Original article by Dana Drugmand republished from DeSmog.

Lawsuit filed against five oil and gas majors and API demands they pay for their decades of deception.

The state of California has jumped into the ring in the fight to hold some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers accountable for their role in driving the worsening climate crisis. On Friday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against five oil and gas majors including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips as well as their chief lobby group the American Petroleum Institute. The lawsuit alleges these entities deliberately deceived the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and their impact on the climate system, and effectively engineered a delayed societal response to addressing the climate problem.

California’s filing adds to a growing wave of climate lawsuits brought by cities, counties and states across the country against Exxon and its industry peers. A handful of the state’s coastal communities led the way in this wave of litigation by filing some of the first cases against fossil fuel companies in 2017 and 2018. Now more than three dozen states and municipalities are taking corporate climate polluters to court.

California has become the eighth state to file a climate liability lawsuit, joining Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Delaware, Minnesota, and New Jersey. Given its sheer size, California’s move to take legal action adds significant weight to this mounting roster of states.

“California’s decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding legal fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, a group advocating for holding climate polluters accountable, said in a statement.

According to the complaint, filed in Superior Court for the County of San Francisco, the defendants “have misled consumers and the public about climate change for decades,” mounting a disinformation campaign to discredit the emerging scientific consensus dating back to at least the 1970s. The alleged deception continues to this day through misleading advertising that greenwashes the companies’ image by portraying them as climate-friendly, the complaint contends.

Misleading advertising is among the charges the lawsuit brings, along with misleading environmental marketing; unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business practices; products liability; pollution and destruction of natural resources; and public nuisance. California is seeking monetary damages.

Noting that just this year the state has suffered from multiple climate-related disasters such as extreme flooding and drought, severe wildfires, and a record-hot summer, the complaint argues that California taxpayers should not have to bear all the costs of dealing with these escalating climate impacts. Instead, “the companies that have polluted our air, choked our skies with smoke, wreaked havoc on our water cycle, and contaminated our lands must be made to mitigate the harms they have brought upon the State,” the complaint states, adding it “seeks to hold those companies accountable for the lies they have told and the damage they have caused.”

Original article by Dana Drugmand republished from DeSmog.