The Case for Sue Big Oil

June 6, 2023

On CBC’s Air Check-in recently, with the wildfires raging across Alberta and BC, the topic of discussion was Climate Change and what are people doing about it.

Caller after caller spoke about all the things they were doing on their part to lessen their carbon footprint: eating less meat, installing solar, geothermal or electric heat pumps, driving an EV or taking public transit, but despite all that they were doing, there was an overall sense of helplessness, despair and eco-grief that not enough was being done.

Despite all the big climate rallies and copious letters sent to our Provincial and Federal Governments to change policies like ending fossil fuel subsidies, stopping the expansion of FF projects and transitioning off FF, nothing was shifting the needle.

The oil and gas companies continue to rake in obscene profits as community after community suffers catastrophic losses from forest fires, flooding, drought and extreme wind storms.

View Royal Council is aware that climate change will impose costs on our residents. In 2018 Council wrote to 20 of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies asking them to commit to pay a fair share of the costs that our community will experience. Mayor Screech wrote:

As a coastal community we are concerned about rising sea-levels. Our community is bordered on two sides by tidal waters (Esquimalt Lagoon and the Gorge Waterway), and we have low-lying land on both sides. Increased winter precipitation is impacting our roads and stormwater management, while summer drought over the past several years has affected our residents.

Planning for and addressing these impacts brings real costs for us as a municipality. Costs like these will only rise as global temperatures increase. …

Just as other industries take cradle-to-grave responsibility for their products, we believe it is only fair that you commit to pay a share of the costs resulting from climate change being borne by View Royal and other communities like ours. (Letter to Royal Dutch Shell, dated January 26, 2018).

We agree with the Sue Big Oil campaign that enough is enough - it is time to take legal action against fossil fuel companies. The alternative is that View Royal will bear a rising tide of climate costs alone. We write to support the recommendation of the Parks, Recreation and Environment Advisory Committee (PREAC) that View Royal Council work towards a class action lawsuit with other BC local governments to recover climate costs from global fossil fuel companies.

Naysayers said it can’t be done and they said the same for suing Big Tobacco and look what happened!

The premise of this campaign is to gather together enough communities to launch a class action lawsuit. Even filing the case and having the courts consider whether to certify the case as a class action would be a huge victory. In a successful certification, the courts would signal that there is a possibility of winning the case. It would send huge shock waves through the oil and gas industry and their shareholders. Any whiff of litigation will make the shareholders jittery and they will start demanding change to the way things are done.

The Council of Canadians have penned an article on why this strategy could work. We need to hit the FF industry in the pocket book and make them pay their fair share of the mounting costs of our climate disasters as well as for the costs of adapting to Sea Level Rise, or retrofitting our buildings with electric heat pumps to help people withstand the heat waves, or the planting of thousands more shade trees, etc https://canadians.org/analysis/extracting-justice/?utm_source=Council+of+Canadians&utm_campaign=c8a76fed96-2023-02-27-E-News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f477a42a0b-c8a76fed96-383949944

As the Guardian recently reported, there are now dozens of US local governments bringing similar cases, and a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has cleared the way for them to proceed: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/25/experts-hail-decision-us-climate-lawsuits-advance

The Sue Big Oil campaign asks View Royal to set aside just $1/resident, towards the costs of filing and certifying the class action: a very small investment with the potential for huge returns. The goal is to get somewhere between 500,000 and a million residents across a multitude of communities signed on in order to launch. Once we can show that the people are behind this, the momentum will only continue to grow.

Sincerely, The VRCC