News & Analysis
July 15, 2024
The City of Baltimore said last week that it will appeal a judge’s decision to dismiss the city’s lawsuit that seeks to hold 26 fossil fuel companies accountable for deceiving the public about climate damages caused by their products and to make them pay for the associated costs.
In a rare opinion siding with Big Oil in a climate accountability lawsuit, Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Videtta A. Brown ruled that Baltimore’s case is “entirely about addressing the injuries of global climate change” and therefore “goes beyond the limits of Maryland state law.” A lawyer for Baltimore said officials “respectfully disagree with this opinion and will be seeking review from a higher court.”
Brown’s decision is at odds with a growing number of rulings across the U.S. that have allowed similar climate accountability lawsuits in Colorado, Hawai`i, and Massachusetts, as well as two other cases in Maryland, to advance toward trial and discovery in state courts. A judge in Delaware also ruled that a limited version of that state’s lawsuit could proceed toward trial in state court.
In the other cases, judges have agreed that these climate accountability cases aim to hold oil and gas corporations accountable for deceptive practices, and their rulings have rejected Big Oil’s attempts to mischaracterize them as attempts to litigate climate policy and regulate pollution through the courts.
The Hawai`i Supreme Court, for example, ruled that a lawsuit brought by Honolulu “clearly seeks to challenge the promotion and sale of fossil-fuel products without warning and abetted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign” and that oil companies’ arguments claiming otherwise “fail.”
But in their ongoing quest to escape accountability, the Big Oil defendants are now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review and overturn Honolulu’s victory before the case reaches trial. Earlier this year, the justices asked the Biden administration for its views on the matter.
Robert Percival, a professor and director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, told Inside Climate News that he believed the judge that ruled against Baltimore got the issue wrong.
“These cases [a]re state law actions for consumer fraud because of the oil companies’ lying about the impact of their products and engaging in a disinformation campaign,” he said, adding that the companies’ “objective is to avoid a trial that would reveal what they really knew about their products causing climate change for decades.”
