Northwest Oregon has never seen anything like it. Over the course of three days in June 2021, Multnomah County — the Emerald State’s most populous county, which rests in the swing along Oregon’s northern border — recorded highs of 108, 112 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit.
Temperatures were so hot that the metal on cable cars melted and the asphalt on roads bent. Nearly half of the homes in the county lacked cooling systems because of Oregon’s typically mild summers, where average highs top out at 81 degrees. Sixty-nine people died of heat stroke, most of them in their homes.
When scientific studies have shown that the extreme temperatures were caused by heat domes, which experts say is affected by climate change, provincial officials did not just chalk it up to a random weather event. They began researching the major fossil fuel companies whose emissions are driving the climate crisis – including Exxon Mobil, Shell and Chevron – and sued them.
“This catastrophe was not caused by an act of God,” said Jeffrey B. Simon, a lawyer for the county, “but rather by several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people by selling so much. oil and gas as they could.”
Now, 11 months after the suit was filed, Multnomah County is preparing to move forward with the case in Oregon state court after a federal judge settled in June a months-long debate about where the case should be heard.
About three dozen lawsuits have been filed by states, counties and cities seeking damages from oil and gas companies for damages caused by climate change. Legal experts said the Oregon case is one of the first to focus on public health costs associated with high temperatures during a specific occurrence of the “heat dome effect.” Most of the other lawsuits seek damages more generally from such ongoing climate-related impacts as sea level rise, increased precipitation, intensification of extreme weather events and flooding.
Pat Parenteauemeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said that zeroing out the heat and the heat dome effect are elements that could make the Multnomah case easier to prove.
“When it comes to the extreme heat events that affected Portland, the scientists concluded, by looking at that event and then looking at historical records of heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, it would not have happened , except for human-caused climate change,” Parenteau said.
“It’s actually the first time I’ve ever seen climate scientists state such a conclusion in such absolute terms,” he added.
Korey Silverman-Roati, a fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center on Climate Change, also said the case was distinctive because it focused on a specific event. “Many of these other suits allege more long-term impact damage from climate change, such as sea level rise is something that happens over the course of decades,” Silverman-Roati said. “Whereas the Multnomah pack is this 2021 heat dome disaster that they had to deal with.”
The Multnomah County lawsuit says that Exxon, Shell, Chevron and others engaged in a range of improper practices, including negligence, creating a public nuisance, fraud and deceit.
The case claims that the companies were aware of the harms of fossil fuels and engaged in a “scheme to sell fossil fuel products and fraudulently promote them as harmless to the environment, while knowing that carbon pollution released into the atmosphere by their products would likely deadly extreme heat events like the one that devastated Multnomah County.”
“We know that climate-induced weather events like the 2021 heat dome harm Multnomah County residents and cause real financial costs to our local government,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement. “The court’s decision to hear this lawsuit in state court vindicates our contention that the case must be resolved here — it’s an important victory for this community.”
An Exxon spokesman declined to comment on the matter; Representatives for Shell and Chevron did not respond to requests for comment.
A common defense for fossil fuel companies is the argument that existing environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, are already responsible for regulating air quality, so legal action should not be allowed under state law, Silverman-Roati noted.
In the suit, officials in the county, which includes Portland — Oregon’s largest city, with about 640,000 people — say they will ultimately incur costs of more than $1.5 billion to deal with the effects of the 2021 heat dome.
“We contend that this is just like any other kind of public health crisis and mass destruction of property caused by corporate wrongdoing,” said Simon, who is a partner in the law firm of Simon Greenstone Panatier. “We argue that these companies have polluted the atmosphere with carbon by burning fossil fuels; that they foresaw that extreme environmental damage would be caused by it; that some of them, we believe, deliberately misled the public about it.”
The suit cites some of the internal correspondence by the companies, which Multnomah County officials say indicate the industry was aware as far back as 1965 that pollution can have “catastrophic consequences”.
“No one in Multnomah County leadership thought it would ever be 124 degrees in Portland,” Simon said. “But we argue that the defendants did foresee that you would have extreme changes, which could include that kind of harm — and didn’t tell the truth about that.”
Legal experts said that while the allegations in the suit are based on the kind of traditional tort law cited in other cases alleging public health violations, the effectiveness of that approach in a suit involving climate change is uncertain.
Chris Wolda professor of environmental law at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, said the country’s case could be helped by technological advances in weather modeling that could bind greenhouse gases to “specific impacts in specific regions.”
“In the past, it was very common for people to say, ‘Look, we can’t link this hurricane or this heat wave to concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,'” Wold said. “We can say that more and more. The climate models are now good enough to say, ‘We should expect to see these heat increases or these precipitation changes in these places.’ And it’s going to make it easier, I think, for plaintiffs to be able to successfully argue that emissions from certain companies cause specific impacts.”
Silverman-Roati, at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change, also cited the role of improved modeling as a compelling element in the case.
“The scientists can tell us, ‘This heat dome would not have happened but for climate change,'” Silverman-Roati said. “And then this province can go to court and say: ‘Look, we have to pay for all this damage from this heat dome. And the companies that marketed their product that caused this problem and told us that these products would be fine, those companies will have to pay for a portion of everything that we have to pay in response to this heat dome.’”
Crucially, Parenteau, of the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said modeling linking climate change to the June 2021 heat dome effect would be difficult to challenge in court.
“They’re not going to have a problem getting that evidence in front of a jury and getting the judge instructed to tell the jury whether they agree with that evidence leading to a finding of liability,” he said.
“I think in the minds of the average American when they think of climate change, they probably think of storms and flooding and sea level rise, things like that. But they probably don’t think about it killing people,” Parenteau said. Cases like Multnomah County’s “make that connection clear because it’s true, it kills people. And it’s not just killing people with heat.”
Jeff Goodellthe author of The New York Times bestseller “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” said it was unclear how the pending cases might be affected by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which imposed limits on the regulatory authority of federal agencies. But Goodell said the trend toward communities seeking compensation from the fossil fuel industry shows no signs of abating.
“This question of what accountability looks like and how it will play out is one of the most interesting questions in the climate world right now,” Goodell said. “And I do think that this demand for accountability will only grow. And, you know, we’re at the beginning of some kind of epic battle.”
He added: “I don’t know what shape it will take in the next few years, but I know it’s not going to be resolved anytime soon. And I know it’s also only going to grow and become bigger and louder and more urgent.”
