(The Center Square) – A South Carolina judge is scheduled to hear arguments Thursday and Friday on whether to dismiss a climate-change lawsuit by the city of Charleston against 24 oil and gas companies.
In the lawsuit filed in 2020, the city said the companies contributed to greenhouse gas pollution, global warming, and climate change by selling fossil fuel products.
“As this lawsuit shows, these companies have known for more than 50 years that their products were going to cause the worst flooding the world has seen since Noah built the Ark,” then mayor John Tecklenburg said in a statement when the lawsuit was filed. “And instead of warning us, they covered up the truth and turned our flooding problems into their profits. That was wrong, and this lawsuit is all about holding them accountable for that multi-decade campaign of deception.”
The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages.
Charleston’s lawsuit is one of 20 filed nationwide by state and local governments against oil companies, according to federal court records.
Two of the defendants in the Charleston case, Chevron Corp. and Chevron U.S.A. Inc., tried to have the case tried in federal court. But U.S. District Court Judge Richard Mark Gergel in 2023 moved it back to state court.
On April 8, President Donald Trump issued an executive order instructing the U.S. attorney general to take action to stop state climate change lawsuits against oil companies.
“These state laws and policies weaken our national security and devastate Americans by driving up energy costs for families coast-to-coast, despite some of these families not living or voting in states with these crippling policies,” the executive order states. “These laws and policies also undermine federalism by projecting the regulatory preferences of a few states into all states. Americans must be permitted to heat their homes, fuel their cars, and have peace of mind – free from policies that make energy more expensive and inevitably degrade quality of life.”
The Center Square was unsuccessful before publication getting comment from Charleston Mayor William Cogswell.
South Carolina Circuit Court Judge William Young is scheduled to hear arguments Thursday and Friday on the oil companies’ motion to dismiss the Charleston lawsuit.
Regardless of the ruling in the South Carolina case and Trump’s executive order, these types of lawsuits aren’t likely to go away anytime soon, Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told The Center Square.
“I think the trajectory of the climate lawsuits is probably going to increase,” Isacc said. “As long as we have leftist elected municipalities in states who recognize there is a law firm out there that will do this for them for free, I think you are going to continue to have people take the hook.”
