Alexa st. John
In one of the nation’s first illegal death allegations calling for the fossil fuel industry to be accountable for its role in climate change, a Washington woman sues seven oil and gas companies.
The lawsuit filed this week in state court said they knew their products had changed the climate, including the fact that businesses contributed to the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest that killed 65-year-old Juliana Leon and did not warn the public about such risks.
June 28, 2021, according to filing, it reached its peak on 108 degrees Fahrenheit Day. Leon had just driven 100 miles from home to make an appointment, and the air conditioning in the car wasn’t working so he rolled the window on his way home.
According to the lawsuit, Leon pulled his car and parked it in a residential area. She was unconscious behind the wheel when the bystander sought help. Despite medical intervention, Leon passed away.
The filing names are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Conocophillips, Phillips 66 and BP subsidiary Olympic Pipeline Company. Conocophillips, BP, and Shell declined to comment when Associated Press arrived. Other companies did not respond to requests for comment.
“The defendant knew that fossil fuel products were already changing the atmosphere of the planet,” the filing on Thursday said when Juliana was born. “By 1968, the defendants realized that the fossil fuel-dependent economy they created and perpetuated would strengthen these atmospheric changes, resulting in more frequent and destructive weather disasters and near-predictable losses of human life.”
The filing adds: “The extreme heat that killed Julie was directly linked to the fossil fuel-driven changes in the climate.”
The lawsuit accuss companies of concealing, neglecting and misrepresenting the risks of climate change caused by people burning oil and gas and interfering with research.
In a peer-reviewed analysis, international climate researchers said the 2021 “heat dome” would be “virtually impossible without significant human climate change.”
Scientists have widely attributed record, more frequent, longer-lasting, and increasingly deadly heatwaves around the world to climate change, which is the result of the burning of fossil fuels. Oil and gas are fossil fuels, which when burned, release greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planets, such as carbon dioxide.
“We have seen a very high level of scientific understanding of this particular effect that climate change can cause on individual extreme weather events,” said Coray Silver Munroty, a senior fellow at the Sabin Climate Change Law Center at Columbia Law School. “Scientists today are much more confident in saying that, but because of climate change, this hasn’t happened.”
Silverman-Roati said the specificity of this case can reveal to people the consequences of climate change and the potential consequences of company behavior.
The lawsuit was first reported by the New York Times.
“Large oil companies have known for decades that products can cause catastrophic climate disasters that will be fatal and devastating if they don’t change their business models,” said the president of the Climate Integrity Center. “But instead of warning the public and taking measures to save lives, big oil lies and intentionally accelerated the issue.”
Unprecedented behavior
State and cities have been helping to warm the world by following stakeholders in the fossil fuel industry. Recently, Hawaii and Michigan announced plans for legal action against fossil fuel companies for the harm caused by climate change, but the United States is being filled with rebuttal lawsuits from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The current administration is quickly ignoring climate change and related terminology. Under President Donald Trump, the United States has once again withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – Agency that has been wiped out by the weather forecast and research workforce will no longer track the costs of weather disasters driven by climate change. And the Environmental Protection Agency has been called for to rewrite the decisive long-standing findings that the greenhouse gases that warm the planet put public health and welfare at risk.
Meanwhile, the federal government has reiterated many other efforts and projects to address climate change by increasing support for oil and gas production in the name of the “US Energy Control” agenda.
Around the world, other climate events are closely monitored for potentially unique precedents in efforts to hold major polluters accountable. A German court this week ruled against Peruvian farmers who argued that the energy company’s greenhouse gas emissions promote global warming and put their homes at risk.
Yet, there are rare cases where it appears that these companies will argue that they should be held responsible for the death of individuals. Misty Leon seeks unspecified financial damages.
“We’ve been working hard to get into the world,” said Don Braman, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School. “We are facing an escalating climate crisis, and we are sobering that this year, the hottest record, will be one of the coolest things in the near future.
“It is predictable or foreseeable that the loss of life from these climate fuel disasters is likely to accelerate as climate chaos intensifies,” he added. “At the heart of all this is the debate about the negligence of fossil fuel companies, based on the growing and growing evidence that these companies have understood the dangers of their products for decades.”
Alexa St. John is a climate reporter for the Associated Press. X: Follow her at @Alexa_stjohn. Contact her at ast.john@ap.org.
Find out more about AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
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Original issue: May 29, 2025, 7:33pm EDT
