Climate Chance is Taking Over Our Courtrooms

Typically oil companies don't care about climate change, but Chevron changed that. - Cartoon Credit: Pace University

Climate change has a lot of action coming up in 2018 in the courtroom. There are plenty of cases with decisions that concern climate change that will have to be made in the near future. In this post, I'll look into one of the biggest and most important court cases that is currently still going on, dealing with oil companies and climate change. 

Five largest oil companies in the U.S. - Credit: Pintrest

This pivotal court case deals with the cities of San Fransico and Oakland, California fighting against the five biggest oil companies in the world: BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Conoco Phillips. The surprising thing that happened recently with this case, that not a lot of people saw coming, was that the Chevron attorney agreed that human activity is causing climate change and that we all need to do something about it soon.

This is a huge step forward for getting all oil companies to realize the fact that humans are at fault for causing climate and it also establishes a climate change victory in court. Theodore Boutrous Jr. said that “from Chevron’s perspective there’s no debate about climate science," and they are 100% onboard with declaring that humans are indeed playing a significant role in causing climate change. Moving forward, hopefully, this successful conclusion by Chevron can be used as leverage in other court cases since the fact that humans have played a role in rising temperatures of our planet has now been established in court. 

At the end of March, the federal judge in California who is covering this case held a five-hour tutorial about what climate change was and the science behind it in order to make sure everyone was on the same page. I found this interesting and think it should be done more in court so that any misunderstanding about the science is eliminated. The judge of this case wanted to make sure he got the science 100% correct, so he invited each city representative and each oil company in separately to present their version of the history of climate change and what it's like now. He wanted to do this rather unorthodox approach so that he could get the science straight first and not have to make any decisions in the courtroom without knowing what exactly was going on.

The politics of climate change have been bouncing around for a long time, sometimes even going in circles ending up at the same place that we started with some of these cases. This case may end up morphing into a battle over who is responsible for climate change. Like I mentioned earlier, there's still a long way to go with this case and a lot to still be decided, so who knows where it will go next.

People protest for climate change - Credit: The Guardian

To give you a little perspective on how far climate change research has come, a lawsuit concerning how heat waves and flooding could be connected back to fossil fuels, faltered ten years ago because not enough research had been done with respect to climate change and its effects. They weren't able to create a strong enough of a connection between the heat waves and flooding to fossil fuels. Now, with the copious amounts of research that we have conducted, the science is much stronger and able to back up claims that climate change causes specific weather events to occur. 

With all of this new research, climate change is being seen more and more in U.S. courts in the recent years. In the 15 years before 2000, there were only six climate-related lawsuits in the United States. However, since 2000 there's been more than 1,000 lawsuits. This trend is also happening in other places around the globe with the number of countries with climate change-related cases doubling from 2014 to 2017. Specific parts of the government are the defendants in most climate change cases, but fossil fuel companies are getting sued more often now having to describe how they contribute to climate change with the things that they do.

It should be very interesting to see how the major court case involving the five largest oil companies turns out and as well as how these recent events will reshape the way we think about climate change in our judicial system.