September 2020

The City of Charleston, South Carolina, filed a state lawsuit against 24 fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, Shell, Chevron, and BP, to hold them accountable for lying about climate change harms they knew their products would cause. 

The Charleston complaint alleges that, rather than warn the public of the climate damage caused by their products’ intended and foreseeable, the defendant fossil fuel companies chose to conceal the dangers, promote false and misleading information, undermine support for greenhouse gas regulation and engage in massive campaigns to promote the ever-increasing use of their products at ever-greater volumes.

Charleston is the first community in the American South to file a climate accountability lawsuit