Charleston gets early win in climate change lawsuit vs. 'Big Oil' - Charleston Post Courier

Charleston gets early win in climate change lawsuit vs. 'Big Oil' | SC Climate and Environment News | postandcourier.com

A federal judge has given the city of Charleston an early win in its climate change lawsuit against "Big Oil" by ruling the case will stay in South Carolina, where the city wants the issue fought.

U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel agreed on July 5 that Charleston's bid seeking to make fossil fuel companies pay for climate damages could proceed in state court, where it was initially filed.

City officials welcomed the decision, which some legal experts say creates a more favorable stage in arguing that the multiple oil and gas companies which have operated in the U.S. for decades knew of the environmentally hazardous affects of their products.

"We agree wholeheartedly with him," said Chloe Field, a city spokeswoman. "It is time to move towards trial in the Court of Common Pleas where we filed this case nearly three years ago.”

In 2020, the city of Charleston filed the lawsuit against two dozen major oil and pipeline companies, alleging their products and the spread of misinformation about fossil fuels have caused climate change leading to repetitive and disastrous flooding in the city.

Nationwide, almost two dozen state and local governments are pursuing similar litigation against oil companies seeking climate-related damages. The only government in the South to file such a case is the city of Charleston.

To date, six federal appeals courts — including the Fourth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over South Carolina — and 15 federal district courts have ruled against the fossil fuel industry’s arguments as it sought federal jurisdictions. The result has kept these complaints in state courts.

The Post and Courier reached out to all of the named co-defendants in the lawsuit. The Phillips 66 Company, Marathon Petroleum Corporation and BP America all declined to comment, citing policies against discussing ongoing litigation.

The Chevron Corporation counsel Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. responded by email: “Climate change is an issue of global magnitude that requires a coordinated policy response, not a disjointed patchwork of lawsuits in state and local courts across multiple states."

This is the same response the lawyer gave to reporters in April when his client incurred a major setback when the U.S. Supreme Court turned away five appeals by Chevron and two other oil companies who pushed to move these kinds of lawsuits to federal court.

The local government plaintiffs involved with those appeals included the state of Rhode Island and municipalities or counties in California, Colorado, Hawaii and Maryland.

The Gergel ruling that remands Charleston's lawsuit from federal court back to state court is the first since the U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed the oil industry.

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said the significance of the Charleston ruling isn't just that South Carolina state court will be more favorable to local governments — which doesn't always hold true — but rather that state courts are a more appropriate legal venue given past lawsuits.

He sees these climate accountability filings as similar to those filed by state governments against big tobacco companies in the 1990s and, more recently, the lawsuits filed by state and local governments against opioid drug makers. In both instances, those filings remained in state court.

"Like the tobacco industry, the oil industry knew their products would kill people and cause massive harm," Wiles said. "Just like tobacco, they lied about it … with the explicit goal of confusion."

There is evidence that South Carolinians support this kind of legal action. In a poll of 954 registered South Carolina voters in the fall of 2022, the environmental group Climate Nexus found that 87 percent of voters said they would approve of their city or town "suing oil companies to hold them accountable for misleading the public about the impacts their products had on the climate and to recover the costs associated with climate adaptation and resilience."

Some 76 percent of self-identified Republicans said they would approve.

The poll was conducted by Climate Nexus, which provides independent market research. It was paid for by the Center for Climate Integrity, Wiles' green group that has provided advising to some of the first states, like New Jersey and Massachusetts, that sought climate-related damages from big oil companies.

The city of Charleston filed its lawsuit much later than these states and has had no interaction with the center. At the time the case was filed in September 2020, Mayor John Tecklenburg said the city has estimated the cost of keeping up with rising sea levels at $2 billion.

The Center of Climate Integrity has become a target of so-called "Big Oil" for their efforts in early organizing and advising in these lawsuits. Their name pops up often on websites, like InDepth Energy, that appear to be traditional news site but are sites managed and paid for by the the oil industry.

"These meritless lawsuits brought by local governments in state courts will do nothing to advance global climate solutions, nothing to reduce emissions, and nothing to address climate-related impacts,” wrote Boutrous, the Chevron lawyer.

Charleston's argument is that monies awarded from the lawsuit could have a huge impact in alleviating the city from flooding. Currently, the Army Corps of Engineers is considering building a $1.1 billion seawall to protect the city's lower peninsula. The Corps says the wall will reduce the risk of damage from storm surge by more than 10 times its price tag.

More than half of buildings on the peninsula, where the population is expected to double to nearly 70,000 people in the next 50 years, are within the 100-year flood plain. The projected yearly damages from coastal storms in Charleston is expected to reach as much as $773 million in the next half-century, according to the Corps.

The July 5 ruling came right in the middle of the world's hottest week in record-keeping history, a phenomena scientists attribute to a changing climate driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.