In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, big oil companies – including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Shell – are facing a climate change wrongful death lawsuit from the family of a Seattle woman.
The lawsuit, filed in King County Superior Court on May 28, alleges the oil companies knowingly fueled climate change and misled the public about the risks and consequences that the suit claims contributed to the record-high temperatures that blanketed western Washington in the final week of June 2021.
Julie Leon died of hyperthermia on June 28, 2021, Seattle’s hottest day on record, when temperatures soared to 108 degrees.
“On that day, Julie was overcome by heat while driving through Seattle with her windows rolled down. She managed to safely pull off the highway and onto a residential street before losing consciousness. Roughly two hours later, a good Samaritan discovered her, unresponsive and hot to the touch. First responders administered over a dozen rounds of CPR and other lifesaving measures but could not revive her,” the legal filing reads.
The lawsuit contends the extreme heat that killed Leon was directly linked to fossil fuel-driven alteration of the climate.
“Indeed, scientists have determined that an event as severe as the Heat Dome would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without anthropogenic warming,” according to the filing.
Cliff Mass, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, told The Center Square that the plaintiffs don’t have a chance with the lawsuit.
“Global warming only contributed a very small amount of the increase in temperature during that heatwave,” Mass said.
In a detailed July 5, 2021, blog, Mass said that the unusual spike in temperatures 30 to 40 degrees above normal during the final week of June that year was the result of a convergence of several factors that came together simultaneously.
Mass said climate change and warming of the planet only contributed about a 1- to 2-degree increase in extreme heat.
“The key factor in this and previous regional heatwaves is the development of an unusually strong and persistent area of high pressure over the Northwest,” Mass wrote.
Mass noted that if global warming produced extreme heatwaves in our region, “there would be a long-term trend towards more extreme high temperatures. A single event does not reflect climate, only a trend or changes in long-term average do.”
Plaintiffs argue that oil companies have known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels would eventually lead to catastrophic climate change.
“Defendants conspired to discredit the burgeoning scientific consensus on the existence and cause of climate change, deny their own knowledge of climate change-related threats, create doubt about the consequences of burning fossil fuels, and delay the transition to a lower-carbon future,” the lawsuit maintains. “Defendants publicly downplayed the risks of using their products and the severity of climate change.”
Donald Kochan is a professor of law and executive director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
He told The Center Square that none of the recently filed climate activist-inspired lawsuits have gone to trial.
“These lawsuits are not being filed for the purposes of ever getting to that stage,” Kochan said. “They’re being filed for public relations effect and for leverage and for ways in which they can try to demonize or shame productive industries.”
Kochan explained the critical decision defendants will have to make regarding the settlement of the case, assuming the King County judge allows proceedings to move toward trial.
“You need a corporation [that] has the guts to make that long-term assessment and is willing to sort of dredge it through to get the victory, which I think that they would get in this situation just because our causation standards really are high,” he noted.
Kochan was referencing the causation standard of proving that fossil fuel emissions alone led to the extreme heat, which directly caused the victim’s death.
“We can prove that but for your actions, this person would not be dead … and they can’t meet that here,” he said.
Kochan noted many large corporations will settle cases like this to avoid media attention, but in this case, he suggests it would be worth the time and larger cost to go to battle so as not to open the floodgates to similar litigation.
“The more sophisticated corporate manager would explain to their shareholders, we need to spend the money to defend this and also to defend the reputation of this company,” he said, conceding that dragging the case out toward trial also costs three to four years of potentially bad press for the defendants.
At a recent U.S. Senate Subcommittee hearing, David Arkush, director of the Public Citizen’s Climate Program, a climate litigation group that has championed similar lawsuits, admitted that he believes oil and gas companies should be prosecuted for murder over climate change.
A couple dozen states and dozens of local governments have taken big oil companies to court in an attempt to make them pay for the consequences of weather events they blame on climate change, but Leon’s case is believed to be the first that seeks to hold them accountable for the death of an individual.
The suit seeks unspecified financial damages.
