The city of Chicago is prosecuting five oil and gas companies and a business group that represents their role in climate change and its role, arguing how companies mislead the public how the use of fossil fuels affects the welfare of the residents of the city.
The suit filed in Cook County Circuit Court on Tuesday alleged BP, Chevron, Shell, Conocophilips, Exon Mobil and American Petroleum Institute that they increase “climate deception” about burning fossil fuels to protect their profits.
Chicago is the latest in a group of government bodies that are taking legal action against fossil fuel distributors on how climate change has affected cities and states. According to a release from the Center for Climate Integrity, the cities of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregan, South Carolina and Puerto Rico have taken similar action since 2017.
Chicago, Chicago firm Dicellow Levit and San Francisco firm lion adulting are represented by their own lawyers and lawyers, who are not demanding a specific amount from the defendants. However, it is demanding that they reimburse the city on climate change incidents such as infrastructure and property damage costs.
Since 1980, Chicago dwellers have to argue the lawyers, along with low ice coverage, summer waves, snow deficiency and more heavy rains, as well as damage related to climate change for the city’s infrastructure and housing, along with low snow coverage on the lake Michigan and other lakes.
The disadvantage “has been high in low -income communities and communities, who historically experienced racial, social, health and economic inequalities,” reads the case.
The suit also discovered that 2023 was the hottest year on records and points to predict an increase in extremely hot days.
The hopes of transporting the Chicago region this week expect a warm weather
To prepare for those forecasts and other weather events, Chicago must build a new infrastructure to face more intense weather and correct losses: The city plans to invest about $ 200 million to protect the city’s weakest areas from climate change consequences.
The lawyers argued in the filing that companies have known for decades that their products would produce atmospheric warming.
Despite this knowledge, the later efforts of companies to maintain widespread use of fossil fuels, “increased greenhouse gas emissions, intensified global warming, and said about the destructive climate change effects for the city of Chicago,” said the suit.
The lawsuit compares advertising efforts of companies for people in the tobacco industry in response to public health research about the effects of smoking.
Parallel to companies’ own marketing efforts, the suit argues that the American Petroleum Institute helped campaigning to sow doubts about climate change, prolonging the use of fossil fuels, and rapidly intensified climate change for the obstruction of Chicago dwellers.
In the statement, the institute’s lawyer Ryan Mayors called the action “meritless” and “a major waste of taxpayer resources”, arguing that the climate policy was the domain of the Congress, not the cities.
According to court records, a case management hearing is scheduled for June 20.