News & Analysis
October 16, 2024
California communities won an important victory in their efforts to put Big Oil companies on trial for climate deception last week, when a California judge rejected one of the oil and gas companies’ arguments to dismiss their cases. The ruling clears one more hurdle for lawsuits from the state of California and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Imperial Beach, and Richmond, and the counties of San Mateo, Marin, and Santa Cruz working their way through state court in California.
Judge Ethan Schulman ruled that California courts have jurisdiction to hear the cases, which seek to make the companies pay a range of damages for lying about the climate harms caused by their products, because Big Oil defendants advertised and conducted business in the state. If companies could only face legal accountability for actions they took in the states where they are headquartered, Schulman wrote, then “defendants that advertise, market, and sell their products nationally, or make any misstatements regarding those products, would be effectively immune from suit in any state other than their state of incorporation or principal place of business … That is plainly not the law, and would be an absurd result.”
Big Oil defendants have tried to avoid facing evidence of their climate deception in state court with this same argument many times, only to be routinely shut down by judges at every level of the justice system — a pattern Judge Schulman noted in his decision.
Earlier this year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta expanded the state’s filing to make oil companies give up the profits they illegally earned while lying to consumers about their products.
“This much is clear: Big Oil continues to mislead us with their lies and mistruths, and we won’t stand for that,” said Attorney General Bonta at the time. “We will continue to vigorously prosecute this matter and ensure that Big Oil pays to abate the harm they have caused, and we will recover ill-gotten gains that will benefit Californians.”
California communities were the first in the nation to file lawsuits in 2017 to hold Big Oil accountable for its decades-long deception campaign that fueled climate impacts like severe storms, worsening wildfires, and sea level rise that communities are paying for today. Attorney General Bonta filed his statewide suit in 2023. With this ruling, these communities have cleared yet another of Big Oil’s obstacles and continue to move their demands for accountability through the courts.
