Judge rules that Hoboken’s lawsuit — which seeks to hold Exxon, Chevron, and other polluters accountable for lying about climate damages they knew their products would cause — can proceed in state court.
News & Analysis
September 9, 2021
The day after Hurricane Ida unleashed record-setting rain over Hoboken, New Jersey, flooding communities and endangering residents across the square-mile-sized city along the Hudson River, Mayor Ravi Bhalla was unequivocal about the role that climate polluters have played in making storms like Ida more frequent and destructive.
“The culprits of this disaster: the fossil fuel industry, Big Oil, and its enablers, must and should be held accountable for the havoc they’ve wreaked upon our quality of life here in Hoboken, throughout the region and other parts of this country,” Bhalla said at a press conference.
Those comments weren’t simply rhetoric: exactly one year earlier, Bhalla announced that his small city would be the first in the state to take major climate polluters like Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell to court as part of a growing wave of lawsuits seeking to hold the companies accountable for their role in the climate crisis. Hoboken’s case aims to make the companies pay their fair share of the climate damages they knew their fossil fuel products would cause — and to hold them accountable for concealing the danger and leaving cities like Hoboken to pay the price for their deception.
Yesterday, the city’s efforts to make polluters pay won an important victory when a federal judge ruled that Hoboken’s lawsuit should proceed in state court, where it was originally filed. U.S. District Judge John Michael Vazquez rejected Big Oil’s arguments that such cases should be heard in federal court, where the companies hope it will be easier to escape accountability, and he agreed that Hoboken’s lawsuit belongs in state court.
“Ultimately, the crux of Hoboken’s Complaint is that Defendants knew that their products caused substantial harm to the environment,” Judge Vazquez wrote. “Yet, Defendants misled consumers for decades about the real risks of continued dependence on fossil fuels and continued to sell their products. Now, Hoboken wants help paying for the effects of climate change it has faced and will continue to face.”
Similar jurisdiction battles are playing out in more than 20 climate liability cases across the country. Judge Vazquez is now the latest judge to methodically bat down any arguments Big Oil’s lawyers make for why the lawsuits are not appropriate for state courts (the only judge to rule otherwise later had his opinion overturned by a higher court). Vazquez’s opinion rejected five separate grounds to remove the case to federal courts, including one that has already been denied by four separate appeals courts: that Big Oil companies cannot be held liable for their deception because they acted at the direction of the federal government.
“Hoboken’s Complaint is focused on Defendants’ decades long misinformation campaign that was utilized to boost Defendants’ sales to consumers,” Judge Vazquez wrote. “Defendants do not claim that any federal officer directed them to engage in the alleged misinformation campaign.”>
While Hoboken’s efforts to hold climate polluters accountable advances in court, a growing number of communities up and down the Garden State are calling on state officials to file a statewide lawsuit against Big Oil — and make New Jersey the sixth state in the nation to take legal action to hold polluters accountable for their role in causing and lying about the worsening climate crisis.
Image by Shinya Suzuki on Flickr