(The Center Square) – No ruling from a South Carolina judge was rendered Friday at the end of a two-day hearing in a climate change lawsuit brought by the city of Charleston against 24 oil and gas companies.
The oil companies want a dismissal.
In the lawsuit, Charleston seeks unspecified monetary damages from the oil and gas companies, claiming that they knew their products contributed to climate change but didn’t disclose that to the public.
Judge Roger Young asked lawyers in the case to submit draft orders to him by July 1.
“I hear a lot of arguments,” the judge said. “Sometimes I don’t find oral arguments to be helpful but this was extraordinarily helpful.”
Attorneys for Charleston argued Thursday that the oil and gas companies knew that their products contributed to climate change but kept that from the public in order to continue reaping profits from the sales.
“When I get into a car, or a train or a bus or a plane, we don’t really care what the energy source is that leads to the transportation,” one of the attorneys for Charleston, Matt Edling, told the judge. “We just care that it gets us from point A to point B and that if we’re paying for it, that’s it’s the most economic choice that is available to us.”
The oil companies intentionally created a market where energy choices were artificially limited to fossil fuels, he added.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “You guys, together, you knew all of this and you made herculean efforts to convince the world that it wasn’t a problem. You saw that it could be a calamitous problem, have benefit from it economically to extraordinary disadvantage of cities like Charleston.”
However, attorneys for the oil companies pointed out that the city of Charleston still uses fossil fuels today and that there are few affordable alternatives yet on the market.
They also pointed out that the oil companies have invested heavily in renewable energy and that one, BP, adopted a slogan, “Beyond Petroleum,” and began using the color green in its corporate logo.
“The city’s theory is that these actions are part of an effort to mislead consumers into believing that BP is becoming a sustainable energy company and that this effort is somehow to convince consumers to want to buy BP’s fossil fuel products,” BP attorney Merritt Abney told the judge. “That theory obviously makes no sense.”
A similar case in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was dismissed earlier this month
