It was the first of its kind in northwestern Oregon. Over the course of three days in June 2021, Multnomah County, the Emerald State’s most populous county along Oregon’s northern border, recorded highs of 108, 112 and 116 degrees.
The temperature is too hot The metal of the cable car melted. and The asphalt on the road is bent.. Because of Oregon’s typically mild summers, nearly half of the county’s homes lacked air conditioning. The average high temperature was 81 degrees. Sixty-nine people died from heatstroke, most at home.
when According to scientific research, The extreme temperatures were caused by a heat dome, which experts say is a result of climate change, but county officials didn’t dismiss it as just a random weather phenomenon. They began investigating the big fossil fuel companies that are responsible for the emissions that are driving the climate crisis, including Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Chevron. I sued them.
“This disaster was not an act of God, but the result of some of the world’s largest energy companies toying with God’s will to sell as much oil and gas as they could, thereby putting the lives of innocent and vulnerable people at risk,” said Jeffrey B. Simon, the county’s attorney.
Now, 11 months after the lawsuit was filed, Multnomah County is preparing to proceed with its case in Oregon state court. After a federal judge agreed in June Months of debate over where to hear the case.
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About 30 lawsuits have been filed by states, counties and cities seeking damages from oil and gas companies for climate change-related harm. Legal experts say the Oregon case is one of the first to focus on the public health costs associated with high temperatures during a specific occurrence of the “heat dome effect.” Most of the other lawsuits seek damages for more general climate-related impacts, such as rising sea levels, increased precipitation, more severe weather events and flooding.
Pat ParentoHe, a law professor emeritus at the University of Vermont Law School, said a closer look at heat and the heat dome effect could make the Multnomah case easier to prove.
“In terms of the extreme heat event that affected Portland, scientists looked at that event and looked at the historical record of heat waves in the Pacific Northwest and concluded that without human-caused climate change, this would not have happened,” Parenteau said.
“This is actually the first time I’ve seen climate scientists draw conclusions in such absolute terms,” he added.
Corey Silverman-RoartyThe case is unique because it focuses on a specific event, he said, a fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change. “Most of these other lawsuits are claiming long-term climate change impacts, like sea level rise happening over decades,” Silverman-Roati said. “Whereas the Multnomah lawsuit is about the 2021 heat dome disaster that they had to deal with.”
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The Multnomah County lawsuit alleges that Exxon, Shell, Chevron and others engaged in a range of improper conduct, including negligence, public hazards, fraud and deception.
The lawsuit claims: The companies knew the harm of fossil fuels, engaged in a “scheme to predatorily market and deceptively market fossil fuel products as harmless to the environment,” and knew that the carbon pollution their products were releasing into the atmosphere could potentially cause deadly extreme heat events like the one that devastated Multnomah County.
“We know that climate-related weather events like the 2021 Heat Dome have devastating impacts on Multnomah County residents and have real financial costs for our local government,” Multnomah County Executive Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement. “The court’s decision to hear this case in state court validates our argument that this case should be resolved here. This is an important win for this community.”
A spokeswoman for ExxonMobil declined to comment on the case, and representatives for Shell and Chevron did not respond to requests for comment.
Fossil fuel companies typically argue that existing environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, already regulate air quality, so they are not permitted to take legal action under state law, Silverman-Roarty noted.
County officials, including Portland (Oregon’s largest city, with a population of about 640,000), say in the lawsuit that dealing with the impacts of the 2021 Heat Dome will ultimately cost more than $1.5 billion.
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“This is like any other public health crisis or mass destruction of property caused by corporate wrongdoing,” Simon said, as a partner at the law firm. Simon Greenstone Panathier. “We claim that these companies burned fossil fuels and polluted the atmosphere with carbon. They predicted that this would cause severe environmental damage. Some of them are claiming that they deliberately misled the public.”
The lawsuit cites some internal correspondence from companies that Multnomah County officials say the industry was aware of. Going back to 1965 That pollution could have “catastrophic consequences.”
“No one in Multnomah County’s leadership could have imagined that we would see 124 degrees in Portland,” Simon said. “But we allege that the defendants foresaw that there would be a dramatic change that would involve that type of harm and failed to tell the truth about it.”
Legal experts said the lawsuit’s arguments build on traditional tort law that has been cited in other cases alleging public health violations, but it’s unclear whether that approach would be effective in climate change litigation.
Chris WorldHe, an environmental law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, said technological advances in weather modeling could help the county’s case. green gas “Specific influences in specific areas”
“In the past, it was very common for people to say, ‘We can’t link this hurricane or this heat wave to greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,’” Wold said. “We’re increasingly able to say that. Climate models are now good enough to say, ‘We should expect to see this increase in heat or this change in precipitation in this region.’ And I think that will allow a plaintiff to successfully argue that a particular company’s emissions are causing a particular impact.”
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Silverman-Roarty of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change also noted that improved modeling was a key factor in this case.
“The scientists can say, ‘This heat dome would not have occurred without climate change,’” Silverman-Roati said. “And this county can go to court and say, ‘Look, we have to pay for all the damages caused by this heat dome. And the companies that marketed the product that caused this problem and said this product was going to be fine, they have to pay a portion of everything that we have to pay in response to this heat dome.’”
Parento, of the University of Vermont Law School, said modeling linking the June 2021 heat dome effect to climate change would be difficult to refute in court.
“They would have no problem presenting that evidence to a jury and being instructed by the judge to find them liable if the jury agrees with that evidence,” he said.
“When the average American thinks about climate change, they probably think about things like storms and floods and sea level rise. But they probably don’t think about the fact that it’s killing people,” Parenteau said. Cases like Multnomah County “clearly demonstrate that connection, because it is real, and it’s killing people. And it’s not just the heat that’s killing people.”
Jeff GoodellThe author of the New York Times bestseller “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet” said he was uncertain how the recent Supreme Court ruling would affect pending litigation. It imposed limits on the regulatory authority of federal agencies.But Goodell said the trend of communities demanding compensation from the fossil fuel industry shows no signs of abating.
“The question of what accountability looks like and how it plays out is one of the most interesting questions in the climate world right now,” Goodell said. “And I think that demand for accountability is going to grow. And, you know, we’re at the beginning of a kind of epic fight.”
He added: “I don’t know what it will look like in the next few years, but I know it’s not going to be solved any time soon. And I know it’s going to get bigger, louder and more urgent.”
