Oil and gas companies have been riding high in recent months.
President Trump has made expanding the production of fossil fuels a pillar of his domestic agenda. His administration is working to roll back regulations that target energy producers and fast-track the granting of permits for new pipelines and export terminals, while the renewable energy industry faces serious setbacks.
But in courtrooms around the country, oil and gas companies are confronting a bevy of new challenges.
Today I published an article on what experts say is the first wrongful death lawsuit to be brought against oil and gas companies over claims that they deceived the public about climate change and caused dangerous global warming.
The case concerns Juliana Leon, a 65-year-old woman who perished when a heat dome, which occurs when atmospheric conditions act like a lid on a pot, scorched the Pacific Northwest in 2021. With temperatures hitting 108 degrees Fahrenheit, she pulled over while driving home from a doctor’s appointment and rolled down the windows. Some time later, she perished from hyperthermia, or overheating.
Her daughter, Misti, told me that while she had been aware of climate change before her mother’s death, the issue seemed almost academic. Now, a warming planet has shaped a tragedy that could define her life.
“I never would have in a million years guessed that a heat dome and climate change would be what killed my mother and what took her from me,” she said. “There’s no way to comprehend that and to kind of even rationalize it.”
New legal fronts
The wrongful death suit is just the latest to target a group of oil and gas companies that researchers say have produced a majority of the emissions that have dangerously warmed the planet.
Karen Zraick is currently in Charleston, S.C., where she is reporting on an unusual face-off between the city’s legal team and lawyers for oil and gas companies.
Charleston sued fossil fuel companies five years ago, seeking funds to protect the low-lying city from rising sea levels. As Zraick reported, the city had flooded nearly one out of every five days in 2019.
The argument in the Charleston case is much the same as the one in Ms. Leon’s case, and in dozens of others.
It lays out a well-established set of facts: that the oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products would dangerously alter the planet’s atmosphere, that they continued to produce those products despite knowing the risks, and that they worked to suppress public awareness of theses dangers.
“These companies have known for more than 50 years that their products were going to cause the worst flooding the world has seen since Noah built the Ark,” John Tecklenburg, the former mayor of Charleston said when he announced the lawsuit. “And instead of warning us, they covered up the truth and turned our flooding problems into their profits.”
Challenges and further lawsuits
None of these cases has made it to trial. And while many are moving forward, some, including cases in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland, have recently been dismissed by judges.
But even some of the groups that have lost major cases in recent years are undeterred, and are bringing still more legal challenges.
Take a nonprofit legal organization that we’ve written about over the years, Our Children’s Trust. The group has recently notched real wins in Hawaii and Montana. But in March, its long-running, landmark case against the federal government, Juliana v. United States, came to an end after the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.
On Thursday, however, Our Children’s Trust was back at it, as Zraick reported, assembling a group of young people to bring a suit in Montana alleging that a number of President Trump’s executive orders are unconstitutional and would cripple the clean energy industry, suppress climate science and worsen global warming.
“Trump’s fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation,” said Eva Lighthiser, 19, the named plaintiff. “I’m not suing because I want to. I’m suing because I have to. My health, my future, and my right to speak the truth are all on the line.”
3 things to know about the latest heat projections
Forecasters are warning of “dangerously hot” weather in the Western United States starting tomorrow, with temperatures projected to climb as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit in Las Vegas, 100 in Boise, Idaho, and 93 in Salt Lake City, Utah, over the weekend. All of those temperatures are close to or above the highest ever recorded in those locations on the date.
Hotter weather is here to stay, according to a report issued Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization. There is now a 70 percent chance that average global temperatures will measure 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels over the next five years, the report found.
In 2015, nearly all nations signed the Paris Agreement, with a goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the equivalent of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Staying below that threshold is now seen as virtually impossible. Global average temperatures exceeded the target for the first time last year, and greenhouse gas emissions also reached a fresh peak in 2024.
It’s already too late to stop the world’s glaciers from melting, Rebecca Dzombak reported today. Even if temperatures stopped rising immediately, glaciers outside of the ice sheets would lose about a third of their mass.
Researchers used eight different glacial models to analyze how more than 200,000 of the world’s glaciers would respond to 80 different climate scenarios, over thousands of years.
The good news? Every tenth of a degree counts, a researcher told Dzombak. Ramped-up efforts to combat climate change could still save a lot of ice.— Claire Brown
More climate news from around the web:
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The diplomat overseeing this year’s United Nations climate talks warns that some countries are in denial about the economic costs of a warming planet, according to The Guardian.
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After a village in Alaska was relocated because of climate change, The Washington Post reports that residents were left with no running water, intermittent electricity and other problems.
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David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series.
The post The Growing Legal Battle Over Climate Change appeared first on New York Times.
