CHICAGO (CN) — Chicago filed a novella-length chancery lawsuit in Cook County against six of the world's largest oil companies on Tuesday, accusing them of lying to the city — and the world — for years about fossil fuels' potential for environmental destruction.
The city outlined 11 claims in the complaint, including product liability, public nuisance, conspiracy, unjust enrichment, fraud and negligence.
It says that BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Shell and Exxon Mobil, along with their predecessors and affiliates, have known about the negative effects of fossil fuel consumption since at least the 1950s. Similar to the lies the tobacco industry once broadcast to consumers about the health impacts of their products, the city claims these oil giants and their partners have waged a decadeslong disinformation campaign to downplay those negative effects and boost their own profits.
For example, it blames the American Petroleum Institute, a large oil and gas trade association that is also named as a defendant, of using non-governmental organization "front groups" like the Global Climate Coalition and the Coalition for American Jobs "to promote climate disinformation and advocacy from a purportedly objective source."
As of 2024, the six defendant companies have a combined market cap of over $1.18 trillion.
"This successful climate deception campaign had the purpose and effect of inflating and sustaining the market for fossil fuels, which — in turn — drove up greenhouse gas emissions, accelerated global warming, and brought about devastating climate change impacts to the City of Chicago," the city says in the suit.
To back up the claim, the city extensively cites research on fossil fuels' effects on Earth and its atmosphere, some of which dated all the way back to the early 1950s and was carried out by oil companies' own scientists. The plaintiffs also point to more recent independent investigations by both journalists and scientists which levied similar accusations at the oil industry.
Some of the same investigations implicated the media in corporations' disinformation efforts, with one 2017 study published in IOPScience describing "advertorials" Exxon Mobil ran in the New York Times for more than two decades.
"In our 2017 study ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)’, we concluded that ExxonMobil has in the past misled the public about climate change," the study's authors wrote. "We demonstrated that ExxonMobil ‘advertorials’ — paid, editorial-style advertisements — in The New York Times spanning 1989–2004 overwhelmingly expressed doubt about climate change as real and human-caused, serious, and solvable, whereas peer-reviewed papers and internal reports authored by company employees by and large did not."
The plaintiffs also describe the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's acceptance of more than $11 million in research funds from BP since 2012 as example of the complicity of some of the region's public and private institutions in the defendants' alleged deception.
Chicago argues the defendants took pains to climate-proof their own infrastructure and prepare internally, even as they downplayed climate risks to the public.
Citing a series of 2015 investigative reports published in the Los Angeles Times, the city claims these climate-proofing efforts included raising and strengthening offshore oil platforms to protect against higher, more violent seas, and developing technology to move fossil fuels through the warming Arctic region.
The city is demanding recompense for this disinformation campaign and asks that the defendants' immense resources are used to help it mitigate some of the ecological damage for which they are responsible.
The city does not claim any violations of federal law, and disclaims any environmental injury arising from the defendants' business with the U.S. military — one of the worst polluters in world history, according to a 2019 study by Lancaster University and backed up by a similar conclusion by Brown University researchers the same year. But it does point to several deleterious effects Chicago and Lake Michigan are now suffering as a result of global warming.
These include "basement flooding and property damage, sewage overflows, contamination of local waterways, and transit disruptions," alongside shoreline erosion and "the potential for toxic algae blooms" in the lake.
“These companies knowingly deceived Chicago consumers in their endless pursuit of profits,” progressive Chicago Alderman Matt Martin, whose city ward abets the Chicago River, said in a prepared statement. “As a result of their conduct, Chicago is enduring extreme heat and precipitation, flooding, sewage flows into Lake Michigan, damage to city infrastructure, and more."
“From the unprecedented poor air quality that we experienced last summer to the basement floodings that our residents on the West Side experienced, the consequences of this crisis are severe, as are the costs of surviving them," Mayor Brandon Johnson echoed in his own prepared comments.
The city's complaint echoes a number of similar lawsuits filed by public bodies against energy industry players over the last several years. These include complaints from San Francisco and Oakland, New York City and Massachusetts.
A study not named in the complaint known as the Carbon Majors Report, published in 2017 by environmental charity CDP, found that just 100 fossil fuel producers, including Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips, were responsible for 71% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions from 1988 to 2015.
According to an analysis released by NASA last month, 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded.
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