ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66 and Murphy Oil are among 24 oil and gas companies sued by the city of Charleston, South Carolina which accused them of contributing to climate change and misleading the public about the danger their products posed to the environment and causing flooding when Hurricane Irma hit the city three years ago. The city wants the companies to pay for repairs of damages caused by flooding in the city.
The Charleston Observer said the lawsuit was filed Wednesday and named as defendants: Brabham Oil Company, Colonial Group, Enmark Stations, Colonial Pipeline Company, Piedmont Petroleum Corp., Exxon Mobil Corporation, Exxonmobil Oil Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Shell Oil Company, Shell Oil Products Company, Chevron Corporation, Chevron U.S.A. Inc., BP P.L.C., BP America Inc., Marathon Petroleum Corporation, Marathon Petroleum Company LP, Speedway LLC, Murphy Oil Corporation, Murphy Oil USA, Hess Corporation, Conocophillips, Conocophillps Company, Phillips 66 and Phillips 66 Company.
Some of those companies — Brabham Oil Company and Piedmont Petroleum Corp. — are based in South Carolina. Colonial Group, Colonial Pipeline Company and Enmark Stations are based in Savannah, Georgia.
“As this lawsuit shows, 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,” Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg said in a statement. “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.”
The 140-page lawsuit asserts that the oil companies knew that the use of fossil fuel products creates greenhouse gases, and therefore, causes climate change. The city also claims that the companies worked to discredit science and reports that stated that was the case.
City officials claimed that without the misinformation campaigns and efforts to extract more fossil fuels, “climate crisis impacts in Charleston would have been substantially mitigated or eliminated altogether.”
Charleston is the first city in the American South to file a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for their contributions to climate change. It joins several large cities such as Baltimore, New York City and San Francisco who have filed similar suits.
Click here to read entire Charleston Observer story.
Source: Charleston Observer
