Our planet is hotter now than it has been in human history. Over the last 40 years, we have seen the largest increase in the surface temperature of Earth than in any other 40-year period. The hottest years in human history are the last 10. More Americans died in 2023 from heat-related illnesses than in any previous year. These aren’t coincidences. They happen because we continue to pollute our atmosphere with carbon dioxide by the burning of fossil fuels. That pollution traps heat in and pushes it downward upon all of us.
Carbon pollution from the burning of fossil fuels isn’t just “warming” our planet; it’s boiling it, like an egg in a stove pot.
In June 2021, Multnomah County, Oregon, was scorched by the most extreme heat event in its history. For several consecutive days and nights, a “heat dome,” sometimes called an “extreme heat event,” boiled the county. Over three consecutive days, county temperatures reached highs of 108°F, 112°F and 116°F. Inner city Portland reached temparatures of 124°F. Those high temperatures exceeded the highs of any day in any previous year in the county – ever. The average high temperature in this county in June is in the 70s.
Forty percent of the county’s residents had no cooling systems in their homes, in most instances because they never needed them. Sixty-nine people died of heat stroke, most of them inside their homes. It was so hot that the metal cables of cable cars literally melted.
This was not a natural weather event. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, several scientific studies were conducted, all of which reached the same conclusion: this heat dome was caused by fossil fuel pollution that superheated the planet’s surface, dried out the region’s soil, and intensified a high pressure system to turn this county into a convection oven.
In June 2023, my firm and our co-counsel filed suit on behalf of Multnomah County against several large energy companies and allied trade organizations. We contend that this catastrophe was not caused by an act of God, but rather by energy industry insiders playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people by selling as much oil, gas and coal as they could while lying about how much harm to American communities pollution from those products would likely cause.
We know from internal corporate documents that some of the oil companies we sued understood more than 50 years ago that carbon emissions from the fossil fuel products they sold were polluting the atmosphere at a high rate and would cause the Earth’s surface temperature to substantially rise.
We will prove that over 40 years ago, they correctly predicted, internally, that by the early 21st Century, the increase in global temperature from their polluting products would cause appreciable changes in regional weather and that no later than the year 2030, some of the weather changes would be catastrophic.
Yet, we allege, they deliberately misled the American public that the science on those matters was unclear, unproven, and that therefore no action should be taken to change course or prepare for extreme climate change.
Because of the heat dome, Multnomah County was forced to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to cover healthcare, social services and infrastructural damage repair.
We contend that fossil fuel producing companies and their co-conspirators in disinformation caused this devastation. We believe they must answer for it and be held financially accountable under traditional principles of Oregon tort law – negligence, fraud, trespass, and creation of public nuisance.
As I write this, there are approximately 30 climate accountability cases filed by governmental entities against companies in the fossil fuel industry in the United States. Ten of those cases were filed by states and the remainder were brought by political subdivisions like Multnomah County or by Native American tribes. None of those cases have reached a trial date nor resolved by settlement.
Defendants in these cases are hopeful that the U.S. Supreme Court will grant their petition for review of the City of Honolulu’s climate case, where the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the trial court correctly denied defendants’ motions to dismiss and ordered that the case may proceed in state court under state law. The Supreme Court is expected to rule upon defendants’ petition for certiori in the Honolulu case in Fall 2024.
