In a win for the fossil fuel industry, a state judge has rejected New York City’s lawsuit seeking to hold oil and gas companies financially accountable for climate change.
New York City filed its case in 2021 under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, alleging — like dozens of similar climate lawsuits nationwide — that the oil industry intentionally misled the public about the role of fossil fuels in worsening climate change. But in a ruling issued Tuesday, state Supreme Court Justice Anar Patel found that the city had failed to show that Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP deceived New Yorkers about the climate effects of their products.
Patel wrote that the city had also claimed that “there is near universal consensus that global warming is primarily caused, or at least accelerated, by the burning of fossil fuels.”
“The city cannot have it both ways,” Patel wrote.
The New York City Law Department said it was disappointed with the ruling and is reviewing its options.
“Our complaint alleged that these defendants spent millions to mislead consumers to think that they, and their products, contribute to a clean energy future. They do not,” said spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci. “Companies that violate the city’s consumer protection laws should be held fully accountable. New Yorkers deserve no less.”
A spokesperson for Exxon, the lead defendant in the case, noted it was the second time a judge has dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by the city.
“At some point our hope is that political figures around the country come to understand that ideological hatred for us doesn’t mean we did anything wrong,” the spokesperson said.
Oil industry allies welcomed the dismissal of the case.
The verdict is a “clear indication that courts in New York and around the country are continuing to see through these allegations and that neither the law, nor commonsense, subjects energy producers and sellers to liability for climate change,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel to the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an initiative of the National Association of Manufacturers, which opposes climate liability lawsuits.
The ruling comes six months after a state judge in Maryland became the first to dismiss a local government’s entire climate change lawsuit. And last January, a state judge in Delaware tossed out parts of the state’s lawsuit against BP, Chevron and other companies.
If other state courts follow their lead, the rulings could slow the momentum of climate liability litigation, which — if successful — could lead to a multibillion-dollar payout to local governments dealing with climate mitigation. Such lawsuits were dealt a major win Monday with the Supreme Court rejecting the industry’s petition to intervene in the cases.
In the New York case, Patel, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, also found that the city had not proven that the companies duped consumers with campaigns about their support for clean energy and alternative energy sources.
She wrote that the alleged greenwashing statements were “inactionable,” adding that the city had in some cases used “distortions of statements that have been taken out of context.”
Patel found that some of the statements — including an Exxon boast that a fuel would help consumers “drive cleaner, smarter and longer” — did not fall under the state’s consumer protection law because they represented “statements of aspiration, opinion, or puffery.”
She cited prior cases to argue that such statements are protected against false advertising claims.
“No reasonable consumer,” she wrote, “would be misled by these subjective, nonspecific, and vague statements to believe that the use of the Invigorate, Shell V-Power® NiTRO+, or Synergy™ fuel products does not contribute to climate change.”
New York City’s lawsuit was filed in April 2021, three weeks after a federal appeals court upheld dismissal of the city’s 2018 lawsuit against Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips. That ruling has become a legal cudgel for the industry.
A federal judge last May rejected the oil industry’s request to transfer the city’s 2021 lawsuit out of state court, where it was first filed, and into federal court.
Patel noted in her decision that the new lawsuit was “effectively re-purposing” many of the allegations in the dismissed 2018 lawsuit to make a claim under the state’s consumer protection law.
Separately, in the Maryland case, the city of Baltimore filed an appeal Monday with the state’s Appellate Court, arguing that the lower court “fundamentally misconstrued the city’s case” when it dismissed the lawsuit.
Judge Videtta Brown of the Baltimore City Circuit Court ruled in July that the city’s 2018 challenge against BP and other oil producers went “beyond the limits of Maryland state law.”
But Baltimore argued in its appeal that its lawsuit doesn’t seek to regulate air pollution and instead targets the industry’s “extravagant misinformation campaign that contributed to the city’s injuries in breach of Maryland tort duties.”
The lawsuit, Baltimore argues, “does not allege defendants violated a legal duty by manufacturing or burning fossil fuels, or by polluting.”
