CCI joins scientific, military, and academic voices in support of Delaware’s fight for climate accountability

States and municipalities fighting to hold major oil and gas corporations accountable for climate damages and deception have won a string of major court victories in 2022, bringing lawsuits filed against fossil fuel majors in Colorado, Maryland, and California one important step closer to trial in state court. 

Three separate federal appeals courts — the Tenth, Fourth, and Ninth — unanimously rejected fossil fuel industry arguments for why the companies should not face trials in state court over their well-documented history of deceiving the public about their products’ leading role in costly climate damages. 

Now Delaware is asking the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to agree that the First State’s lawsuit against 31 major climate polluters — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP — should likewise proceed in state court, as a lower court ruled earlier this year. Delaware is the nation’s lowest-lying state and particularly vulnerable to climate damages such as sea-level rise.

Last week, a broad range of experts in a variety of fields submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Delaware’s court fight, urging the Third Circuit to join the other three circuits in rejecting Big Oil’s efforts to escape accountability. They included:

Military officials: Robert S. Taylor, a highly decorated, high-ranking lawyer for the Department of Defense under the Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama administrations, explained why Big Oil’s use of “national security” arguments to justify their activity does not hold water. In his brief, Taylor tells the court that oil companies did not “act under” the direction of the Defense Department to advance national security interests when they engaged in the behavior at the heart of Delaware’s lawsuit, calling such arguments from the fossil fuel defendants “baseless.” 

“The suggestion that the DoD directed or controlled this conduct is also misleading,” Taylor wrote, “to the extent that it purports to cloak the defendants’ conduct in misrepresenting the impact of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the use of fossil fuels under the banner of national security.” 

Scientists: Nine leading climate scientists — including CCI’s Sverre Leroy — submitted a brief that explains the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is the driving force behind climate change and related damages such as sea-level rise, which has caused “unavoidable adaptation expenses” for communities like Delaware. 

“We know that the present damage and future risk to coastal communities such as [Delaware], posed by rising sea levels, is caused in significant part by the changing climate,” they write. “We know that the [oil companies’] production and marketing of fossil fuels is a significant cause of that climate change. We know what portion of CO2 emissions are associated with each company’s products. All of these matters can be proven at trial in Delaware state courts through the introduction of evidence in the form of well-established scientific facts.”

Academics and climate groups: In another brief, CCI, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and leading scholars of the fossil fuel industry’s climate deception — including Robert Brulle, Justin Farrell, Benjamin Franta, Stephen Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, and Geoffrey Supran — lay out the evidence of the oil and gas defendants’ historical and ongoing efforts to lie to the public about their products’ role in climate change

“Defendants had actual knowledge of the risks associated with their fossil-fuel products as early as the late 1950s and no later than 1968,” they write. “Despite their knowledge and expertise on climate science, Defendants publicly sowed doubt and contradicted these findings while affirmatively promoting the use of their products through various deceptive means. Defendants thus created the harms alleged by Plaintiff and therefore should be held liable in state court.”