Judge Allows Climalawfare Suit To Proceed In Oregon

Will they also be shutting down the Portland international airport? How about the shipping ports? They all use a ton of fossil fuels. How about Portland getting 43% of its power from natural gas?

Oregon judge allows Multnomah County climate lawsuit against fossil fuel giants to advance

An Oregon judge will allow the climate lawsuit Multnomah County’ filed more than three years ago against some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies to move forward.

Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adele J. Ridenour issued her decision Monday denying 20 of 21 arguments the fossil fuel defendants made to dismiss the 2023 case. Ridenour’s decision allows the case to continue to move toward a trial.

Multnomah County filed the $51 billion lawsuit against Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute, among several other companies and industry groups, following the 2021 heat dome when temperatures for five days in a row reached more than 100 degrees and R69 people in the county died. The Capital Chronicle reached out Wednesday to lawyers for those companies and the petroleum institute, as well as lawyers for seven other defendants but did not hear back. (snip)

The decision to allow the case to move forward comes months after Ridenour in June heard two days of oral testimony from the fossil fuel defendants, who argued centrally that Multnomah County is trying to effectively impose penalties on global and interstate pollution, which, under the federal Clean Air Act, is a power that the U.S. government, not state governments, hold.

But Ridenour said that while the county does find the companies’ fossil fuel pollution is at fault for the 2021 heat dome, the county is not seeking damages for the pollution itself, but for the companies’ deceptions to Oregonians, which allowed the pollution to continue to occur for decades.

Well, that’s novel, but, if it makes it out of county court, it will get squashed, either at the state level or the federal level, and the county will have wasted enormous amounts of taxpayer money on this tilting. Still, I once again recommend that all the named fossil fuels companies immediately stop selling to at least the plaintiffs and any who have signed on. Why would you do business with someone suing you?