US drops US$51B lawsuit on Exxon, others for heat dome that killed 69 people

Jun 27, 2023 Court Stories, ExxonMobil, Features / Columnists, News, Oil & Gas

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“They have profited massively from their lies and left the rest of us to suffer the consequences and pay for the damages. We say enough is enough.”- County Chair

Kaieteur News – A county in the State of Oregon, in the United States of America (U.S.A), last week filed a lawsuit against several oil giants, including ExxonMobil Corporation for over US$51 billion for the damages caused by the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome which caused the death of 69 people.

In a statement last Thursday, the Multnomah County announced that it filed suit against several of the largest fossil fuel and coal-producing corporations, seeking to hold them accountable for the damages arising from the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Dome, one of the most deadly and destructive human-made weather disasters in American history.

The County alleges that the combined historical carbon pollution from the use of defendants’ fossil fuel products was a substantial factor in causing and exacerbating the heat dome, which smothered the County’s residents for several days. The suit, filed in Oregon Circuit Court in Multnomah County, names Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, Motiva, Occidental Petroleum, Anadarko Petroleum, Space Age Fuel, Valero Energy, Total Specialties USA, Marathon Petroleum, Peabody Energy, Koch Industries, American Petroleum Institute, Western States Petroleum Association, and McKinsey & Company.

In this effort to hold these fossil fuel companies and their misinformation agents accountable, the County is represented by three law firms as their outside counsel: Worthington & Caron, PC, Simon Greenstone Panatier, PC, and Thomas, Coon, Newton & Frost. Each firm specializes in large-scale catastrophic harm litigation.

“This lawsuit is about accountability and fairness, and I believe the people of Multnomah County deserve both. These businesses knew their products were unsafe and harmful, and they lied about it,” said County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson. “They have profited massively from their lies and left the rest of us to suffer the consequences and pay for the damages. We say enough is enough.”

Multnomah County is seeking US$50 million in actual damages, US$1.5 billion in future damages, and an estimated US$50 billion for an abatement fund to study, plan, and upgrade the public health care services and infrastructure that will be reasonably necessary to “weatherproof” the County from future extreme heat events and to safeguard the public health.

Beginning on June 25, 2021, the Plaintiff, Multnomah County, was scorched by the most extreme heat event in its history. Over the course of three consecutive days, County temperatures reached highs of 108°, 112° and 116° Fahrenheit. All three of these high temperatures, up to 40 degrees above the daily average for the region, exceed those of any other day in the County’s recorded history. The extreme heat caused the deaths of 69 people, property damage, and the significant expenditure of taxpayer monies and County resources.

In the aftermath of the superheating event, several of the world’s most experienced and respected climate scientists conducted research to determine the heat dome’s causes. They published their findings in studies that were unanimous in their conclusion; the deadly event was caused by fossil fuel emissions, which polluted the atmosphere. Further, that pollution caused dramatic rises in global temperature, drought and the drying of regional soil. When those pollution-caused conditions combined with a dense high-pressure system that hovered over the Pacific Northwest, they converted the region’s typically mild climate into functionally that of a convection oven.

The lawsuit asserts, “The heat dome that cost so much life and loss was not a natural weather event. It did not just happen because life can be cruel, nor can it be rationalized as simply a mystery of God’s will. Rather, the heat dome was a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Defendants’ decision to sell as many fossil fuel products over the last six decades as they could and to lie to the County, the public, and the scientific community about the catastrophic harm that pollution from those products into the Earth’s and the County’s atmosphere would cause.”

The lawsuit alleges that the Defendants committed negligence and fraud, and created a public nuisance, all of which are well-established causes of action under Oregon state tort law. As attorney Jeffrey Simon, a partner at Simon Greenstone Panatier, PC, and a law professor of mass tort litigation observed, “There are no new laws or novel theories being asserted here. We contend that the Defendants broke long-standing ones, and we will prove it to a jury.”

“What is new about this case,” said attorney Roger Worthington, a partner at Worthington & Caron, PC, “is how the leadership of Multnomah County is utilizing irrefutable climate science to hold corporate polluters accountable for their role in causing a discreet and disastrous event, as well as recent wildfires.”

He continued: “We will show that fossil fuel-induced global warming is already costing Oregonians lives and treasure. We will show that the normal use of fossil fuel products over time has imposed massive external, unpriced and untraded social, economic and environmental costs on the County. We will show that they were aware of this price, and instead of fully informing the public, they deceived us. And we will ask a jury to decide if it is fair to hold the polluters accountable for these avoidable and rising costs. We are confident that, once we show what the fossil fuel companies knew about global warming and when, and what they did to deny, delay and deceive the public, the jury will not let the fossil fuel companies get away with their reckless misconduct.”

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• damages, killed, lawsuit, Oregon, Pacific

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