Climate disaster survivors call on Merrick Garland and DOJ to sue Big Oil

Survivors of “climate disasters” are calling on federal prosecutors to take fossil fuel companies to court.

The more than 1,000 signatories of Thursday’s agreementletterfor the Department of Justice have survived wildfires, floods, and heat waves caused or worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.

Major oil companies “have known since the 1950s about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels,” they wrote.

“Instead of acting responsibly on the warnings of their own scientists, they waged a decades-long disinformation campaign to cloud the science and confuse and mislead the public.”

Although scientists at fossil fuel companies like Exxon have projected current levels of planetary warming with surprising accuracy, the industry has spent decades fighting climate science and is currently challenging federal regulation and financial tools that seek to slow it.

Even as the renewable energy industry has grown, the fossil fuel industry — and the extraction of coal, oil and gas — has expanded to record levels.

The letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland comes amid a wave of national pressure against the industry.

On the civil front, there is a wave of legislation or lawsuits from “climate super funds” — from seven states, 35 cities and Washington, D.C. — that seek to hold industry accountable for the costs of climate change.

In May, House and Senate Democrats referred their own investigation of the industry to the Department of Justice, with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calling on Garland to “investigate Big Oil during their decades-long disinformation campaign.” to deceive the American public.” .”

The federal government ended up taking the tobacco industry to court for similar reasons, former federal prosecutor Sharon Eubanks told Raskin’s committee in May.

Others argue that civil resources are not enough. Public Citizen, which authored the letter in conjunction with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, is coordinating an effort by academics and local prosecutors to devise a framework for charging big oil companies with criminal homicide.

His record of “misleading the public about the dangers of emissions” exposes the world’s largest private oil companies to second-degree murder charges, said former federal prosecutor Cindy Cho.he wrotein a white paper in June.

For example, Cho noted, the heat wave that hit Maricopa County, Arizona, last summer killed “a lot more [people] than all the murders the county suffered that year.”

Recent research suggests that the potential damage caused by this mistake is on a planetary scale. The main pillars of Earth’s climate are about to collapse due to the rising heat of the coming decades and centuries; By mid-century, scientists estimate, climate change will exert a burden of 38 billion dollars per year on the world economy.

But the letter’s signatories argued that the picture of disorder may be painfully small: lives lost, but also dreams and livelihoods lost.

Jenny Sebold, mother of three, whose Vermont clothing store was destroyed in record floodsworsened by climate changehe said that the waters took “everything”.

“I like to joke that I pay my bills with optimism,” she said, while “rich oil executives continue to make a lot of money.”

Others were even more blunt. “We are tired of being resilient,” said activist Roishetta Ozane of the Lousiana-based advocacy group The Vessel Project in a statement.

This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story