Climate Disaster Survivors Call For Criminal Investigation Into Fossil Fuel Industry

More than 10,000 survivors and loved ones of survivors of “climate-driven disasters” have signed an open letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) urging an investigation into fossil fuel companies for “climate-related crimes.”

Of the signatories, more than 1,000 were survivors of these disasters and more than 9,000 were loved ones. Public Citizen said they, along with Chesapeake Climate Action Network, delivered the letter to the DOJ.

The letter comes at a time of increased public pressure against the fossil fuel industry and during which climate-related civil lawsuits have increased at an unprecedented pace, and have been mostly successful. 

“The burning of fossil fuels has racked up enormous profits for fossil fuel companies while stoking the fire of climate change and driving increasingly lethal extreme weather events that have destroyed lives, property, and livelihoods,” the letter says. “And the damage is far from over. Communities across the country are battling a summer onslaught of deadly heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfires.”

One of the survivors, Allen Myers, said in a statement, “The 2018 Camp Fire burned down my family home in Paradise, took the lives of 84 neighbors, and left hundreds of families displaced for years.” He added that some of his friends are experiencing the same thing, as the Park Fire devastates homes in Butte County.

“Let’s be clear, the fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry are all over it. The industry continues to ignore the catastrophic consequences of burning fossil fuels, which heats our atmosphere and increases the scale and frequency of disasters. The Department of Justice needs to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable now,” Myers said.

The letter also asserts that fossil fuel companies have known since the 1950s about the dangers posed by the use of fossil fuels, and, in the decades since, waged a “disinformation campaign” to dispel the science and mislead the public.

Indeed, fossil fuel companies have funded research into the possibility of human-caused climate change as early as 1954, when a group of fossil fuel interests backed the study of early modern climate science, according to The Guardian, and according to the BBC, ExxonMobil’s climate change data in the 1970s was at times even more accurate than NASA’s.

It’s possible that fossil fuel companies knew about these risks even before they started funding these experiments, as the idea of climate change was by no means new in the 1950s. Joseph Fourier was likely the first to propose the greenhouse effect in 1824, although it wasn’t named as such until 1901 by Nils Gustaf Ekholm. In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote was the first to show by experiment that carbon dioxide could act as a warming blanket, and in 1938, Guy Callendar connected atmospheric carbon to Earth’s warming.

As for the disinformation campaign the document alleges, that too is well documented. Since at least the 1970s, fossil fuel companies have kept the skeleton of climate change in their closet while lying to the public.