News & Analysis
May 30, 2025
The daughter of Julie Leon, a victim of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, is suing ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and other Big Oil companies for fueling the extreme heat that killed her mother. The groundbreaking wrongful death suit is the first of its kind in the U.S. and underscores the fossil fuel industry’s decades of climate lies that prioritized industry profits over the public's health and safety.
“Defendants have known for all of Julie’s life that their affirmative misrepresentations and omissions would claim lives,” the complaint states. “Julie is a victim of Defendants’ conduct. Her lifespan is a bridge between cause and effect.”
The temperature rose above 100 degrees for the third consecutive day on June 28, 2021, when Julie was driving home from a doctor’s appointment in Seattle, Washington. Julie was later found unresponsive in her car with the windows down, parked along her route home – and despite several rounds of life-saving measures, she could not be revived. The medical examiner ruled Julie’s cause of death as hyperthermia — a condition that killed hundreds of people during the heat dome, which scientists determined would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.
The case cites decades of disinformation that Big Oil peddled throughout Julie’s life in order to obscure the reality of climate science and delay climate action. Fossil fuel companies knew in the 1950s — the same decade Julie was born — that their products fuel the escalating climate harms we’re experiencing today. In 1962, a Shell scientist published a report stating that fossil fuel combustion was “seriously contaminating the earth’s atmosphere with CO2,” which might have already begun changing the climate “in the direction of higher average temperatures.” In 1977, an Exxon scientist warned that “Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years [i.e. before 1987] before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” In 2000, Exxon published ads in the New York Times calling climate science “unsettled” and promoting climate uncertainty, more than two decades after their own research revealed the impacts of burning fossil fuels. But the companies failed to warn the public about the risks of using their fossil fuel products, the lawsuit argues, and caused the conditions that claimed Julie’s life.
“Why shouldn’t we hold someone legally accountable for this kind of behavior?” Public Citizen’s Climate Program Director David Arkush told the New York Times, which was the first outlet to report on the lawsuit. “There would be no question that we would hold them accountable if they caused other types of deaths. This is no different. They foresaw this, they did it anyway, and they hurt people.”
Misti Leon, Julie’s daughter, told the New York Times that learning of the fossil fuel industry’s climate lies felt like “a punch to the gut.”
“My reaction was shock and disbelief,” she said. “It actually felt more personal.”
Ten U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and dozens of local governments have taken Big Oil companies to court to make them pay for their climate deception. But Leon’s case is the first that seeks to hold them accountable for an individual climate victim’s death.
“Big Oil’s victims deserve accountability,” said CCI President Richard Wiles. “This is an industry that is causing and accelerating climate conditions that kill people. They’ve known it for 50 years, and at some point they must be held accountable.”
