A disturbing litigation trend threatens to increase gas prices and stoke inflation. Across the country, government officials are suing energy companies, blaming them for carbon emissions and climate change.
But new research from the Pacific Research Institute finds that these lawsuits are counterproductive and likely to choke off investments in emission-reducing innovations – and increase gas prices by 31-cents per gallon.
The truth is, rather than serving to fight climate change as some politicians and attorneys claim, these lawsuits would do nothing except extract high value settlements from deep pocketed energy providers.
A recent report published by the American Tort Reform Foundation outlines how municipalities and state attorneys general have colluded with private attorneys and their funders to bring lawsuits against leading energy companies. Over 20 climate lawsuits have been filed. To date, no judge has sided with the plaintiffs in such a case, but that hasn’t stopped the litigation industry from trying new theories to force settlements.
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The radical expansion of public nuisance law applied in these lawsuits threatens to create a dangerous precedent for future litigation. To claim that fossil fuels are a public nuisance is to ignore the profound contribution these energy sources made to modern society. U.S. District Judge William Alsup called out this absurdity in tossing San Francisco and Oakland’s case in 2018.
We all contribute to carbon emissions in our daily lives, and government officials, activists, trial attorneys, and private funders are no exception. The municipalities filing these suits all maintain fleets of gas-powered vehicles for sanitation, public safety, and transportation. Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who worked with contingency-fee lawyers to file not one but two lawsuits, infamously traveled by motorcade from Gracie Mansion in Manhattan to his gym in Brooklyn.
Civil courts exist to resolve legitimate disputes, not to bolster politicians' tough-on-climate credentials or create global policy out of whole cloth. Rather than saddling energy companies with lawyer-enriching lawsuits, elected officials must work to carefully craft and pass legislation.
These suits make a mockery of our civil justice system, and threaten to further burden consumers and businesses in New York and across the country with even higher energy costs.
Politicians must abandon this ill-conceived and costly strategy, and instead work with all stakeholders to advance climate-friendly innovations while making energy more affordable. These lawsuits do neither.
Tom Stebbins
Albany
Tom Stebbins is executive director at the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York.
