The US state of Delaware announced Thursday that it is filing a lawsuit against several oil companies, holding that they are responsible for the climate crisis and its impacts on the citizens of this region of the east coast.
“Delaware citizens are already paying the price for the embezzlement of the largest companies in the fossil fuel industry,” state attorney general Kathy Jennings said Thursday. “Exxon, Chevron and other mega-companies knew very well the kind of sacrifices the world should make to maintain their profits and they have deceived the public for decades,” she added, noting that the The state wanted to make the oil companies pay “for the disorder they created”.
The lawsuit targets 31 companies in the fossil fuel sector, including Total, Shell, BP and Conocophillips. The court document filed Thursday refers to various state laws related to “negligence”, “public nuisance” and “fraud”. Delaware also directly accuses the oil companies of having contributed to the climate crisis, which particularly affects the coastal areas of this state located east of the city of Washington.
“Delaware and our residents are suffering from rising oceans, rising temperatures, intense rainfall and flooding due to climate change, and these are having negative impacts on public health, the environment and the economy.” , said the head of the State Department of Natural Resources and Environment Shawn Garvin.
The lawsuit also directly cites the impacts of climate change on the State, including the case of the 22,000 citizens “threatened” by coastal flooding, but also the more frequent episodes of extreme heat expected over the next few years. The agricultural sector is also directly threatened, according to the state government.
A known issue
This is not the first time that a lawsuit has been filed in the United States against oil companies. In 2018, New York City filed a lawsuit against five fossil fuel giants. The lawsuit directly targeted five of the major multinationals in the petroleum industry: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell.
Chevron then denounced an action “without a factual or legal basis”, which “will do nothing to answer the serious question of climate change”, while Shell stressed that global warming must be addressed “by reasonable government policies and cultural change. ”, Not“ by the courts ”. The New York lawsuit was ultimately dismissed in 2019.
An analysis published in 2017 by Environmental Research Letters confirmed that ExxonMobil had known since the 1980s that climate change was real and caused by human activities, but publicly maintained doubts about this reality.
As early as 1980, an Exxon official, Henry Shaw, insisted on the need to fight against any restrictions imposed on the oil companies. “We have every interest in launching a very ambitious defensive program. Because there is a good chance that legislation will be put in place, which will affect our activities, ”he wrote in an internal note cited in the book. Losing the Earth, by journalist Nathaniel Rich.
According to new data released this week by the international energy agency, fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) meet 81% of global energy demand. This rate has not declined for 40 years. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is imperative to make an unprecedented energy shift quickly, in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.
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