As Congress negotiates the next COVID-19 relief package, 60 members of the U.S. House are calling on party leaders to “categorically oppose” any effort to exploit the pandemic in order to give the fossil fuel industry legal immunity or limited liability from lawsuits over climate change and other misdeeds.
The letter to House leadership comes in response to a massive push from industry lobbyists for blanket legal protections from lawsuits during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It explains that a draft of a previous COVID-19 relief package included immunity from lawsuits for fossil fuel companies, but the language was ultimately removed before passage.
The fossil fuel industry has shamelessly used the pandemic to gut hard-won environmental and health protections. We can expect that they will try again to kill lawsuits seeking to make them pay their fair share of the billions in climate damages that their decades of lying has inflicted on communities across the country.
Cities and states are being driven to financial ruin by the pandemic. Now more than ever, Congress must not give oil executives a get-out-of-jail free card for the massive damage they caused by lying about climate change for decades.