Charleston, South Carolina, sues major oil companies for the costs of climate change

Charleston is now the first city in the southern United States to sue major oil companies in an attempt to hold them accountable for the “daunting” costs of climate change, city officials announced on 9 September.

The 24 defendants in the city’s state court lawsuit include multinational corporations BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, as well as regional companies. The lawsuit claims that these companies lied to the public by hiding the threats that fossil fuels pose to the planet.

Charleston joins several other American counties in efforts to extract money from fossil fuel companies to pay for adaptation measures, although some have faced an uphill battle by skeptical judges in recent years.

“As this process shows, these companies have known for over 50 years that their products would cause the worst flooding the world has seen since Noah built the Ark,” Mayor John Tecklenburg said in a statement on Wednesday.

“And instead of telling us, they covered up the truth and turned our flood problems into their profits,” said Tecklenburg. “That was wrong, and this process aims to hold them accountable for that multi-decade deception campaign.”

In response to the lawsuit, Exxon Mobil spokesman Casey Norton said the city’s claims were baseless and without merit: “Lawsuits like this waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money and do nothing to promote meaningful actions that reduce the risks of climate change. “

Charleston sits on a peninsula at the confluence of three rivers, some of them built in swamps and filled streams. The low-lying city has seen more frequent flooding events over time, from about four days a year, 50 years ago, to nearly 89 days a year in 2019, the process says.

In addition to floods and erosion along the city’s coastline, residents will also see more frequent and more serious extreme events, including hurricanes, droughts and heat waves as a result of oil companies’ actions, the process notes.

At a news conference last week in front of officials working to raise an aging wall, Tecklenberg projected that the city could need “hundreds of millions or billions” of dollars to deal with these environmental changes.

The lawsuit comes days before the third anniversary of Hurricane Irma in Charleston, which caused the third tidal wave recorded in the city at almost 3 meters.

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Michelle Liu is a member of the Associated Press / Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a national nonprofit service program that puts journalists in local newsrooms to report on covert issues.

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