New Hampshire lawmakers say it’s time to make Big Oil pay

A group of New Hampshire state lawmakers are calling for the Granite State to join the fight to hold Big Oil companies accountable for their climate deception and the associated costs. 

House Concurrent Resolution 5 urges the state’s governor and attorney general to take “appropriate legal action against multinational fossil fuel companies for harms incurred from disinformation campaigns about the effects of fossil fuel combustion.” 

In a committee hearing on January 20, Representative Tony Caplan, the resolution’s lead sponsor, told his colleagues that the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign to deceive the public about their products’ role in climate change has been “astoundingly successful for oil companies, but tragic for the rest of us.” 

“Under the spell of [the industry’s] sophisticated public relations effort, instead of taking immediate action, we have delayed joining the fight against climate change, and the costs associated with doing nothing have multiplied exponentially,” Caplan told the New Hampshire House Committee on State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs.  

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, New Hampshire is facing rising sea levels, increased flooding, heavier rainstorms, hotter and drier summers, and threats to agriculture and winter recreation as a result of a warming climate. Since 2004, there have been five extreme weather events in New Hampshire that caused over $15 million in damages, primarily due to flooding and ice storms. 

“Just as tobacco and opioid industries were held accountable for their fraud and deception, and the resulting harm, the fossil fuel industry must not be allowed to escape legal liability and pass off the extraordinary costs of these harms with impunity,” said Iyla Shornstein, political director for state and local programs at the Center for Climate Integrity, during testimony before the committee. 

New Hampshire is no stranger to taking on Big Oil. In 2013, the state won a $236 million verdict against ExxonMobil, which a jury ordered to pay to clean up groundwater contamination caused by the gasoline additive MBTE. 

In recent years, four other New England states — Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont — have sued Exxon to hold the corporation and other fossil fuel companies accountable for the harm caused by their climate deception. 

Will New Hampshire be the fifth?