Climate Change Lawsuits Wind Through the Courts As Devastating Fires Continue

Within January alone, wildfires in Los Angeles have killed more than two dozen people and burned upwards of 55,000 acres of land, and new fires continue to start.

The destruction comes just 18 months after Hawaii’s wildfires. In August 2023, fires claimed the lives of at least 100 people in Lahaina and destroyed over 2,000 acres of land.

Recovery efforts in both states will take years to complete, and discussions about exactly who is responsible for the heartbreaking devastation will continue.

Climate Change and the Fires

While Americans do not know with certainty that recent extreme weather events that fuel such fires are due entirely to climate change,  conditions associated with it are more commonplace than ever before, including sudden, long periods of rainfall that lead to vegetation overgrowth, followed by extended droughts and parched landscapes,

And with these signs of climate change, coupled with massive fires, have come climate lawsuits with victims seeking compensation for the damage and suffering they, and the cities and towns they live in, have endured. In courts across the country climate lawsuits are pending, filed against entities like gas and utility companies, as well as local governments and municipal agencies, all aiming to hold those accountable for fueling the devastation.

Here’s a look at recent activity involving climate lawsuits:

Jan. 13, 2025: The U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal by lawyers for Big Oil to stop the lawsuit Sunoco vs Honolulu in which the municipality of Honolulu is suing several oil companies for their role in climate change.

The original lawsuit in 2020, said that heat waves linked to climate change had stressed the region’s electrical grid and that a wastewater treatment plant would need to be retrofitted against sea level rise at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It alleges that the oil and gas companies, including Sunoco, Shell, Exxon, Mobil, BP, and Chevron, have known for decades about the dangers of burning fossil fuels on the climate yet kept the information from the public, and because of their negligence they contributed to the costly infrastructure damage.

The defendants’ lawyers argue that the lawsuit seeks to regulate interstate commerce and should be heard in federal court rather than state court.

Hawaii’s state Supreme Court denied a similar appeal in March, when state justices declared that the case did not concern restricting interstate commerce but deceptive marketing grounds. 

In an article in the New York Times concerning the federal court’s decision to deny the appeal,  experts stressed  that if the U.S. justices had accepted the appeal, a ripple effect against plaintiffs in many other climate lawsuits would have occurred and that an eventual decision by “the conservative high court could have later doomed the cases.”

Michael Gerrard is the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. He told the publication that “the theory that the oil companies were using in this case, if it succeeded, would have shut down all those other cases.”

Some other cases include ones filed by the city governments of Baltimore, New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco as well as states including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Minnesota, as well as California. The California lawsuit was filed two years ago, long before the current wildfires in the state. At the time Gov. Gavin Newsom described the damages as part of a “decades-long campaign of deception” that created climate-related harms in California.”

Dec. 18, 2024: In December, Our Children’s Trust, a non-profit public interest law firm well-known for its work advocating for children’s causes and climate concerns, and the Western Environmental Law Center represented youth plaintiffs as the Montana Supreme Court upheld a 2023 district court ruling in their favor in Held v. Montana.

The plaintiffs alleged in the case that the state of Montana, the Governor, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, the Montana Department of Transportation violated their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by promoting the fossil fuel industry. In the original decision, the judge had written that any of the laws limiting the ability of regulators to consider climate effects were unconstitutional and that the state of Montana’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor.”

The judge also conceded that Montana has 5,000 gas wells, 4,000 oil wells, four oil refineries, and six coal mines, causing Montana to be a “major emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, in absolute terms, in per person terms, and historically.”

The state Supreme Court considered the appeal and determined simply that the plaintiffs had shown at trial “without dispute”  that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system with increasing severity “for the foreseeable future.” 

June 21, 2024: Our Children’s Trust also saw success last year in Hawaii, with the case Navahine vs. Hawaii Department of Transportation settling with 13 youth plaintiffs and the state of Hawaii and its transportation division. 

The lawsuit claimed that Hawaii violated the state constitution by operating a transportation system that adversely affects the climate, infringing upon the right to a clean and healthy environment. It also alleged that the Department of Transportation prioritized highway construction over other transportation forms. Just days before the case was set to go to trial, an agreement was reached requiring the state to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 across all modes of transportation, including ground, air, and sea inter-island transportation.

The terms also stipulate that Hawaii must create a greenhouse gas reduction plan within one year. Additionally, the transportation department must complete networks for pedestrians, bicycles, and public transit in coordination with Hawaii counties within five years. The agreement mandates that at least $40 million be allocated to expanding the public electric vehicle charging network by 2030.

Changes in Federal Law: Will Climate Lawsuits Continue?

During his first hours as the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump initiated several executive orders and signed what is known as his National Energy Emergency, declaring there is an immediate need for an increase in fossil fuel production and that “an affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy is a fundamental requirement for the national and economic security of any nation.”

Although the federal government’s change in leadership clearly promotes different energy policies and includes many aspects concerning fossil fuels that climate scientists believe contribute to climate change, it still has yet to be determined what influence these policies will have on climate lawsuits now and in the future.