Calgary-based Encana named in California climate change lawsuits

A Canadian energy company is named in three large lawsuits that attempt to link damages from climate change to industry’s alleged attempts to hinder action to address it. In the latest of a growing number of such lawsuits around the world, Calgary-based Encana is one of 20 energy majors and their subsidiaries facing claims from three California communities. They allege the companies have deliberately sown misinformation and doubt on climate change and are at least partially responsible for related damages such as shoreline erosion. “Defendants ... have known for nearly a half century that unrestricted production and use of their fossil fuel products create greenhouse gas pollution that warms the planet and changes our climate,” says the lawsuit filed by the City of Imperial Beach. “They have nevertheless engaged in a co-ordinated, multi-front effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge of those threats, discredit the growing body of publicly available scientific evidence, and persistently create doubt in the minds of customers, consumers, regulators, the media, journalists, teachers, and the public about the reality and consequences of the impacts of their fossil fuel pollution.” Encana has not responded to requests for comment. The lawsuits, filed Monday in California, draw on legal precedents used against tobacco companies, which reached a U.S. settlement of US$368.5 billion in 1998. “The plaintiffs have an uphill battle, but these are plausible claims,” said Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Burger said that, like tobacco companies, the energy industry knew its business was creating problems. Reports quoting documents from Exxon’s archives suggest its management was told by its own scientists about greenhouse gases and climate change as early as 1977. Instead of addressing the problem, the lawsuits allege, industry deployed think tanks, lobbyists and other means to obscure the science and resist regulation — much like the tobacco industry. “You have a similar history of corporate malfeasance,” said Burger. But the climate lawsuits will have a much tougher time linking specific damages to industry actions, he said.