News & Analysis
August 25, 2020
New Jersey state and municipal officials have a solid scientific and legal basis to take fossil fuel companies to court in order to hold them accountable for the financial costs of climate change, according to a panel of experts who spoke at an online event on August 19.
The forum, sponsored by Monmouth University, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Center for Climate Integrity, was held as state legislators are considering Senate Resolution 57, a bipartisan measure that calls on New Jersey to “pursue legal action against fossil fuel companies for damages caused by climate change.”
State Senator Joseph Cryan, one of the resolution’s sponsors, said in opening remarks that he hopes the Senate will vote on SR57 sometime this month. “We all know that not only is climate change real, we know that some folks have known about it for a long time,” he said, pointing to the increased number of heatwaves and 90 degree days in the state since his youth on the Jersey Shore in the 1970s. “While I was sitting on that beach, listening to my first Bruce Springsteen along the way, fossil fuel companies knew then what they were doing to the environment,” Cryan said.
Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists Climate & Energy Program, presented data showing how rising sea levels and coastal flooding as a result of climate change have damaged properties across New Jersey. She also explained how greenhouse gas emissions are the principal cause of global warming, and that the vast majority of those emissions can be attributed to fewer than 100 major carbon producers: oil and gas companies.
Nathaly Agosto Filion, the Chief Sustainability Officer of the City of Newark, illustrated just some of those costs for her city and others across the state, from the damage done by flooding to the public health problems created by extreme heat, which is projected to intensify in coming years. She cited a study from the Center for Climate Integrity that estimates New Jersey could face as much as $25 billion in costs to combat rising seas. These costs are even more pronounced because of the ongoing budget crises states and cities face as a result of COVID-19, Filion said, and the avenues for municipalities to secure additional funds are limited.
Marco Simons, general counsel for EarthRights International, who is currently litigating climate damages lawsuits against Exxon and Suncor Energy on behalf of several Colorado municipalities, shared some of the publicly available evidence that as far back as the 1960s, the fossil fuel industry recognized that their products would cause climate change.
Simons presented internal documents from the American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, and other Big Oil players showing that the industry agreed to publicly promote the “uncertainty” of climate science that they internally said “cannot be denied.”
“Essentially the companies knew about the problem and they misled the public,” Simons said.
Nearly 20 states, cities, and counties have brought climate lawsuits that charge Exxon and others with violating public nuisance, consumer protection, and other state and local laws. Simons said New Jersey is particularly well-positioned to bring suit against Exxon, by many counts the world’s largest climate polluter, because the oil giant’s predecessor company was Standard Oil of New Jersey, and ExxonMobil is still incorporated in the Garden State.
Monmouth University’s Randall S. Abate, who moderated the event, explained that these cases do not seek to solve climate change. But they do address the important question of who should pay for the massive financial toll it places on communities, said Abate, the Rechnitz Family/Urban Coast Institute Endowed Chair in Marine and Environmental Law and Policy.
“Litigation is a very important piece of the effort in addressing climate change because it helps secure just outcomes,” Abate said. “...There are massive climate adaptation costs that are unfairly born by taxpayers when these costs can be shared with multinational oil companies to bear their proportionate share of these costs to reflect their substantial contribution to global climate change and the local climate impacts that flow from them.”
Earlier this month, Abate made the case for New Jersey to sue climate polluters in an op-ed in the Asbury Park Press.
