In 2023, Multnomah County filed a nearly $52 billion lawsuit against more than a dozen major oil and gas companies, hoping to hold them responsible for climate change and its local impacts. Now, as Oregonians grapple with a historically dire wildfire season and other worsening climate impacts, oil companies want to get the case dropped.
The fossil fuel defendants in the case argue Multnomah County doesn’t have the legal grounds to sue them. Defendants say the county is trying to use Oregon laws to regulate global activity, and that it’s blaming global emissions for local impacts.
Multnomah County’s lawsuit names companies including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, and NW Natural, as well as industry lobbyists and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The lawsuit alleges the defendants’ actions contributed to climate change-induced disasters locally, and specifically attempts to claim damages from the historic and deadly 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome.
The 2021 heat event saw Portland temperatures rise as high as 116 degrees, and resulted in 69 deaths in Multnomah County. The county characterizes the heat dome as a particularly harmful climate impact, but also notes that the harms from greenhouse gas emissions are “ongoing and will multiply.”
“[The county] lacks sufficient resources to prepare for the enormity of that impending harm and seeks all remedies from Defendants provided by Oregon state law for its damages, past and future, as well as for abatement of such harms,” the lawsuit states.
The county argues the oil companies and the firms that propped them up are culpable, not only due to the emissions generated by their oil and gas products, but also because they spent decades spreading misinformation about the causes and effects of global warming.
The defendants argue the county’s lawsuit is precluded by federal law. During a two-day hearing in Multnomah County Circuit Court earlier this summer, the companies argued that state courts in Oregon lack jurisdiction over their emissions in other states and countries, and thus cannot exert their influence via a state legal challenge.
Similar arguments have been used by fossil fuel companies in cases around the country, including in a case set to be heard by the Supreme Court this fall. The Supreme Court’s decision is likely to impact Multnomah County’s case, as well as similar lawsuits in other jurisdictions.
Defendants also argue the county’s lawsuit conflicts with Oregon’s strong anti-SLAPP law, meant to prevent abusive, anti-free speech litigation. A hearing on the defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion is scheduled for October.
Multnomah County versus Big Oil
Multnomah County’s lawsuit, filed in 2023 and amended in 2024 to add new defendants, is more than 200 pages long, not including exhibits. The lengthy document lays out a multifaceted case against more than a dozen oil and gas companies and several industry collaborators, and seeks damages and relief for the harm their products have caused the county.
The lawsuit says the defendants are culpable for knowingly promoting products that created harmful greenhouse gas emissions in Multnomah County and around the world. It says the defendants’ “false and misleading promotion of fossil fuel products are individually and collectively a cause of Multnomah County’s lack of preparedness” for extreme weather events, including the June 2021 heat dome.
“The severity of the heat dome caused the County to expend enormous financial and human resources that it otherwise would not have, and thus added crushing economic burden upon the County, in tandem with the devastating human toll exacted upon its residents,” the lawsuit states, noting that scientists determined such extreme heat events would be “virtually impossible without anthropogenic climate change.”
The lawsuit alleges that in the late 20th century, fossil fuel companies recognized a growing scientific consensus connecting greenhouse gas emissions to global warming. The county says this behavior made it more difficult for governments, including their own, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for climate change-induced weather events.
As a result, Multnomah County says it faces substantial costs, some more quantifiable than others. For example, the lawsuit lists “the costs to repair and maintain climate change-damaged County owned property” as well as “loss of enjoyment and use of a habitable climate.” All said, the lawsuit seeks nearly $52 billion in relief for past and future costs.
The defendants pushed back on multiple fronts. During a two-day hearing in June on the companies’ joint motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the defendants made their primary argument that if the county’s case succeeded, it would “impermissibly permit Oregon law to be applied to interstate and international emissions beyond the reach of state law.” The defendants also argued against tying their global greenhouse emissions, the vast majority of which have taken place outside of Oregon, to events like the 2021 heat dome.
“The entire gravamen of Plaintiff’s Complaint is that increased global emissions resulted in global climate change that resulted in the PNW heat dome event,” the defendants’ joint motion to dismiss states. “Plaintiff cannot use Oregon tort law to impose liability for out-of-state activities that it believes resulted in excessive emissions.”
David Greenstone, arguing on behalf of the county, said the lawsuit is simple, not “artfully pled or a clever way to hide ulterior motives,” as the defendants insinuated. The case, he said, seeks to use state law to hold the defendants responsible for “their deceptions, misrepresentations, and failures to warn about the dangers of their fossil fuel products that caused Multnomah County to be woefully unprepared for the massive extreme heat event that ravaged the county in 2021.”
“Our case is not about using Oregon law to attempt to regulate interstate or global emissions. Indeed, [it] may end up having no effect at all on the defendants’ emissions,” Greenstone said. “Our case should force the defendants to compensate the county for damage it caused… and if, as a byproduct, it forces the defendants to finally tell the truth about their impact on climate change, that would indeed be a positive result.”
Fossil fuel immunity
In legal documents and in court, the defendants made the case for the global ubiquity of oil and gas products, seemingly in part to argue Multnomah County has no jurisdiction over such an important industry.
“We all rely on oil and gas products. The courthouse, the plaintiff, the county, all of us…. It’s what powers modern life, it’s what got us here,” Theodore Boutrous Jr., an attorney for Chevron arguing on behalf of all the defendants, said early in the June hearing. “When one reads the complaint, they leave that part out. They treat energy and oil and gas as evil, and seek to hold the defendants liable here for basically the way human life has evolved.”
In their motion to dismiss, the oil companies argued the county’s claims lacked the standards “required to ensure this court does not overstep its constitutional bounds and rule on issues—including how to balance environmental interests with economic growth, energy independence, and national security—committed to the political branches.”
Roger Worthington, another attorney helping Multnomah County in its lawsuit, said the defendants are trying to make the case that “this issue is too important and complex for a jury in Multnomah County to decide.”
“It just boggles the mind that the fossil fuel industry lawyers would step into court and basically say, ‘Courts, you’re not equipped to handle this. This is too big for a jury. It is essentially the business of America to extract, refine, and sell fossil fuels,’” Worthington told the Mercury in July. “It’s disturbing to know [the companies] have created this problem, and now they’re saying the problem is so big that the courts are not equipped to handle it.”
Similar arguments have guided ongoing efforts around the country to grant legal immunity to oil and gas companies for their role in the climate crisis. Republican lawmakers in states including Utah, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have recently attempted, sometimes successfully, to pass laws to shield fossil fuel companies from climate lawsuits.
US Representative Harriet Hageman, a Republican from Wyoming, introduced her “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act” to Congress in April, hoping to make it federal law.
“State legislatures and environmental extremists are trying to scapegoat the same producers who keep America running with fines and lawsuits over legal production in the past, lawful activity in the present, and imagined transgressions in the future,” Hageman wrote in a press release. She said her bill would “protect American energy from leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity.”
Fossil fuel companies have also taken their fight to the Supreme Court, which is set to hear a case this fall brought by oil and gas companies that were sued by the county of Boulder, Colorado, in 2018. The Supreme Court case will seek to determine if state relief claims against fossil fuel companies, like the one brought by Multnomah County, are precluded by federal law.
Earlier this summer, Worthington appeared in front of the US House Judiciary Committee after members deposed him to testify in the Committee’s investigation into the Environmental Law Institute (ELI). Republicans on the Committee say the ELI has improperly influenced federal judges to rule in their favor on climate cases. Worthington says he is not, and has never been, involved with the institute. But he believes his work on the Multnomah County case made him a target for Republicans who want to “show trial lawyers and advocates that if you tangle with the fossil fuel industry, you can expect to be harassed.”
As the impacts of the climate crisis worsen, proponents of accountability lawsuits suspect more people will support holding oil and gas companies responsible. They believe efforts to shield the companies from immunity are defensive attempts to quash legitimate pushback against the fossil fuel industry. As Iyla Shornstein, political director at the organization Center for Climate Integrity, put it in a March Inside Climate News article: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t need immunity.”
Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adele Ridenour’s ruling on the defendants’ motion to dismiss the county’s lawsuit is expected soon. Ridenour will also hear the defendants’ anti-SLAPP motions in a two-day hearing, starting October 14.
