Newest climate lawsuit follows familiar playbook pushed by well-funded climate activist groups

A suburban Pennsylvania county filed a lawsuit against oil companies and an industry group, alleging that they are responsible for “increasingly severe, damaging and at times deadly weather events.”

“The defendants have known for decades, with startling precision, that their products would bring about climate change and destabilization,” the county said in a statement announcing the suit.

The suit, which was filed in the Bucks County state court, joins dozens of others that states and local governments have launched against the fossil fuel industry.

Fossil fuels provide approximately 82% of the world’s energy, as well as thousands of products. These suits are asking oil companies to pay billions of dollars, and should they prevail, those costs would be passed onto consumers. With the pervasiveness of fossil fuel-based products and energy, no one will escape the extra expenses.

Besides making everything more expensive, the lawsuits, some critics argue, will also undermine effective solutions to negative impacts of the industry.

Coordinated campaign

According to Energy in Depth, a publication of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the Center for Climate Integrity has been pursuing Pennsylvania officials to join in the nationwide climate lawsuit campaign.

The Center for Climate Integrity, which has taken in over $10 million in donations since 2018, according to the group’s tax filings, describes its mission as empowering “communities and elected officials with the knowledge and tools they need to hold oil and gas corporations accountable for decades of lying about climate change.”

The group partnered with the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council and Resilient Analytics to produce a report in July 2023 that estimated the costs to adapt and mitigate impacts of climate change in Pennsylvania. The report recommends taking legal action against oil companies to cover the costs it alleges are caused by oil and gas.

Resilient Analytics and CCI produced a similar report for Florida in 2019. The group told the Tampa Bay Times that it receives money from anti-fossil fuel groups, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, which is part of the foundations established by the Rockefeller family. The groups have billions in assets and fund numerous efforts to destroy the fossil fuel industry.

Neither the Center for Climate Integrity nor Bucks County responded to questions about how much CCI was involved in lobbying for the county’s legal action, but CCI celebrated the news of the lawsuit and referred to the Pennsylvania study it conducted with Resilient Analytics in support of the action.

Deep uncertainties

The Bucks County lawsuit, like all the others that CCI encourages governments to file, alleges that oil companies have known since the 1950s that “fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution that can have catastrophic consequences for the planet and its people.” The lawsuit goes on to claim that the companies hid this knowledge rather than warn consumers and the public about them.

Robert Rapier, an energy expert and editor in chief of Shale Magazine told Just The News that the claim has no merits. While oil companies were doing research — as all companies do into the risks their products pose — and some of that research was finding a potential risk from the impacts of emissions, Rapier said it’s not like such tentative research would have had a major influence on policy decades ago.

“I always ask these people, ‘when are people taking policy direction from ExxonMobil?’” Rapier said.

Climate research deals with an enormously complex system. As climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry explains in her book “Climate Uncertainty and Risk,” even after decades of research into the climate, the science is today full of, as Curry describes it, “deep uncertainties.”

The lawsuit claims that as long as 70 years ago oil companies understood climate change enough to react to it. The filings do not explain exactly how they should have responded.

“What were they supposed to do? Fold up shop and say, ‘Well, we’re not going to produce oil anymore,” Rapier said.

While groups like CCI portray oil companies as having research producing more clarity on climate change than mainstream climate scientists have, Rapier said the claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny

In a Forbes article in 2019, Rapier, who worked for the oil industry, explained that contrary to the picture of sinister liars withholding information from the public out of greed, not everyone in “big oil” was aware of the research, and there was a lot of debate over its findings.

In the 1970s, there was so much uncertainty surrounding trends in climate, there was a period in which temperatures were dropping and some scientists feared, and the media widely reported, that an ice age was approaching.

Commenting on a study published last year that purported to find that Exxon had models estimating future warning from carbon dioxide emissions, Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explained in a thread on X that these models included data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations consortium of the world’s leading climate scientists. This was public knowledge and hardly some secret, Pielke explains, that Exxon hid from everyone.

Rapier, in his Forbes piece, says, as is alleged, that Exxon did fund anti-climate change organizations. That’s not because, he wrote, Exxon was trying to hide anything. It’s that there’s generally a disbelief in climate change within the industry and the right side of the political spectrum where most of the industry’s employees alignments fall.

Low confidence

As with the other climate lawsuits winding their way through court systems across the country, the Bucks County suit alleges that the companies’ products that citizens of the county consume willingly every day produce “catastrophic impacts, including droughts, flooding, and severe weather events” that are costly for “states, cities, and counties such as Bucks County.”

As Pielke explains in a series of articles on his “The Honest Broker” Substack – as well as Curry in her book — the IPCC is far from conclusive in its research on the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions on extreme weather.

Here’s what the IPCC says about floods: “In summary there is low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale. In general, there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence because of a limited number of studies, differences in the results of these studies and large modelling uncertainties.”

The IPCC breaks down drought into different types, finding low to medium confidence of a human contribution to drought conditions. On hurricanes, which the IPCC refers to as tropical cyclones, the research shows: “There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) trends in TC [tropical cyclone] frequency- or intensity-based metrics.”

There are areas in which the IPCC does find trends and a signal of human contribution, and that includes heat waves, heavy precipitation, and wildfires, which the IPCC calls “fire weather.” The IPCC research, however, finds little in the way of trends of the kinds of extreme weather that climate suits allege is impacting infrastructure in ways that oil companies should pay for.

Pielke has done extensive research into the costs of disasters, which finds that, when properly controlled for changes in wealth over time, disaster costs as a share of GDP are trending down. Pielke cautions that these findings are not a measure of trends in extreme weather and only trends in economic impacts of natural disasters.

To the high court

With so many of these suits being tossed at oil companies and industry groups, a coalition of them filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court. Unlike previous cases before the high court, which dealt with jurisdictional questions, the latest request asks the Supreme Court to judge the merits of these cases.

The petition, which concerns a climate suit filed by Honolulu, Hawaii,  asks the court to decide if, “federal law precludes state-law claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate.”

Should the court side with the companies, it could help stymie these suits, which are driven by well-funded climate activist groups and flooding the nation’s court.

If not, as Donald Kochan, professor of law at George Mason University, argued in the Washington Times, a patchwork of lawsuits will “stretch the defendants’ resources so thin that they are forced to settle.”

Whatever those settlements cost, it will be the consumers who ultimately pay for them.