Groundbreaking Lawsuit Accuses Big Oil of Conspiracy to Deceive Public About Climate Change

Attorney Stephen Susman helped file a groundbreaking lawsuit earlier this year on behalf of 400 Inupiat villagers in the Alaskan town of Kivalina who are being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by global warming. The suit accuses twenty oil, gas and electric companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and Peabody, of being responsible for emitting millions of tons of greenhouse gases causing the Arctic ice to melt.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, a judge in Georgia blocked the construction of a coal-fired power plant, because the plant did not set limits on carbon dioxide emissions. In what’s being described as an unprecedented ruling, the judge said the plant could not receive an air pollution permit unless it limits its emissions.

Today, we’re going to look at the rapidly growing field of global warming litigation. I’m joined here in Aspen, Colorado by the attorney Stephen Susman. He’s the founding partner of the law firm Susman Godfrey. Earlier this year, he helped file a groundbreaking lawsuit on behalf of 400 villagers in the Alaskan town of Kivalina. They’re being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by global warming.

The suit accuses twenty oil, gas and electric companies of being responsible for emitting millions of tons of greenhouse gases, causing the Arctic ice to melt. Companies named in the suit include ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and Peabody. The suit also accuses eight of the corporations of being involved in a conspiracy to mislead the public about the causes of global warming.

Susman and his legal team have adopted a legal strategy similar to that used by lawyers who fought Big Tobacco in the 1990s. Stephen Susman was also involved in that litigation: he was an attorney for the tobacco giant Philip Morris.

Stephen Susman also recently represented the Texas Cities for Clean Air Coalition in their successful effort to block the energy company TXU from building ten new coal-burning power plants. The case was featured in Robert Redford’s documentary Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars.

Attorney Steve Susman joins me here in Aspen, Colorado. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

STEPHEN SUSMAN: Pleasure to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about this lawsuit.

STEPHEN SUSMAN: Well, this lawsuit was—in these cases, you need to find the right plaintiff. This was the perfect plaintiff, because it was a village that has—a Native village that has standing under federal law to bring a lawsuit. This is not a class action. The problem with all the tobacco cases, initially, was that they had to be brought as class actions. Individuals’ injuries were too different to be asserted in a class action, so none of the tobacco cases were certified for class treatment. They became successful when the lawyers figured out a way to represent the states, and they didn’t have to be class action, so the state was the perfect plaintiff seeking Medicaid reimbursement. Here, we have a perfect plaintiff: they have federal law standing to sue for injuries to their village, because they’re a Native tribe—it does not have to be a class action—and they have sustained the most direct kind of injury and of interest from global warming.

An increase in the ambient temperatures in the Arctic prevents the sea ice from forming on the seaward side of this six-mile-long barrier island. And as a result, the harsh storms during the fall and winter wash over the island and are about to wash it away. So there is a direct consequence of the increase in temperatures. You know, you can think of other harms from global warming that are more indirect, like damages from storms. Kivalina was one of those, where, you know, well, the storms—the global warming warms the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream creates more severe weather, where the causation is more tenuous. Here, it was direct, people directly injured. The Corps of Engineers says that it will cost between $100 million and $300 million to relocate them to the mainland, which has to be done. And so, they were the perfect client.

They asked us to file this lawsuit on their behalf. A group of lawyers organized themselves and are doing it. And we hope that the court will let us proceed with our claim that many of the defendants in our case—the case is very simple. The case is a nuisance case. The theory is basically, you can’t do something on your property that prevents the enjoyment of mine. I mean, if you were barbecuing and ashes from your barbecue pit fell on my house and burned it up, that’s a perfect nuisance case, and you would be liable under the common laws, as long as we’ve had common law. Now, this is a little more direct, because what they’re putting in the atmosphere hurts everyone in the world, for sure, and there are a lot of people putting the stuff up there. So it’s very difficult—impossible to get all of the wrongdoers in the same courtroom. And that’s where we’re testing the theory.

So that’s why we filed the lawsuit. We hope that we will be able to proceed with the lawsuit. And all we are seeking here is not a big pile of money, but to have the oil companies relocate these people to the mainland. If they don’t want to relocate them, let them build a barrier, some kind of barrier wall around the island so they stay where they are.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, this isn’t the first lawsuit brought around the issue of global warming—

STEPHEN SUSMAN: No.

AMY GOODMAN: —but it’s the first one brought around the issue of conspiracy to deceive.

STEPHEN SUSMAN: That’s true. This is the first lawsuit where the claim is made that the defendants, principally organized by ExxonMobil, have organized and orchestrated collusively a movement to deceive the public about whether global warming was occurring, whether it was occurring by cause of manmade activity or something else, and as a result, the public didn’t demand changes and let this go on for so long.

I mean, one of the most phenomenal things about the defendants—I can only call it chutzpah—is that they have now filed on us, which I have here—they’ve filed on us, June 30th, eight motions to dismiss our lawsuit. One of the motions is that our claim is barred by the statute of limitations, that these 400 people waited too long to file their lawsuit. Can you imagine that? And yet, that’s why the conspiracy did injure us. I mean, people did not realize until fairly recently what was causing all this to happen and who was causing it. And the defendants, yet, come in and say, well, you waited too long to file your lawsuit.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you prove that these companies worked in conspiracy? I mean, you’ve got the biggest oil companies in this country, like ExxonMobil, like Chevron, and then you’ve got BP, you’ve got ConocoPhillips.

STEPHEN SUSMAN: Well, I am confident—first place, there’s a lot of public material on this about the denial community, how Exxon and others have financed organizations that are claiming that—and bogus science that claim that global warming is not occurring, that it’s a natural phenomenon. And so, you can go on the internet and get a lot of activity of these organizations that they finance and support and who the members are. And so, you begin putting things together.

Now, obviously, you normally—because conspiracy is not something people do in public—it’s done in the, you know, candlelight in the tower. Obviously, we need discovery from the defendants. And it’s our hope that we will find in their files documents very much like the plaintiffs’ file and in the tobacco companies’ files, the tobacco papers.

AMY GOODMAN: You mean, in your files?

STEPHEN SUSMAN: No, I mean—yeah, well, I guess in my files, yes, and in the files of Philip Morris and others who I was representing—

AMY GOODMAN: You were the general counsel for Philip Morris.

STEPHEN SUSMAN: No, I was one of their national counsel defending the class actions brought—I was set to go to trial in Mississippi against Mr. Scruggs, who was the plaintiffs’ lawyer at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Trent Lott’s brother-in-law.

STEPHEN SUSMAN: That’s right, who’s now chopping stones somewhere. But I was set to go to—I was defending the tobacco industry, but one of our big problems was that they had alleged a conspiracy of the tobacco companies to deny that cancer was being caused by smoking. And when they got in the files, they found all these memos from executives—let’s finance this project, let’s pay this doctor to do this—and communications among the tobacco companies, and they were members of a trade association. Well, it’s our hope that—and I believe we will find climate or global warming papers, or whatever you want to call them, when we get into the discovery against these defendants, that establish that they knew what they were doing and they participated in it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you must know what these lawyers for the other side are feeling like, because you were one of them, when it came to Big Tobacco.

STEPHEN SUSMAN: Yeah, they are thinking this is ridiculous.

AMY GOODMAN: Is that what you thought?

STEPHEN SUSMAN: Huh?

AMY GOODMAN: When the big—

STEPHEN SUSMAN: Yes, or I would have represented the plaintiffs in the tobacco cases. I thought it was ridiculous. I thought these theories were bizarre. They had never been tested. The tobacco companies will never settle. And so, why should I take on such a risky thing? And so, I turned down an opportunity to represent Massachusetts and Texas as plaintiffs. A month later, Philip Morris—

AMY GOODMAN: And again, those plaintiffs were bringing suit against Philip Morris and the other companies for…?

STEPHEN SUSMAN: Medicaid—reimbursement of Medicaid expenses that they had paid for citizens for cancer treatment. Then I went to work for Philip Morris. And of course, a few years later, when the tobacco companies paid billion dollars and public health was changed in the world forever, because you cannot smoke cigarettes anywhere now, when that happened, of course, I realized, boy, did I make a mistake. I was on the wrong side of the docket. And so, now in my life, as I get older, I have an opportunity to be on the right side of the docket, maybe.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Stephen Susman. He’s with us for the hour. When we come back from break, we’ll also be joined by one of the leading climate scientists in this country—he’s Harvard physicist John Holdren—and we’ll talk about the issue of, well, he calls it “global climate disruption."