Several states are suing Big Oil over climate change, but is Ohio one of them?

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Three years ago, a report produced by two Ohio environmental groups estimated municipalities across the state will spend $1.8 billion to $5.9 billion by 2050 to combat the effects of climate change.

The report -- titled “The Bill is Coming Due: Calculating the Financial Cost of Climate Change to Ohio’s Local Governments” -- was pitched as a conservative assessment of the financial burden over time.

And that assessment hasn’t gotten any better, said Joe Flarida, executive director of Power a Clean Future Ohio, which sponsored the report along with the Ohio Environmental Council.

“I would say what we’re seeing is worsening impacts over the years since,” Flarida said.

The report predicts crumbling roads, hotter school rooms and the need for enhanced water treatment among other consequences of climate change that will have to be reckoned with over time.

“Part of what the report is getting at is there is a financial liability that municipalities are facing and that someone needs to pay for it,” Flarida said.

What the report didn’t do, however, is say who should foot that bill. Flarida said an option local governments are discussing is suing Big Oil.

Make them pay

One way state and local governments across the country are looking to cover the cost of climate change – although it hasn’t caught on in Ohio – is to extract payment from the petroleum industry.

The Center for Climate Integrity is currently tracking climate change lawsuits in 10 states and Washington, D.C. Most of the action is along the East and West coasts, although plaintiffs in the Midwest include the city of Chicago and the state of Minnesota. Michigan is also expected to file suit.

The legal theory, to a large degree, is that oil and gas companies knew burning fossil fuels would lead to climate-related disasters and that they deceived the public into thinking otherwise.

It’s analogous to the way plaintiffs sued the tobacco industry for lying about the hazards of smoking and Big Pharma for peddling addictive painkillers without adequately warning about the risks involved.

“Lying is the key,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity. “They knew what they did.”

Victor Flatt, an environmental law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said that while deception on the part of oil companies is central to many of the lawsuits, others simply require a showing of harm.

The lawsuits against Big Oil – as with those against the tobacco and opioid industries - don’t seek to stop production, but to demand that the industry be made to account financially for the damages caused from the release of carbon into the atmosphere over many years.

Ohio not on board

While some municipalities in Ohio are thinking about joining the legal movement, up to this point there does not appear to be much interest.

Ohio has not been a player for a couple reasons, Flatt said.

One is the conservative nature of the General Assembly. Republicans are generally opposed to tort lawsuits against big business, he said, and the legislature could ban local governments from taking such legal action if they wanted to.

The other is that the climate-related incidents in Ohio have been less severe than those experienced elsewhere, such as major flooding in Houston, western North Carolina and central Texas, or the 69 deaths in Multnomah County, Oregon, in 2021, blamed on a heat dome over the region.

That’s not to say Ohio isn’t at risk.

One of the climate-related dangers facing older, Great Lakes cities such as Cleveland is excessive heat, which can potentially turn deadly as it did in Chicago in 1995, killing more than 700 people, said Nicholas Rajkovich, an associate professor of architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he focuses on climate adaptation.

Another is flooding. As Lake Erie warms up from climate change, areas downwind are going to see more precipitation, especially in the fall, he said. And warmer air holds more of the lake’s evaporation, which is then released during heavy storms, potentially overwhelming stormwater systems like the one in Cleveland.

“The local impacts of climate change are really going to be different from location to location,” he said.

Rajkovich said Cleveland’s aging housing stock will need to be weatherized with insulation so that air conditioning in the summers won’t overburden the energy grid.

Ohioans are also likely to suffer more bad air over time as drought-related wildfires in Canada spew smoke across the region, Flatt said. Cleveland was especially hard hit two summers ago.

In Cuyahoga County, where County Executive Chris Ronayne has made fighting climate change a priority, the discussion has not been about suing Big Oil but more about what can be done at the local level to reduce carbon emissions.

Projects include creating microgrids of largely renewable power that can operate independently of the public utility and provide protection against blackouts. There’s also efforts to expand the tree canopy to soak up carbon in the air and reduce the heat-island effect in urban areas.

“It is clear that there’s a local cost to climate change that local governments are starting to experience around the world,” said Jenita McGowan, chief of sustainability and climate for the county.

But Cuyahoga County has no plans to sue Big Oil.

McGowan said it is unclear whether lawsuits would be an effective way to obtain the money needed to pay for the local impacts of climate change.

“I think it’s just a big wait-and-see there,” she said of the legal strategy.

McGowan said a more plausible approach might be what Vermont is doing - and what New York, Maryland, California and Massachusetts are considering: assessing a carbon fee on the state’s largest emitters.

Meanwhile, “We’re focused on doing good work right now,” she said.

A battle is shaping up

In other parts of the country, legal action is an option that’s been settled upon. The states of Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, California, New Jersey, Delaware and Hawaii have filed suit, as have a number of local governments, including New York City; Honolulu, Hawaii; Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Charleston, South Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; and Hoboken, New Jersey. Several California cities and counties filed cases early on in 2017.

“There has been a steady drumbeat of these cases,” Wiles said, with more to come.

He said several of the cases have already “passed the motion-to-dismiss” phase, which means they are likely to go to trial. Others that have been dismissed in the lower courts are on appeal.

Most of the lawsuits don’t focus on a single event as the basis of their claims, he said, but on the need for communities to gird themselves generally against an expected increase in weather-related ravages over time.

It remains to be seen if the tragic flooding along the Guadalupe River in central Texas will trigger a climate change lawsuit, he said, because plaintiffs there would have to specifically show the storm that caused the disaster was made more intense by global warming.

“For any case based on a single event you have to wait for the science to come in,” he said.

The fact that some of the lawsuits are moving forward in the courts has the industry concerned, Wiles said. In June, attorneys general from 16 states, including Ohio, signed a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi asking the Trump administration to shield the oil companies from climate-related liabilities.

“These suits, invoking flimsy legal theories and flawed models, seek billons of dollars,” states the letter to Bondi. The signatories go on to state support for Trump’s energy policy.

“Lawfare against the energy industry is deeply damaging,” the letter states. “It threatens our shared economic prosperity, energy independence, and national security.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the trade association that represents the oil and gas industry, did not respond to a request from cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer seeking comment.

Wiles said attempts to have the federal government indemnify oil and gas companies are improper and said politics should not play a role in deciding what happens.

“This really shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” he said.

Said Rajkovich: “People can talk about who should pay for the costs linked to climate change, but at the end of the day we’re all going to end up paying for this one way or another.”

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