According to news reports, Vancouver may become the first Canadian city to sue Big Oil for its role in causing the climate emergency.
Companies such as Exxon Mobil, which owns oilsands producer Imperial Oil, are being singled out because they privately researched climate change decades before it was a mainstream issue and determined that burning fossil fuels creates dire global threats. One of the oil executives involved in creating the first oilsands project in Alberta, Robert Dunlop, was warned about the dangers of climate change as early as 1959. But instead of acting on that information, the major oil companies then ran ads throughout the 1990s and 2000s to convince the public that human-induced warming isn’t real. It’s a disinformation campaign that continues to this day.
No Canadian city has yet taken Big Oil to court over climate denial and delay, but such litigation is more common in the U.S., where more than 20 jurisdictions have filed lawsuits asking fossil fuel polluters to pay for the damage caused by their products. Seven oil firms, three coal companies and hundreds of organizations and operatives are among the defendants accused of consumer fraud, racketeering, antitrust, fraudulent misrepresentation, conspiracy to defraud, products liability and unjust enrichment among other crimes.
For 60 years, the fossil fuel industry has known about the global dangers of their products, but instead of warning the public or doing something about it, they turned around and orchestrated a massive campaign of denial and delay designed to protect profits. The evidence cannot be denied or disputed. Big Oil misled the public. They have taken a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook, and if the results of even one of the lawsuits that have been filed is successful, there will be no more bitumen extraction in the Alberta oil sands.
Virginia Smith
Read more: ‘Very early’: Scientists date when humans first came to Alberta’s oilsands region
Read more: Oilsands execs say a ‘just transition’ isn’t a worry — it’s their next big ‘boom’
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