The plaintiffs were eight coastal
cities and counties. The defendants were Shell Oil, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and more than two dozen other energy companies. In April 2018, two Colorado juris-
dictions filed suit against ExxonMobil and Suncor (formerly Sun Oil). Those lawsuits allege that the two companies knew for years that their natural gas facilities and the gasoline it sold to filling stations were contributing to climate change. As if on cue, four months after the
two Colorado lawsuits, the city of Bal- timore and the state of Rhode Island filed nearly identical suits against two dozen energy companies, alleging their “wrongful conduct” would cause “flooding and storms [to] become more frequent.” In 2019, Massachusetts filed a
similar case. This was followed in 2020 by Delaware, Connecticut, Min- nesota, Washington, D.C., Charles- ton, South Carolina, Hoboken, New Jersey, and the Hawaiian cities of Honolulu and Maui. In 2021, Vermont, New York City, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel Coun- ty, Maryland, joined the parade. The rush was on. The Big Kahuna was always going
to be California; and on Sept. 15, 2023, five months after Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Rob Bonta attorney gen- eral, Bonta’s office did just that. A primary rationale for all this liti-
gation is that energy companies were allegedly saying one thing privately regarding the impact of greenhouse gases and another publicly. If the language of these lawsuits
sounds derivative, that’s because it is: The plaintiffs have made no secret that their public relations approach is cloned from the great tobacco litiga- tion of the 1990s. This would mean, if this litigation
succeeds, that nearly everyone in this country will pay significantly more at the gas pump and for electricity in what will essentially be a tax imposed by the judicial branch.
Democrat states and municipalities are systematically suing energy companies and demanding multibillion-dollar payouts.
AN OLD PLAYBOOK By the 1990s, with Bill Clinton and the trial lawyers lobby leading the attack, Big Tobacco had become an easy mark. In 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General’s report labeled cigarettes a grave health hazard, 42.6% of Ameri- cans were smokers. By the end of the 1990s, when the mass litigation was settled, that rate was cut in half (and it’s been halved again since then).
FOLLOW THE MONEY Private law firms are teaming up with public attorneys to go after energy companies for damages related to climate change. Their lawsuits are aiming for compensation for prob- lems like the damage caused by ris- ing sea levels and extreme weather, all linked to carbon emissions. They are demanding that indus-
try bear the costs of adapting to and mitigating climate change. Just like the tobacco lawsuits, the
climate change cases are chasing bil- lions of dollars, but the final num- bers are still up in the air since none of these cases have been settled or gone to trial yet. In the tobacco industry’s Master Settlement Agreement, companies agreed to pay $206 billion to states over 25 years, and it’s estimated that around $20 billion of that went to the law firms from the various tobacco lawsuits. If the climate lawsuits play out similarly, the private attorneys could be looking at contingency fees in the 15%-25% range, which means they could rake in untold billions.
PAYING THE PIPER This issue is headed for the U.S. Supreme Court and, depending on its ruling, probably Congress and the White House. Two public policy issues: The first
is that if these suits are successful, who really pays for it? The second is a question of governance. Are class- action suits by plaintiffs’ attorneys and local and state jurisdictions real- ly how the government should make public policy on one of the most far- reaching issues of the age? Today in Maryland, one of the
states suing Big Oil, a pack of cig- arettes costs more than $10. It’s a product that costs less than $1 to produce. But the state tax is $5, the federal
tax is a buck, and the lawsuit settle- ment adds additional costs, meaning that the tobacco companies’ profit margin is roughly 5%. Some anti-tobacco voices are can-
did that this is their goal in the energy lawsuits, too — to make it much less profitable to produce gasoline for our cars, natural gas for our stoves and other usages, and coal-fired electrical power plants.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClear Media Group. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
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