![](images/Logos/Grist.jpg)
The laws that took down mobsters are
being turned against Big Oil
Cities in New Jersey and Puerto
Rico claim oil companies are behind a conspiracy to deceive the
public.
By Kate Yoder
May
19, 2023
![](images/images_05_24_2023/pic7.jpg)
Kena Betancur / VIEWpress / Corbis via
Getty Images
The flood-prone city of Hoboken, New Jersey, sued
Exxon, Chevron, and other oil companies three years ago, hoping to put
them on trial for deceiving the public. Like other lawsuits set in
motion by “Exxon Knew” investigations, Hoboken made the case that they
breached state consumer protection laws by hiding the risks of burning
fossil fuels.
But the lawsuit recently took a novel twist. Hoboken’s lawyers amended
the complaint in late April, alleging that Big Oil had violated the
state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as
RICO, as first reported by the accountability site ExxonKnews. New
Jersey’s statute is modeled after a federal RICO law passed in 1970
designed to take down organized crime. These racketeering lawsuits
aren’t just for the Mafia anymore; they’ve also been successful
against tobacco companies, such as Philip Morris, and pharmaceutical
executives tied to the opioid epidemic.
It could be the start of a new wave of climate lawsuits, said Korey
Silverman-Roati, a fellow at Columbia Law School. Thirty-three states
and two U.S. territories have RICO laws, and judgments in these cases
can award plaintiffs triple the damages. The use of RICO is another
sign that cities and states are trying to learn from “the successes
and failures of the tobacco litigation movement and the opioid
litigation movement,” Silverman-Roati said.
It’s already proving to be a big year for climate
court cases. Last month, the Supreme Court rejected petitions from
Chevron, Shell, BP, and other companies in many cases filed by cities
and states, unleashing lawsuits to proceed in state courts that had
been stuck in limbo for years. This week, the court also allowed
Hoboken’s case to move forward, potentially toward a jury trial. The
city aims to make the oil giants pay hundreds of millions of dollars
for updating local infrastructure to withstand stronger storms, rising
seas, and other effects of climate change.
Hoboken’s lawsuit is the second to argue that Big Oil colluded in a
“fraudulent scheme” to conceal how their products contribute to
climate change. In November, cities across Puerto Rico accused
Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies of
violating the federal RICO law. The towns seek to make companies pay
billions of dollars for the extensive damages suffered during
hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017.
Both lawsuits argue that evidence of a conspiracy traces back to 1989,
just as governments around the world started talking about reining in
global warming. That year, ExxonMobil, Shell, and the industry’s
largest trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, helped form a
group to block climate action audaciously named the Global Climate
Coalition. Even though these companies had privately understood the
risks of climate change for decades, they developed a robust public
relations campaign that cast doubt on the science. The corporate
coalition lobbied politicians, reviewed international climate science
reports, and gave the industry a voice in global climate negotiations.
The latest lawsuits also point to the American Petroleum Institute’s
creation of a front group called “Global Climate Science
Communications Team” in 1998, mirroring the tobacco industry’s efforts
to discredit the science that linked cigarette smoke to cancer. (The
oil industry’s “science” team did not include a single scientist.) It
had the stated goal of getting a majority of Americans to recognize
“that significant uncertainties exist in climate science,” declaring
that “victory will be achieved” when uncertainty became part of the
“conventional wisdom.”
“They’ve made it easy to prove,” Melissa Sims, an attorney at Milberg,
the Tennessee-based law firm representing the Puerto Rican cities,
told Grist earlier this year, “because unlike all the other
racketeering cases that have been on file, none of them included a
written battle plan with a detailed division of labor on how they were
going to accomplish their deception.”
In response, oil companies say that courtrooms aren’t the right place
to address the big question of climate change. After Puerto Rico’s
suit was filed, a lawyer for Chevron told Reuters said it was “a
baseless distraction from the serious challenge of global climate
change, not an attempt to find an effective solution.” An Exxon
spokesperson said that these kinds of cases “waste millions of dollars
of taxpayer money.”
Hoboken, on the other hand, says that the campaign of deception that
started 40 years ago never stopped. Today, advertisements showcasing
oil companies’ clean energy ventures “dupe consumers into believing
that they are committed to addressing climate change,” the city’s
complaint says.
Both RICO lawsuits highlight “this decades-long pattern of fossil fuel
companies knowing that their products are harmful, deceptively
marketing them to the public as safe, and then public communities
being on the hook for huge sums to pay for those harms,” Silverman-Roati
said. “It’s really a way of underlining that pattern aspect of the
behavior, the conspiratorial aspect of the behavior, and tying that to
criminal violations like fraud.”
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
exactrix@exactrix.com
|