Survivors of “climate disaster” are calling on federal prosecutors to take fossil fuel companies to court.
More than 1,000 signatories on ThursdayletterDepartment of Justice employees have experienced wildfires, floods, and heat waves caused or exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels.
Big oil companies “have known the dangers of burning fossil fuels since the 1950s,” they write.
“Instead of following the warnings of their own scientists and acting responsibly, they waged a decades-long disinformation campaign to muddy the science and confuse and mislead the public.”
Scientists at fossil fuel companies like Exxon have predicted global warming with astonishing accuracy, but the industry has fought climate science for decades and is now challenging federal regulations and financial instruments that seek to slow it.
While the renewable energy industry is booming, the fossil fuel industry and the extraction of coal, oil and gas are expanding to record levels.
The letter, addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, comes amid a wave of nationwide pressure on the industry.
On the civil side, a flurry of “Climate Superfund” bills and lawsuits have been filed in seven states, 35 cities, and Washington, D.C., seeking to hold industry accountable for the costs of climate change.
In May, House and Senate Democrats commissioned the Justice Department to conduct their own investigations of the industry, with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calling on Garland to “investigate the big oil companies that have waged a decades-long disinformation campaign to mislead the American people.”
The federal government eventually sued the tobacco industry on similar grounds, former federal prosecutor Sharon Eubanks told Raskin’s committee in May.
Others argue that civil remedies alone aren’t enough. Public Citizen, which wrote the letter with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, is coordinating an effort by academics and local prosecutors to design a framework for prosecuting big oil companies for murder.
Former federal prosecutor Cindy Cho said the world’s largest privately held oil company could face second-degree murder charges over records showing it “misled the public about the dangers of its emissions.”WrittenIn the June white paper.
For example, Cho said, the heat wave that hit Maricopa County, Arizona, last summer “caused [people] That was more than all the murders the county had experienced that year.”
Recent studies suggest that the potential damage from this deception could be global: major pillars of the Earth’s climate are set to collapse as temperatures rise over the coming decades and centuries, and scientists estimate that climate change could cost the global economy $38 trillion per year by the middle of this century.
But the letter’s signatories argued that the disruption can be heartbreakingly small-scale: not just lives lost, but dreams and livelihoods lost.
Jenny Seybold, a mother of three, said her Vermont clothing store was destroyed by record flooding.Worsened by climate changeHe said the water had taken “everything.”
“I like to joke that I’m optimistically paying my bills,” she said, “while wealthy oil executives get to keep making a ton of money.”
Others were more scathing: “We are tired of persisting,” Roischetta Ozané, an activist with the Louisiana advocacy group The Vessel Project, said in a statement.
