Charleston ends lawsuit against Big Oil

Charleston, South Carolina, has decided not to appeal a judge’s ruling that dismissed the city’s climate deception lawsuit against major fossil fuel companies, even as other courts across the U.S. have allowed similar lawsuits to proceed toward trial.

The move brings an end to the city’s five-year legal fight to make ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other Big Oil companies pay for “the devastating adverse impacts” of climate damages the polluters have long known their products would fuel. The low-lying coastal city faces billions in costs to protect communities and infrastructure from rising seas and floods.  

“These companies have known for more than 50 years that their products were going to cause the worst flooding the world has seen since Noah built the Ark,” then-Mayor John Tecklenburg said when the city became the first in the U.S. South to sue Big Oil companies for climate deception. “And instead of warning us, they covered up the truth and turned our flooding problems into their profits. That was wrong, and this lawsuit is all about holding them accountable for that multi-decade campaign of deception.”

Though Charleston won an early decision that allowed the case to go forward in state court, South Carolina Judge Roger Young dismissed the lawsuit in August. The city, now under new leadership, decided not to appeal.

In a local op-ed before the ruling, CCI Managing Attorney Corey Riday-White pointed out that a growing number of courts have allowed cases similar to Charleston’s to move forward toward trial in state courts, including every state supreme court to have considered these cases so far. 

“Big Oil and its allies’ attempts to mischaracterize these cases doesn’t change the fact that they are about holding oil companies accountable for their deception — plain and simple,” he wrote in The State. 

Meanwhile, every other ruling to dismiss climate deception cases similar to Charleston’s is in the process of being appealed. In October, a trio of local governments in Maryland will ask the Maryland Supreme Court to overturn rulings against their cases that other courts found were “wrongly decided” — the first opportunity for a higher court to reverse such a decision.