Blue state sues big oil companies, seeking damages over climate change

(Pexels)

by Will Kessler
Daily Caller News Foundation

The state of California filed a lawsuit Saturday against major oil companies, claiming that their production of fossil fuels has contributed to climate change and natural disasters.

The suit, which was filed in the Superior Court of California in the County of San Francisco, alleges that deception by the defendants caused a delayed societal response to global warming, and that their misconduct has greatly affected people, property and natural resources, according to court filings. The suit targets oil companies Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the trade group American Petroleum Institute, which it claims promoted disinformation about climate change.

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“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us – covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press release. “It has been decades of damage and deception. Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells. California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill. California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable.”

The timing of the suit was partially motivated by a decision from the Supreme Court in April that enables existing suits from local governments to enter state court rather than federal court, increasing the likelihood of a friendly ruling on a climate-related case, according to Politico.

The lawsuit asks the defendants to pay for a portion of recovery efforts for weather events and wildfires that the state argues were induced by climate change, measures to protect people from rising temperatures, water supply issues and fortifications against sea level rise and flooding, according to the press release.

Is California targeting deep-pocket companies to make up a financial shortfall?

California is suing Big Oil for lying about climate change.

We’re taking five major oil companies to court for wreaking havoc on our planet and lying to people about the dangers of fossil fuels.

It’s time they pay their fair share. pic.twitter.com/hu1Glnq4Da

— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) September 16, 2023

“California’s lawsuit does nothing to advance meaningful solutions to climate change and is a costly distraction from the important work that needs to be done,” the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project said in a statement about the lawsuit. “This litigation has no legal merit, which is why it has already been rejected by the federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court cautioned more than a decade ago that courts are simply not the appropriate places to decide climate policy.”

In 2017 and 2018, eight local governments in California filed similar climate lawsuits, which have since advanced to state courts, according to Politico. California’s suit is the largest of its kind to date.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Believe it or not, today's high priests of climate-change apocalypse are correct in predicting that in just a few short years, the earth will become miserable, wretched and almost uninhabitable by human beings. But the grim future they envision won't come about because of "catastrophic climate change," but rather, because of the implementation of their completely insane and truly catastrophic agenda.

As Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore recently admitted, "If they actually achieve Net Zero, at least 50% of the population would die of hunger and disease." Likewise, writes energy expert and author Alex Epstein: "Today's proposed policies to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use would, if fully implemented, have truly apocalyptic consequences – making the world an impoverished, dangerous, and miserable place for most people."

Question: When the scientific case for global warming apocalypse consists primarily of a 1-degree Celsius rise in temperature over more than 130 years, what explains the obsession with an imminent, climate-caused end of the world?

Although many groups have been drawn into the Climate Change Cult – from the news media (which has warned of climate catastrophe, either global warming or a "new ice age," for over a century!), to innocent school kids indoctrinated by hysterical leftist teachers, to liberal Democrats who claim "climate change" will destroy the earth in a few years – the REAL villains are the national and global elites who KNOW the apocalyptic global warming religion is just a cruel hoax, but promote and exploit it as a means of accomplishing their ultimate goal: Transforming and ruling the world.

The heart and soul of today's bizarre, pagan climate-change religion, and the global elites' strategies for using it to rule all of mankind, is powerfully exposed and illuminated in the September issue of WND's critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, an issue titled "CULT OF THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE: The elites' breathtaking strategy for ruling the world." WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.

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