The city’s lawsuit cites the industry’s concealing of science that predicted catastrophic consequences for the continued burning of fossil fuels.
Honolulu city officials, lashing out at the fossil fuel industry in a climate change lawsuit filed Monday, accused oil producers of concealing the dangers that greenhouse gas emissions from petroleum products would create, while reaping billions in profits.
The lawsuit, against eight oil companies, says climate change already is having damaging effects on the city’s coastline, and lays out a litany of catastrophic public nuisances—including sea level rise, heat waves, flooding and drought caused by the burning of fossil fuels—that are costing the city billions, and putting its residents and property at risk.
“We are seeing in real time coastal erosion and the consequences,” Josh Stanbro, chief resilience officer and executive director for the City and County of Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, told InsideClimate News. “It’s an existential threat for what the future looks like for islanders.”
The lawsuit puts it simply: The industry has known for decades that those impacts could be catastrophic, yet did nothing.
Fossil fuel companies have “promoted and profited from a massive increase in the extraction and consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas, which has in turn caused an enormous, foreseeable, and avoidable increase in global greenhouse gas pollution,” the suit states.
“Defendants had actual knowledge that their products were defective and dangerous and were and are causing and contributing to the nuisance complained of, and acted with conscious disregard for the probable dangerous consequences of their conduct’s and products’ foreseeable impact upon the rights of others, including the City and its residents,” according to the 119 page lawsuit filed in in the First Circuit Court of Hawaii.
The lawsuit seeks to hold fossil companies, including Exxon, Shell, Chevron and Phillips 66, accountable for the costs and damages caused by misleadingly promoting and selling products that their own scientists and experts warned could impose “severe” or even “catastrophic” consequences.
