News & Analysis
August 5, 2020
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has denied a request from Chevron, Exxon, and other major oil and gas companies to rehear a May ruling that allows climate damages lawsuits from six California cities and counties to proceed in state court.
The decision is the latest in a growing list of jurisdictional losses for Big Oil, which has repeatedly sought to move climate lawsuits from state to federal court. It also means that lawsuits seeking to hold the industry accountable for billions of dollars in climate damages are one step closer to heading to trial. In the words of CCI’s Richard Wiles, “The last thing Big Oil wants is a trial where the truth about their decades of lying about climate change would be laid bare.”
The lawsuits from the counties of San Mateo, Santa Cruz, and Marin, and the cities of Richmond, Imperial Beach, and Santa Cruz, argue that the companies’ fossil fuel products and decades-long disinformation campaigns are responsible for exposing their communities to an onslaught of threats from climate change, including sea-level rise, flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, and extreme weather events.
As they have in every other similar lawsuit, the Big Oil defendants — which also include BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips — removed the California cases to federal court and sought to have them dismissed. But both a federal district court and a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit agreed that the cases should go forward in state court.
Big Oil had asked the full Ninth Circuit to review that panel’s decision en banc, a request that yesterday was denied. The court order noted that not a single judge even requested a vote on whether the entire court should rehear the matter.
Big Oil’s request for the Ninth Circuit to rehear a similar decision in cases filed by San Francisco and Oakland is still pending before the court.
UPDATE: On August 12, 2020, the Ninth Circuit also denied Big Oil's request to rehear its decision in the San Francisco and Oakland lawsuits. The Ninth Circuit had reversed a federal district court's decision to dismiss the cases and sent them back to the district court for reconsideration on whether it has jurisdiction to hear the case.
