News & Analysis
February 16, 2021
A pair of climate damages lawsuits from two Hawaiʻi counties can proceed in state court, a federal district court ruled on Friday, handing Big Oil companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP their first major defeat of the year in the growing number of lawsuits that seek to make them pay for climate damages they knowingly caused.
Honolulu and Maui counties filed separate lawsuits last year that aim to hold more than a dozen fossil fuel companies accountable for their decades-long campaigns to deceive the public about the impact of their products. The two cases cite an array of expensive damages — from sea-level rise and heat waves to flooding and wildfires — that the islands are now facing as a result.
The Big Oil defendants, in a well-worn tactic they’ve used in nearly all similar cases, moved to remove the Honolulu and Maui lawsuits from state to federal court. That’s because the companies are doing everything in their power to avoid defending their history of climate deception in state court, even asking the U.S Supreme Court to help them avoid that fate.
But on Friday, U.S. Judge Derrick Watson became the latest judge to reject the industry’s arguments for federal jurisdiction and rule that climate damages lawsuits against Big Oil belong in state court. In his ruling, Watson said that Big Oil’s arguments “misconstrue” the claims made by Honolulu and Maui, which focus on “alleged concealment of the dangers of fossil fuels, rather than the acts of extracting, processing, and delivering those fuels.”
“We expect this to be the first of many victories for Maui County in this case,” Maui Mayor Michael Victorino said in response. “Big Oil companies will have to answer for what they did. We hope that our case will shine a light on the causes of climate change and how Big Oil concealed that information just to make an extra buck. They must pay for the damages they are causing to our islands.”
