Climate disaster survivors urge Merrick Garland, DOJ to prosecute Big Oil

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the committee in front of which Sharon Eubanks gave testimony in May.

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

The more than 1,000 signatories of Thursday’s letter to the Department of Justice lived through wildfires, floods and heat waves caused or exacerbated 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 their own scientists’ warnings, they waged a decades-long disinformation campaign to muddy the science and confuse and mislead the public.”

Though scientists at fossil fuel companies like Exxon projected current levels of planetary heating with startling accuracy, the industry spent decades fighting climate science, and currently contests federal regulation and financial tools that seek to slow it. 

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

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

On the civil front, there is a wave of “climate superfund” legislation or lawsuits — from seven states, 35 cities and Washington, D.C. — that seek to hold the industry responsible 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 Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calling on Garland to “investigate big oil for its decades long disinformation campaign to mislead the American public.” 

The federal government ultimately took the tobacco industry to court on similar grounds, former federal prosecutor Sharon Eubanks told the Senate Budget Committee in May.

Others argue that civil remedies are not enough. Public Citizen, which authored the letter with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, is coordinating a push by academics and local prosecutors to design a framework to charge big oil companies with criminal homicide.

Their record of “deceiving the public about the dangers of emissions” opens the world’s biggest private oil companies up to charges of second-degree murder, former federal prosecutor Cindy Cho wrote in a white paper in June.

For example, Cho noted, the heat wave that hit Maricopa County, Ariz., last summer killed “far more [people] than all the murders the county experienced that year.”

Recent research suggests that the potential harms caused by this deception are planetary in scale. Major pillars of the Earth’s climate are on track to collapse amid the rising heat of the coming decades and centuries; by mid-century, scientists have estimated, climate change will exert a $38 trillion per year drag on the world economy.

But the letter’s signatories argued that the picture of disorder can be heartbreakingly small-scale: lost lives but also lost dreams and livelihoods.

Jenny Sebold, a mother of three whose Vermont clothing store was destroyed in record floods worsened by climate change, said the waters took “everything.” 

“I like to joke that I pay my bills in optimism,” she said, while “the rich oil execs get to keep making piles of money.”

Others were even more pointed. “We are tired of being resilient,” activist Roishetta Ozane of Louisiana advocacy group The Vessel Project said in a statement.

Updated at 10:15 a.m. Aug. 16