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.
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 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Big Oil Gets Slapped With Its First Wrongful Death Lawsuit )
Also on site :