Big Oil Gets Slapped With Its First Wrongful Death Lawsuit

Yahoo

2 days ago

On August 27, 2019, ExxonMobil posted a video on Facebook titled 'Efficient Driving Tips.' The caption read, 'It's tempting to crank the AC and windows while driving in warm weather, but here's how you can stay cool while enhancing your fuel economy.' To upbeat music, the video advised viewers, 'While driving around town, roll down the windows and skip the AC.'
Less than two years later, on June 28, 2021, Juliana Leon—a poet and mother, known by her friends and family as Julie—was doing just that. Julie was driving home from a doctor's appointment in Seattle, during the Pacific Northwest Heat Dome, the worst heat wave the area had experienced in recorded history. Her car's air conditioning wasn't working—not usually a cause for concern in temperate Seattle—so she rolled down her windows as the thermometer climbed to 102 degrees.
Even with her windows down, the heat was too much for Julie's body to take. As heat stroke began to close in on her, Julie pulled off the highway and parked on a nearby residential street, choosing to make sure she would not cause harm to anyone else with what turned out to be her final act. Two hours later, a passerby found Julie unconscious in her car. First responders administered CPR and attempted other lifesaving measures, but they could not revive her. Her official cause of death was recorded as hyperthermia—overheating of the body.
Julie was not alone in succumbing to this lethal heat. Over 1,400 people in the Pacific Northwest were killed by the Heat Dome event. But Julie's story became unique in at least one way last week, when her daughter filed the first ever U.S. lawsuit directly taking on the fossil fuel industry for causing a climate-related death.
The wrongful death suit, Leon v. ExxonMobil et al., was filed in Washington state court by Misti Leon, Julie's daughter. It alleges that Big Oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP have known—since before her mother was born—that the conspiracy of climate deception they executed to protect their fossil fuel–based profits would cause deaths like Julie's. The suit further seeks to hold these corporations accountable for the devastating tragedy their conduct imposed on the Leon family.
The argument put forward in Leon v. ExxonMobil is relatively straightforward: Julie's death was caused by unnaturally extreme heat; this heat was the result of climate change caused by Big Oil's fossil fuel products; these companies knew that their products would cause disasters like the Heat Dome and deaths like Julie's, but rather than warning the public about this lethal danger, Big Oil launched a campaign of deception to defraud the public about climate risks and block solutions that could have prevented Julie's death.
There is strong evidence to support each of these claims. First, multiple extreme weather attribution studies have determined that the occurrence of the Heat Dome event would have been 'virtually impossible' but for human-caused climate change. The lead author of one of these attribution studies, Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, put it as plainly as possible: 'Without climate change this event would not have happened.'
Second, there is a large body of documentation demonstrating that Big Oil companies have long understood with shocking accuracy that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, 'catastrophic' climate harms that would do 'great irreversible harm to our planet,' 'have serious consequences for man's comfort and survival,' create 'more violent weather,' and cause 'suffering and death due to thermal extremes.'
Third, there are piles of internal strategy memos and external materials outlining the massive disinformation campaign these companies executed to prevent regulators, investors, consumers, and ordinary citizens like Julie from understanding the risks their products were creating. Documented tactics include publishing deceptive advertisements; directing bought-and-paid-for scientists to fraudulently undermine the clear scientific consensus on climate; harassing and attempting to discredit scientists and activists engaged in researching and communicating the actual climate science; deceptively attacking renewable energy efforts and policies; and 'greenwashing' to falsely promote Big Oil products and brands as climate solutions.
There is also substantial evidence of the impact this conspiracy has had in delaying climate mitigation and adaptation measures that could have prevented Julie's death. For example, a recent Pew Research survey found that only 27 percent of Americans believed that almost all scientists agreed that climate change is caused by human activity. Compare this to the most recent analysis of the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change, which found that there is a greater than 99 percent consensus among scientists on this point—out of the 88,125 papers surveyed, just 28 were skeptical, mostly authored by the same few, discredited, industry-funded individuals.
In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who co-sponsored the resolution that prohibited the U.S. from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, 'I was misled. Others were misled. When [fossil fuel companies] had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly—I mean, they lied.… It would have changed everything [had they told the truth]. I think it would have changed the average citizen's appreciation of climate change.… And mine, of course. It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It's cost this country, and it cost the world.'
For Julie Leon, and her daughter Misti, this cost could not have been higher. They both deserve justice. And it's clear Big Oil doesn't have a great answer yet for why that justice should be denied to them. Nearly all the fossil fuel defendants named in the suit have declined to comment on it. The only response thus far has come from Chevron's lead counsel, Gibson Dunn partner Ted Boutrous, who said, 'Exploiting a personal tragedy to promote politicized climate tort litigation is contrary to law, science, and common sense.' Maybe it's possible to portray a bereaved daughter pursuing justice for the killing of her mother as exploiting her own personal tragedy—but that seems a challenging argument to defend.
Likely contributing to Big Oil's nervousness here is the reality that Julie and Misti are far from the only ones to experience this kind of personal tragedy. While Leon v. ExxonMobil is an attempt to win justice for one climate victim and her family, the case is noteworthy in part because it could provide a compelling new model for thousands of survivors across the country who have lost loved ones to climate disasters in recent years, and millions of Americans who will, unfortunately, face similar tragedies in the years to come.
Perhaps just as significantly, this lawsuit could also lay the groundwork for another approach to public accountability for the fossil fuel actors responsible for lethal climate disasters: criminal homicide prosecutions.
The purpose of wrongful death suits like Misti Leon's is to provide private remedies to individuals who have been wrongfully bereaved. The purpose of criminal law enforcement is to deter future crimes, protect the public, punish wrongdoers, and encourage the convicted to pursue less harmful practices. All of these public safety goals apply to Big Oil's ongoing contributions to climate change. The legal argument required to win a wrongful death suit is also essentially the same as that required to win a negligent homicide prosecution; the primary difference is a higher burden of proof on the criminal side.
That is a significant hurdle—but one it may be possible to clear in the context of Big Oil and climate-related deaths. Prosecutors across the country would be well served to take note of Leon v. ExxonMobil and carefully consider how the climate harms their constituents are experiencing fit the criminal laws they are charged with enforcing.
The lawsuit filed last week marks a significant step for the movement seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in knowingly condemning us to a future of climate catastrophe. Though Big Oil companies will fight this litigation with everything they've got, there's only so much that money and corporate spin doctors and BigLaw mercenaries can do to distract from what is, at its core, a very simple message: Climate victims like Julie Leon matter. They deserve justice. And the fossil fuel corporations behind their deaths should pay for their lethal misconduct.