Intempéries

Several climate court cases have been stuck in legal limbo for years. Now they're about to get a lot more interesting.

“As we speak, oil is spilling in my community every day, people are dying. “If you don’t have money, you can’t drink water. It’s like we are living in a desert, while we are living on the water.”

In 2005, I was the lead counsel on behalf of the US in one of the biggest corporate accountability legal actions ever filed. That trial proved that the tobacco industry knew it was selling and marketing a harmful product, that it had funded denial of public health science, and had used deceptive advertising and PR to protect assets instead of protecting consumers.

Urgenda has become synonymous with a particular kind of lawsuit brought against a state for inaction on climate change. What impact it has had both in the Netherlands and internationally?

After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.