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extreme heat
Woman Files First Climate-Related Wrongful Death Suit Against Fossil Fuel Companies
"These fossil fuel actors should be held accountable to the victims of their lethal conduct, and this wrongful death suit provides a compelling new approach for climate victims moving forward."
May 29, 2025
Two years after legal scholars wrote in the Harvard Environmental Law Review that fossil fuel companies could feasibly be charged with homicide in cases of people who are killed by climate-fueled extreme weather events, one woman is taking a major step toward holding oil and gas giants accountable for a specific death—that of her mother, who died during an extreme heatwave in 2021.
Misti Leon filed a civil lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and BP subsidiary Olympic Pipeline Company, arguing that their knowledge going back decades that extracting oil and gas would heat the planet makes them liable for the death of her mother, Juliana.
Juliana Leon, who was 65, was making a 100-mile drive home from a doctor's appointment in Seattle on June 28, 2021 when she pulled over and rolled down her car windows. Emergency workers found her hours later having died of hyperthermia, or overheating, with her body temperature having reached 110°F.
A heat dome had settled over the Pacific Northwest, with high pressure trapping hot air over the region, and the World Weather Attribution later found that the heat dome would have been "virtually impossible" without climate change resulting from fossil fuel emissions.
About 600 more people died in Oregon and Washington in late June 2021 than would have been typical for a one-week period, and Leon is arguing that the death of her mother from hyperthermia, or overheating, was the direct result of fossil fuel companies' actions.
Leon is arguing in the case that, as numerous investigations have found, fossil fuel companies have known for decades that extracting oil and gas would cause planet-heating emissions and could result in extreme, potentially deadly weather events like heatwaves, flooding, and wildfires.
"The purpose of criminal law enforcement is to deter future crimes, promote public safety, punish wrongdoers, and encourage the convicted to pursue less harmful practices. All of these public safety goals apply to Big Oil's continuing contributions to climate change."
"Why shouldn't we hold someone legally accountable for this kind of behavior?" David Arkush, director of Public Citizen's Climate Program and a co-author of the Harvard Environmental Law Review paper, told The New York Times. "There would be no question that we would hold them accountable if they caused other types of deaths. This is no different. They foresaw this, they did it anyway, and they hurt people."
Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund called the lawsuit an "important moment for climate accountability."
Although Leon's case is the first, according to legal experts, to attempt to hold fossil fuel giants accountable for a specific death, it is a significant step in a wider effort to bring the industry to justice for its role in causing weather disasters.
Vermont and New York both passed climate superfund laws last year that would allow the states to hold oil companies financially liable for extreme weather events and force them to pay for damages. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced lawsuits against the two states over the laws.
In the past decade, dozens of localities and states have also filed lawsuits against oil and gas companies for hiding their knowledge of the impact fossil fuel extraction would have on average global temperatures and the climate.
Aaron Regunberg, accountability project director for Public Citizen's Climate Program, said climate disasters like the one that allegedly killed Juliana Leon "are the foreseeable, and foreseen, consequences of specific actions by fossil fuel corporations, CEOs, and boards of directors."
"They caused the climate crisis and deceived the public about the dangerousness of their products in order to block and delay solutions that could prevent heat deaths like Juliana's," said Regunberg. "These fossil fuel actors should be held accountable to the victims of their lethal conduct, and this wrongful death suit provides a compelling new approach for climate victims moving forward."
"The purpose of criminal law enforcement is to deter future crimes, promote public safety, punish wrongdoers, and encourage the convicted to pursue less harmful practices," he added. "All of these public safety goals apply to Big Oil's continuing contributions to climate change, and prosecutors across the country should take note of this new wrongful death suit and carefully consider how the climate effects their constituents are experiencing fit the criminal laws they are charged with enforcing."
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Study Estimates Fossil Fuel Giants Have Inflicted $28 Trillion in Climate Damage Worldwide
As people around the world cope with the worsening effects of planetary heating, "the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically" for fossil fuel giants.
Apr 24, 2025
As planetary heating has fueled increasingly damaging hurricanes, wildfires, and dangerous heatwaves, fossil fuel giants have long been shielded by plausible deniability: Despite scientists' consensus that oil, gas, and coal extraction are polluting the planet and causing global temperatures to rise, they couldn't prove that specific corporations were to blame for worsening climate destruction.
A study published on Wednesday could change that.
Using modeling techniques that have been utilized for more than a decade to explain how climate change is fueling weather disasters, researchers at Dartmouth College estimated that 111 of the world's largest fossil fuel companies have caused $28 trillion in heat-related climate damages so far—slightly less than the value of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.
"The global economy would be $28 trillion richer," reads the study, "were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here."
The study, published in Nature, found that more than half of that amount—which doesn't include damages from hurricanes and other extreme climate events—could be attributed to just 10 oil, coal, and gas companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Russia's state-owned Gazprom, and Saudi Aramco.
"Everybody's asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this?" Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, co-author of the study, told Euronews.
The researchers pursued that question as climate advocates pushed policymakers to adopt the "polluters pay principle": the idea that companies that produce pollution should pay for the damages it causes. Earlier this year, a California Democratic lawmaker introduced legislation that would allow homeowners and businesses to recoup losses caused by climate disasters like the wildfires that devastated parts of the Los Angeles area.
"The global economy would be $28 trillion richer were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here."
New York and Vermont have enacted laws that would hold fossil fuel companies accountable for greenhouse gas emissions and require them to pay for climate damages and adaptation, and other states are considering similar proposals—with oil and gas companies fighting back in court.
Mankin told Euronews that Dartmouth's new research shows that "the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically."
In the past, he said, carbon emitters could ask, "Who's to say that it's my molecule of CO2 that's contributed to these damages versus any other one?"
"We can actually trace harms back to major emitters," he said.
The research team examined the final emissions of the products produced by the 111 largest fossil fuel giants and used 1,000 distinct computer simulations to determine how those emissions impacted changes in the Earth's global average surface temperature, comparing the results to a simulation in which each company's emissions did not exist.
Epidemiologist Ali Khan said the method represented "great improvements in attribution" as at least 68 lawsuits have been filed globally demanding that polluters pay for damages. About half of those lawsuits have been filed in the United States.
"So far, attorneys and litigants have often named defendants as part of the initial legal process, under the assumption that knowing a defendant's emissions is sufficient to make a claim," reads the study. "Science can help claimants assess potential defendants in a transparent and low-cost way."
The researchers determined that Chevron's oil and gas extraction has raised the Earth's temperature by 0.025°C. The company is to blame for an estimated $1.98 trillion in climate damage, behind only Saudi Aramco, which is liable for an estimated $2.05 trillion, and Gazprom, which is responsible for $2 trillion.
Kevin Reed, a professor at Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, told The Washington Post that Dartmouth's research into climate damage attribution is "the real deal."
"This is the first time I've seen this done in a really comprehensive way that isn't just for one specific event," Reed said.
The European Green Party cataloged a number of steps that policymakers could take if $28 trillion had been saved by forcing companies to end their climate-wrecking emissions.
Financing 100% renewable energy would cost just $4 trillion, while guaranteeing universal housing and energy efficiency would cost $3 trillion, said the political party.
"Polluters," said the European Greens, "need to start paying for the damage they are causing to our planet."
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Report Details Record-Breaking Health Threats of Climate Crisis, Fossil Fuel Subsidies
"No individual or economy on the planet is immune from the health threats of climate change," said a lead researcher.
Oct 30, 2024
Over $1 trillion spent each year on subsidizing fossil fuel production must be redirected to public health efforts, said the experts behind a new annual report monitoring progress on the climate and global health.
The 2024 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, published Tuesday in The Lancet by the Lancet Countdown at Universiy College London (UCL), found that delayed action on the climate emergency is exposing people across the globe to record-breaking threats, with 10 of 15 indicators showing that specific health threats have reached "concerning new levels."
"This year's stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet in our eight years of monitoring," said Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown and a senior research fellow at UCL. "Once again, last year broke climate change records—with extreme heatwaves, deadly weather events, and devastating wildfires affecting people around the world."
With 2023 named the hottest year on record earlier this year by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the researchers behind the new report found that the average person experienced an additional 50 days of dangerously hot weather that would not have happened without fossil fuel extraction heating the planet.
Heat-related deaths among people over age 65 reached the highest level ever recorded, 167% higher than in the 1990s and more than double the 65% increase that was expected if temperatures hadn't changed since then.
An additional 151 million people across 124 countries experienced moderate or severe food insecurity last year, an increase that was associated with extreme drought that affected almost half of global land area.
"We must cure the sickness of climate inaction—by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction."
Changing climate conditions across the globe and the flooding that has come with more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms are also fueling a rise in the transmission of infectious diseases like dengue fever, according to the Lancet Countdown, and warmer coastal waters contributed a record-high number of cases of the bacterial infection vibriosis last year.
"The mosquitoes that spread infections like dengue fever epidemics are reaching new countries, and gradually moving north," said Anthony Costello, a professor at UCL Institute for Global Health and co-chair of the countdown.
But despite those indicators and others, said Romanello, "we see financial resources continue to be invested in the very things that undermine our health."
Researchers expressed optimism about rising investments in renewable energy, but warned that new fossil fuel investment accounted for more than a third of new energy spending in 2023, and 84% of world governments continue to subsidize fossil fuel production despite clear warnings from scientists that oil and gas extraction have no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C.
Governments are "in effect paying an estimated $1.4 trillion dollars per year to worsen the crisis," reported The Hill.
Meanwhile, "only 68% of countries reported high-to-very-high implementation of the legally mandated capacities to manage health emergencies in 2023," according to the Lancet Countdown. Just 35% of countries reported having early warning healthcare systems for heat-related illness.
"No individual or economy on the planet is immune from the health threats of climate change," said Romanello. "The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach."
Total carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion reached nearly 40 gigatonnes last year, a 1.1% increase from 2022, contributing to high levels of air pollution as well as changing climate conditions.
"National-level net subsidies exceeded 10% of national health spending in 55% of the countries, and 100% in 27% of them," reads a visual summary of the report. "These funds could be redirected towards supporting the transition to clean energy sources, protect vulnerable populations from soaring climate change risks, and enable a healthy future."
Redirecting fossil fuel subsidies "would provide the opportunity to deliver a fair, equitable transition to clean energy and energy efficiency, and a healthier future, ultimately benefiting the global economy," said Romanello.
Released less than two weeks before world governments are set to convene in Azerbaijan for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29), where climate finance is expected to be a key issue, the report calls for "new strategies and finance for implementation" in order to protect global public health from climate disasters.
"These must acknowledge climate change's effects on health and related systems, assess risks and vulnerabilities, and incorporate resilience to shocks," reads a joint brief by the Lancet Countdown and Médecins Sans Frontières, also called Doctors Without Borders. "Adequate, predictable, and unified climate finance for adaptation and technical support is urgently needed to enable ministries of health and their implementing partners to adopt forward-thinking strategies, integrate anticipatory actions, and enhance flexibility and agility in their operating models."
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the report shows "we must cure the sickness of climate inaction—by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction—to create a fairer, safer, and healthier future for all."
To shift resources toward a "zero-emissions future," said Costello, "people's health must be put front and center of climate change policy to ensure the funding mechanisms protect well-being, reduce health inequities and maximize health gains, especially for the countries and communities that need it most."
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