April 2021

Anne Arundel County, Maryland, filed a lawsuit seeking to hold major oil and gas companies — including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell — accountable for lying to the public about their products’ role in climate change and to recover costs associated with sea-level rise, flooding, and other local climate damages that the companies knew their products would cause. The lawsuit “seeks to ensure that the parties who have profited from externalizing the consequences and costs of dealing with global warming and its physical, environmental, social, and economic consequences bear the costs of those impacts on Anne Arundel County, rather than the County, taxpayers, residents, or broader segments of the public.”

Anne Arundel is the third municipality in Maryland — after the cities of Baltimore and Annapolis — to file such a lawsuit.

Anne Arundel is also the fifth community to name the American Petroleum Institute, the major oil and gas trade association, as a defendant in a climate liability lawsuit. According to the complaint, API, acting hand-in-hand with the fossil fuel defendants, “participated in and led several coalitions, front groups, and organizations” which were formed to provide “climate disinformation and advocacy from a misleadingly objective source, when, in fact, they were financed and controlled by the fossil fuel defendants.”