Delaware’s lawsuit seeking to hold accountable 31 oil and gas companies — including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell — for lying about their products’ role in climate change should proceed in state court, where it was originally filed, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
U.S. District Judge Leonard P. Stark is now the tenth federal judge across the country to reject the Big Oil companies’ arguments that the growing number of climate accountability lawsuits filed against them in state court should instead be heard in federal court, where the industry hopes it will be easier to escape accountability.
Citing the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign to deceive the public about the climate damages they knew their products would cause, Delaware’s lawsuit seeks to make the companies pay their fair share of the rising costs to address those damages — including supercharged storms, heat waves, and sea-level rise — that are becoming worse and more expensive for the nation’s lowest lying state.
"This is not about stopping climate change," Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings explained when she filed the case in September 2020. "This is about Delaware surviving it."
Across the country, Big Oil lawyers have tried and repeatedly failed to push similar climate accountability cases out of state court. In one ruling against the industry last year, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii pointed out that fossil fuel companies have “a batting average of .000” in such arguments.
But in their endless quest to delay justice, fossil fuel companies have already asked Judge Stark to pause his decision in Delaware while industry lawyers file an appeal.
With similar arguments and decisions pending across the country, 2022 is likely to be the year that decides whether the more than two dozen communities that have turned to the courts to hold Big Oil accountable will finally get to proceed to trial in state court.