California on Friday filed lawsuits against five of the world’s biggest oil companies, alleging they caused billions of dollars in damage and misled the public by downplaying climate risks from fossil fuels, the newspaper reported. New York Times. Representatives of the targeted entities did not immediately respond to requests for reaction from AFP.
This legal action follows numerous others initiated by American cities, counties and states against interests linked to fossil fuels because of their environmental impact, against a backdrop of accusations of leading disinformation campaigns for decades. The civil complaint was filed in San Francisco Superior Court against Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, which is headquartered in California. The American Petroleum Institute is also targeted, adds the New York Times. These companies and their associates have “intentionally minimized the risks posed by fossil fuels to the population, even though they were aware that their products could lead to significant global warming,” since the 1950s, the complaint points out. according to the New York Times.
“For more than fifty years, Big Oil (all the giants of the sector, editor’s note) lied to us, hiding the fact that they knew for a long time how dangerous the fossil fuels they produced were for our planet,” declared state Governor Gavin Newsom in a statement Friday. “California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable,” he adds, confirming the complaints.
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California is calling for the creation of a fund to deal with future damage caused by climate change in this state, victim of forest fires, floods and other extreme phenomena fueled by global warming. “Oil and gas company executives have known for decades that dependence on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they have deprived the public and policy makers of this information by actively promoting misinformation on the subject,” adds the complaint is 135 pages long, according to the newspaper. “Their deceptions have delayed the response to global warming,” with “a high cost to people, property and natural resources, which continues to weigh every day,” the text continues.
Since the wave of such complaints against oil and gas firms began about six years ago, the sector has sought to counter the attacks by gaming the procedure to avoid lawsuits. But that effort suffered a major setback last May when the U.S. Supreme Court in two cases declined to consider an appeal, allowing the complaints to proceed in court. The prosecutions are inspired by those successfully brought against the tobacco giants, or against the pharmaceutical industry in the case of the proliferation of opioids.