Multnomah County, Oregon is the latest to join the climate litigation fray, filing a lawsuit against American oil and gas companies on Thursday. This development is hardly a surprise, as familiar players in the climate litigation campaign have been circling the Pacific Northwest for years, paying particularly close attention to the local leadership of Multnomah County.
The New York Times reports, “Multnomah County is suing oil and gas companies including Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.” for damages related to the 2021 heat dome weather event that caused record high temperatures across the Pacific Northwest.
That’s right. The county is suing energy companies, trade associations, and the global consulting firm McKinsey, for a specific weather event that happened in 2021. The lawsuit seeks “$50 million in actual damages and $1.5 billion in future damages,” in addition to a $50 billion “abatement fund.” That’s over $50 billion in aggregate for a lawsuit that the County Commissioner described as about “accountability and fairness.”
However, during a County Commission meeting to discuss filing a climate lawsuit, District 3 Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards made it clear that the plaintiffs in Multnomah County have broad ambitions that go beyond the parameter of a state nuisance lawsuit:
“As the Public Health Authority, the County has a responsibility to take action on behalf of the County residents on significant public health issues. For me, it falls into a case of ‘think globally, act locally,’ and hopefully our local action will have a much broader, global impact.” (Emphasis added)
This sort of “local action” with a much broader goal isn’t a new sentiment for the plaintiffs in these cases. During a Boulder City Council study session in 2021, a top city official revealed that their climate lawsuit is a means of driving “larger systems-level change.” And in 2017, a lawyer supporting a different case said that “[the litigation’s] got the potential really to bring down the fossil fuel companies.”
New Faces, Same Questions
The lawyers representing Multnomah County on a contingency fee agreement are new to this specific kind of climate litigation but are certainly experienced in rounding up settlements from defendants. According to the complaint, Multnomah has enlisted three firms to serve as outside counsel: Worthington & Caron, an asbestos litigation firm; Simon Greenstone Panatier, a firm specializing in toxic exposure; and personal injury attorneys Thomas, Coon, Newton & Frost.
Given the unscrupulous dark money network that props up much of the climate litigation campaign, the massive sum requested by Multnomah County raises several questions:
An Activist-Primed Environment
Rockefeller-funded activist organization Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) has been a key player in the recruitment, support, and initiation of climate litigation, including cases from New Jersey, Minnesota and Annapolis. CCI – to some degree – seems to have primed the environment for Multnomah County’s lawsuit as well.
In 2021, CCI sponsored a climate litigation panel hosted by Lewis and Clark Law School, where attorneys general for Washington State and Oregon spoke. This type of event – a CCI-organized panel discussion focused on the merits of filing state and municipal climate litigation – has been a precursor to lawsuits in multiple instances in the past, including in Hawai’i, Minnesota and New Jersey.
One of the panel speakers, former County Chair of Multnomah County Deborah Kafoury, hinted at the prospect of Multnomah County filing a climate lawsuit by drawing parallels to the public nuisance opioid litigation the county had filed. Kafoury – who has publicly supported Oregon’s youth climate cases and advocated for Multnomah County and Portland to divest from fossil fuels – called for governments to use “every tool at our disposal” to address climate change, including legal action:
“…we must take the fight directly to the corporations that have knowingly sold us a dangerous product and begin building a climate just future today.”
Additionally, Multnomah County Commissioner Chair Jessica Vega Pederson – who made her mark on the Commission by pushing anti-energy policies, including natural gas bans in new construction – and Commissioner Lori Stegmann are both members of CCI’s Leaders for Climate Accountability (L4CA) program, a national network of public officials who aim to recruit states and municipalities to bring climate litigation.
CCI works with L4CA members to “ghost write” op-eds, draft speeches, and essentially run climate litigation campaigns for publicly elected representatives – which then begs the question: did CCI write Pederson and Stegmann’s remarks before the committee voted to file the lawsuit?
Bottom Line: While there are several new elements and new faces involved in Multnomah County’s suit, the funding structure, misaligned incentives, and “global” ambitions are all par for the course for the climate litigation campaign.
As a reminder: climate litigation has so far failed to deliver a penny of the billions of dollars in damages government officials claim to be seeking, and Multnomah County’s lawsuit is yet another case with no guarantee of success. The County would better serve its residents by focusing its taxpayer-funded time and resources on real climate solutions that would actually address the impacts of climate change, rather than investing in frivolous litigation that has little chance of success.
