California Takes on Big Oil in Super-Sized Lawsuit 

Several California municipalities are merging their climate deception litigation with the state’s climate case, to jointly pursue a super-sized lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry, according to recent court filings. This development comes as Chicago joins the growing list of U.S. municipalities suing the fossil fuel industry.

On February 5, Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Charles S. Treat approved California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s petition to link the state’s climate accountability case with lawsuits brought by the counties of Marin, San Mateo, and Santa Cruz, and the cities of Imperial Beach, Richmond, and Santa Cruz. 

The attorney general’s office filed its coordination petition, backed by the municipal entities, in November, noting that coordinating the lawsuits into one package would avoid any conflicting rulings in the various cases.

The joint suit, called the “Fuel Industry Climate Cases,” will proceed in San Francisco Superior Court, where Bonta filed the state’s lawsuit last year. 

In late November, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected an attempt by several oil companies to move Oakland and San Francisco’s climate lawsuits against them from state to federal court. Once the formal action of returning the cases to state court (called a remand) takes effect, they are expected to merge their cases into the super suit as well.

Bonta’s office is expected to lead the litigation going forward, with assistance from outside counsel including San Francisco-based plaintiffs’ law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, but the attorney general’s office could not confirm by publishing time.

The oil companies did not object to bundling the lawsuits. However, in a January 22 filing, Chevron’s attorney Theodore Boutrous of the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher argued that the case be moved to Contra Costa County, claiming that it would be a more neutral venue than San Francisco.

Judge Treat rejected Boutrous’s request, writing in his February 5 order that he “has every confidence that the San Francisco Superior Court can be fully trusted to remain impartial and unbiased in these actions.” 

Gibson Dunn often represents the fossil fuel industry in climate cases and other litigation, such as in Chevron’s infamous racketeering suit in Ecuador.

The California plaintiffs will still have to contend with other efforts by Big Oil to stall the super suit from going to trial, including motions to dismiss the case.

“Big Oil has managed to delay these trials for almost seven years and counting,” said Hollin Kretzmann, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The plaintiffs need to overcome these delay tactics and get the court to put the industry’s deceitful behavior on trial as soon as possible.” 

Damages for Disinformation

The California lawsuits, brought between 2017 and 2023, contend that decades of successful disinformation campaigns by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and other oil companies about the main cause of climate change — burning fossil fuels — effectively delayed the energy transition and exacerbated the climate crisis and consequent damages. 

Now, the state, counties, and cities want the industry to help pay the skyrocketing costs of contending with rising sea levels, extreme flooding, deadly heat and wildfires, and other unprecedented problems being driven by climate change.

In an emailed statement, Shell spokesperson Anna Arata said that the company’s position on climate change “has been a matter of public record for decades” and that Shell agrees urgent action is needed to tackle the problem. “We do not believe the courtroom is the right venue to address climate change,” she said. 

DeSmog reached out to several other oil industry defendants and Gibson Dunn for comment. Chevron,  ExxonMobil, and Gibson Dunn did not respond. 

Legal experts say that merging the cases makes sense.

According to Cara Horowitz, executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law School, the California cases raise many of the same legal questions and are based on much of the same factual evidence. “They also will require courts to make legal decisions about the culpability of fossil fuel company defendants under similar legal theories,” she told DeSmog.  

Merging the lawsuits will also help the cities and counties in several ways. “Local jurisdictions with stretched budgets can now join forces with each other and with the state in mounting a strong claim,” said Horowitz. “That could be important, since one of the rationales for these suits from the very beginning has been that local jurisdictions are running low on money because of the increasing costs of responding to climate harms.” 

Kretzman agreed that “California has considerable legal muscle to take on this fight,” and that will help the municipalities that have teamed up with the attorney general’s office.

Leading the Charge

California is arguably at the epicenter of climate litigation against the fossil fuel industry, which now includes more than three dozen cases brought by states and municipalities nationwide.

In 2017, Imperial Beach – a coastal community of roughly 26,000 residents just south of San Diego – and the Bay Area counties of San Mateo and Marin were the first municipalities in the country to sue Big Oil for climate damages under state tort law. They were joined within months by Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Richmond. 

The state’s filing of its climate accountability lawsuit in 2023 was “a watershed moment,” said Kretzman, because California is the largest U.S. jurisdiction, as well as the first state with a significant oil-producing industry, to sue Big Oil over climate deception.

Bonta has credited those earlier cases in leading the charge by fighting preliminary procedural battles in court. “We monitored the other cases, by local entities in California and other states, and we are grateful and thankful for what they have done,” he said in remarks to the press in September, shortly after filing the state’s lawsuit. 

Last April, the U.S. Supreme Court denied oil industry petitions to remove a handful of climate cases, including those brought by the California coastal communities, from state or local to federal court. 

That decision, Bonta said in September, “allows us to get to where we want to go, to the merits, to hold [fossil fuel companies] accountable for their deceit.”