We recently saw industry supporters put forward a new tactic to help them escape accountability: rig the system and block access to the courts so that it is more difficult, if not impossible, for local governments to file lawsuits to recover costs from the fossil fuel industry — or any big corporation that knowingly harms the public — in the first place.
The idea, concocted by an arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and pushed by state lawmakers, comes as more than a dozen municipalities have filed cases that seek compensation from the fossil fuel industry for climate harms that they knowingly caused, and thousands more have sued opioid manufacturers for creating an epidemic that has claimed thousands of lives. Those latter lawsuits have forced Big Pharma to start paying up majorly for the devastation their industry has caused: in one case alone, opioid companies paid two Ohio counties a $215 million settlement.
But under a new bill introduced by lawmakers in Kansas, all cities, counties, and school districts would be banned from hiring lawyers for such cases “on a contingent fee basis” without written permission from the state attorney general. And as it happens, Kansas’s current attorney general, Derek Schmidt, strongly supports the bill, in order to, in the words of his spokesperson, “end the current haphazard race to the courthouse on important public interest litigation of statewide or national concern.”
So where is this idea coming from? As it turns out, less than a year ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform — a group deeply aligned with big business interests — released a report recommending ways that state governments could cut off local governments’ access to the courts “by abolishing or circumscribing localities’ authority to bring suit.”
The report, Mitigating Municipal Litigation, presents a range of options for lawmakers hoping to quash municipal attempts to seek justice for damages from corporations related to climate change, opioids, and any other matter of public harm.
“Short of stripping localities of their power to sue,” reads one section, “a state could instead make it more difficult to bring suit, perhaps by requiring that the state AG approve the filing of any suit by a municipality or intervene on behalf of the state in any such suit.
Sound familiar?
As the Tampa Bay Times reports, one person who has “gone around the country on behalf of” the Institute for Legal Reform is former Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum. And wouldn’t you know it, McCollum has also written similar legislation aimed at blocking local lawsuits, one of which would take away the ability of cities and counties to sue on “matters of statewide concern.”
We hear the talking point again and again from the fossil fuel industry and its allies that local governments aren’t the right entities to bring these lawsuits, even though cities and counties are facing an estimated $400 billion dollars in costs for seawalls to combat rising seas, not to mention chronic floods, wildfires, and other climate damages that fossil fuel companies knowingly caused while lying to the public through a decades-long deception campaign.
The argument that communities grappling with these costs should have to get permission to seek justice from the courts is entirely aligned with the goals of big corporations who want to slow, or outright kill, any effort to make them pay their fair share of responding to or mitigating the harms their products cause — whether that is the $3.5 billion it will cost Jacksonville to build seawalls to combat rising seas or the $43 million Palm Beach County alone has spent to counter its opioid epidemic. Right now, taxpayers are entirely on the hook for those bills. These corporations want to keep it that way.
Of course, claiming that such issues are better addressed through statewide litigation, assumes (1) that state leaders will always have the guts to take on fossil fuel companies and other industries, and (2) if a state ultimately wins monetary damages through a lawsuit, local governments will receive some of that compensation. The truth is that such a case wouldn’t guarantee cities or counties a single penny in recovered costs.
Once again, the fossil fuel industry and their corporate-interest allies want to be able to wreak complete, life-altering havoc on communities, profit immensely, and face zero consequences. They know that courts are one of the only avenues the public has to hold them accountable, so they want to eliminate even the possibility of more lawsuits. They’ve seen how communities have exercised their right to use the courts to procure justice and compensation from Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. And now they are fighting at every opportunity because they know that as long as communities have access to the courts, one day soon Big Oil will also (and finally) be held accountable.