PBS Frontline.
“By interfering with weather science’s communications with the public, [the fossil fuel industry] knew that the public was less likely to get agitated and do something about it,” Sundt said. “The result has been to slow down efforts to reduce our emissions and leave us even less prepared for the effects of climate change. The longer you wait, the harder it is to fix all those problems, and it’s a lot of time we needed.
In 1997, fossil fuel interests managed to convince U. S. officials to oppose U. S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, a foreign climate agreement that would have limited greenhouse fuel emissions decades ago.
A year later, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the largest oil and fuel industry agreement in the United States, presented a transparent plan to continue provoking opposition to the Kyoto Protocol while negotiations continued. According to a proposed internal strategy found recently launched in February 1998 and reviewed through ExxonKnews, the API would “develop and put in place a campaign-style ‘rapid response’ team. . . to respond to op-eds that make exaggerated claims about meteorological science. . . and media events organized through government officials and/or environmental organizations that seek to link extreme weather events to potential human effects on the global climate.
Long before this campaign began, as evidenced by internal industry memos and promotional materials, major oil companies knew the role the climate update would play in intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves, rainfall, and other extreme weather events.
A 1979 memo circulated to Exxon management, about a report through Steve Knisley of Exxon’s studies and engineering department, on how the expansion of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations should be predicted through 2010 and referred to the “ecological consequences of emerging CO2 levels. “They have been indexed in detail, adding emerging global temperatures, water scarcity in the southwestern United States, increased rainfall, and “severe storms. “
In a film produced by Shell in 1991, titled “Climate of Concern,” a narrator warns that “if the weather device were to succeed at such power levels, no country would emerge unscathed” and that “what is now considered weather may simply become a new normal.
Another film produced that year by BP, titled “This Earth: What Does the Climate Do?”The warmer the seas, the more water will evaporate, making storms and the havoc they wreak more frequent,” the narrator predicts. “Catastrophic floods can be commonplace, leaving casualties – countries like Bangladesh are helpless. “
But around the same time, the industry began to worry about how public understanding of these phenomena might become its core business. In a 1989 presentation through Duane LeVine, a senior Exxon executive, he worried that last year’s excessive heat and drought had “brought a lot of attention to potential disruptions and we’re starting to hear the inevitable call to action. It’s not clear what exactly is happening now. . . however, this critical occasion boosted the greenhouse effort and generated public fear about PEG [prospectively enhanced greenhouse effect]. ].
Under the guise of industry associations and front groups, through public relations campaigns and funded educational research, the industry developed a strategy to undermine the link between climate substitution and climate-related errors – and to discredit those who pursued this science to the end. public.
One of the key players was the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a foreign industry lobbying organization that was instrumental in early efforts to deny climate change and provoke opposition to policy measures to reduce emissions. In 1994, the GCC contracted the weather forecasting service. AccuWeather Inc. to produce a report downplaying the effect of global warming on extreme weather, which the GCC would cite in a brochure distributed at the U. N. meteorological conference the following year.
“There is no convincing observational evidence showing that hurricanes, tornadoes, and other excessive temperatures and precipitation are due to the recent slight increase in Earth’s surface temperature,” the report says.
Reacting to ExxonKnews’ requests for comment on the report, an AccuWeather spokesperson said that “AccuWeather and other major consulting meteorologists involved were committed to producing research based on the knowledge that was held at the time. There was much debate and uncertainty within the clinical network about the reasons and effects of global warming in this period, and a new generation of computer modeling studies was just beginning to emerge, which would create a significant shift in clinical judgment.
“As an organization rooted in science, AccuWeather’s view of global warming and excessive weather has evolved over the past three decades, as has that of many other clinical organizations,” they said, noting that knowledge now shows a “marked increase in billions. “dollars. ” dollar errors due to extreme weather events. Today, the spokesperson added, AccuWeather has signed the Global Science-Media Climate Action Pledge and committed to communicating to the public the effects of the weather update on extreme weather.
The GCC has also hired staff to promote its cause. Notes from an internal meeting held in July 1997 show that the GCC commissioned a study work from Robert E. Davis, a weather scientist at the University of Virginia, explicitly denies the link between weather and excessive weather. .
“A widely held belief is that global warming will produce a more excessive climate,” the published article reads. “While this thinking serves as practical material for sensationalist headlines linking what would have been general climate whims just a decade ago to a nearby climate apocalypse, it is not based on sound science. “
In 1999, in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, then-GCC spokesman Frank Maisano faxed a memo to “communicators interested in global weather issues. “”As millions of people flee Hurricane Floyd, many climate activists have once warned, despite the facts, that hurricanes and global warming are linked,” the memo said.
Reacting to questions about the memorandum and the GCC’s positions, Maïsano told ExxonKnews that “any unbiased examination of the debate on any link between weather and severe weather events has been the subject of vital debates among experts themselves, especially when it comes to hurricanes. »
“It is vital to note that, at that time, the GCC was basically focused on the economic impacts, sovereignty and effectiveness of any proposed policies to deal with climate change,” Maïsano said.
Maisano now runs a strategic communications firm for Bracewell LLP, whose independent law firm supplies facilities to oil and fuel companies, adding Eni (currently sued for climate deception in Italy) and Phillips 66 (which is sued in climate lawsuits in the U. S. ). aggregating these. filed through Bucks County and the state of New Jersey). Since 2005, the organization has also been advocating for renewable energy, Maïsano said.
The industry’s crusade has been underway for years. In 2006, shortly after Hurricane Katrina, the DCI Group (a lobbying contractor connected to Exxon) produced and sent VHS tapes of videos designed to resemble a national newscast to news stations. in the Gulf of México. La region tape featured Dr. William Gray, a hurricane scientist (now deceased) at Colorado State University and weather update denier, stating that for the past 20 years, scientists had not noticed “any significant change in the frequency and intensity of primary hurricanes around the world. . . This is how nature works infrequently (scientists have since concluded that global warming contributed to increased rainfall and the severity of the typhoon, Hurricane Katrina, which killed an estimated 2,000 people).
According to Sundt, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the communications department of the U. S. Department of Global Change Research showed up to host a consultation on the implications of climate change preparedness on the Gulf Coast. “We had a well-developed proposal and they just rejected it. [by the White House] without explanation,” he said.
Today, the steady development of attribution science – or studies investigating the role of climate updating in changing or intensifying extreme weather events – has put the brakes on the plans of big oil corporations. From express corporate emissions to climate-worsened disasters, opening up more opportunities for those corporations to be held liable for climate damages in court.
One such study, conducted by researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists and the University of California, Merced, found that about 40 percent of all burned forests in the western U. S. Emissions from the U. S. and Canada since 1986 may be linked to emissions from just 88 of the world’s largest forests. fossil forests. fuel and cement manufacturers. Those studies cited in the Multnomah County lawsuit filed last year oppose big oil and fuel companies for climate damage.
Delta Merner, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Climate Litigation and a co-author of the study, noted that many of the corporations fighting emissions that cause global warming have adapted their own fossil fuel infrastructure to account for emerging emissions from warm temperatures and storms that worsened decades ago.
“If you look at the oil industry’s reactions to their wisdom on climate change, we’ll see that they’ve been able to build more infrastructure to be resilient,” Merner said. “We would have a more resilient world, we wouldn’t be facing the climate replacement realities we’re seeing today without the lies the industry has been perpetuating for so long. “
At least one oil primary had planned legal action decades ago. In a 1998 planning scenario, Shell made a disturbing prediction: “In 2010, a series of severe storms caused significant damage on the East Coast of the United States. . . In the wake of the storms, a coalition of environmental NGOs is filing a class-action lawsuit against the U. S. government’s decision to prevent the storms. In the U. S. , fossil fuel corporations and fossil fuel corporations are ignoring what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: “Something has to be done. “
Shell ahead of its time. Between the frequency, severity and higher prices of excessive weather events, clinical advances linking them to polluters and the rise of legal theories, Merner said he expects more communities to register complaints. Even as he sees industry deception evolving in terms of content and sophistication, as corporations seek to shift the blame for emissions onto consumers to avoid liability, Merner believes that attribution studies are evolving faster.
“The fact that climate litigation has been aimed at addressing a new wave of misinformation coming from the fossil fuel industry is a testament to the strength of science and is now a key detail in the fight for climate justice,” he said.
This story has been updated to explain the difference between Bracewell LLP’s strategic communications practice and its legal practice.
Emily Sanders is a senior reporter for ExxonKnews.