Climate activists employing tort law firms have lost one lawsuit after another in their misguided crusade to bankrupt energy companies by blaming them for the effects of climate change. This isn’t about justice, for victims deserving or otherwise, but instead a nakedly unscrupulous effort to achieve progressive policy ends by ulterior means. 

But it hasn’t panned out, as a growing number of “public nuisance” cases–tried in liberal and conservative jurisdictions and adjudicated by Democrat- and Republican-appointed judges alike–have been dismissed or lost for abusing law, science, and common sense.

Rather than admit defeat and abandon this strategy, however, the lawyers and activists are trying a new approach: wrongful death suits. No longer are oil companies only at fault for statewide climate damages caused by everyone’s CO2 emissions—now the tactic is to make them responsible for specific, individual fatalities. At least that’s the fantastical argument they’re hoping to present in court.

The first such case was filed last month when Washington resident Misti Leon brought a wrongful death complaint in state court against seven major energy companies and a subsidiary pipeline firm claiming the greenhouse emissions from their products contributed to a 2021 heat wave that killed her mother, Juliana Leon. The victim was found dead after a long drive in a car without air conditioning during a record-breaking 108°F day in Seattle.

The lawsuit alleges these companies knowingly altered the climate,
failed to warn the public, and are liable for Juliana’s death by hyperthermia. 

While the tragedy of Juliana’s death is undeniable, this lawsuit is a scientifically preposterous and ideologically driven attempt to exploit personal loss for political gain, masquerading as a quest for justice. 

A flawed premise

The premise of the lawsuit—that oil companies’ emissions directly caused a specific heat wave and, by extension, an individual’s death—is a leap that collapses under even the slightest scrutiny. Climate science cannot pinpoint a single weather event as the direct result of any one company’s actions. CO2 emissions are a global, cumulative phenomenon, with contributions from countless sources—industrial, agricultural, and individual. Furthermore, there are so many other factors beyond CO2 emissions that could affect particular weather events.

When global warming skeptics employ this curious logic in the opposite direction, using specific weather events like heavy snowfall to debunk climate change, environmental activists rightly highlight the flawed logic: you can’t deny a global phenomenon based on regional weather events. “… [W]hat happens locally, or over short periods of time, is not necessarily representative of what’s happening nationally and globally,” Yale University’s Center for Environmental Communication explains.

Yet when Leon claims that “each Defendant is transacting or has transacted substantial business in Washington,” she is committing the same fallacy by trying to tie global phenomena to company-specific operations in a single state. As judges presiding over previous climate cases have concluded, the plaintiffs can’t have it both ways.

It’s simply untenable to allege a global corporate conspiracy
while demanding restitution for a local tragedy. 

The lawsuit’s reliance on attribution science, which estimates the likelihood that climate change made an event more probable, underscores this problem. It’s widely recognized within mainstream climatology that “Event attribution is not ready for a major role in loss and damage” claims, as a recent article in the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change observed. One of the key reasons for this conservative stance toward attribution science is that it’s based on complex models built on myriad assumptions about the atmospheric conditions across entire countries–and around the world.

Legitimate wrongful death claims require clear causation and foreseeability. Here, the chain is impossibly attenuated: emissions from multiple companies, mixed globally over decades, allegedly intensified a heat wave, which, combined with Juliana’s tragic personal circumstances (a long drive with no air conditioning, diagnosed comorbidities, and recovering from major surgery), led to her death. There is simply no reasonable way to leap from existing attribution studies to that conclusion. 

Rehashing “Exxon Knew”

The lawsuit’s narrative hinges on the claim that these companies “knew” their products would cause “catastrophic climate disasters” yet misled the public. “Defendants have concealed their knowledge of and deceived the public about these risks,” Leon’s complaint alleges, “hooking consumers on fossil fuels without their understanding or consent to the risk of harm to themselves, others, and the planet.”

The gaping flaw in this logic was recently exposed by a Delaware judge presiding over a related climate suit, which also blamed specific damages in the state on the oil industry. As Firebreak’s analysis of that case pointed out, the “Exxon Knew” trope is based on the assumption that the effects of climate change have been “open and obvious” for decades. The plaintiffs, Ms. Leon included, are desperately trying to accuse the energy industry of successfully denying a phenomenon that everyone has been aware of for decades. The plaintiffs’ response to this criticism? Dead silence. As the Delaware judge observed in her decision: 

“There were reports and stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times that warned the public about global warming and the deception used by oil and coal industries … Defendants have provided evidence showing that the general public had knowledge of or had access to information about the disputes, regarding the existence of climate change and effects, decades prior …This information and evidence is unrefuted by the State.”

While it’s true that energy companies conducted internal research on the potential environmental impacts of their products–as all companies do as part of basic risk management scenario building–so did governments, universities, and other industries. What all of these groups have in common is that they wanted more information about the potential risks, and tradeoffs, of an extremely useful and civilizationally pivotal source of energy. 

Combined, these knowledge seekers built a gradual, evolving scientific consensus on global warming—which is far less alarmist than the public has been told. For instance, it’s now widely recognized by many experts (even if with a degree of disappointment) that a runaway warming scenario is highly unlikely.

The fact that energy companies contributed to this consensus about climate change isn’t scandalous—and it’s certainly no justification for a wrongful death suit. Internal industry documents from decades ago confirm that oil companies were studying long-term climate trends, but they certainly didn’t have a crystal ball that predicted the effects of warming half a century later.

Thanks for the cheap energy, see you in court 

The overarching problem with Ms. Leon’s claim is that fossil fuels power modern civilization with the literal and figurative “buy-in” of governments, businesses, and citizens. As willing consumers of abundant food, affordable electricity, life-sustaining and life-saving tools, and medical devices, we are, all of us, undeniably contributors to the effects of climate change, whatever they turn out to be. 

The lawsuit’s accusation of a grand conspiracy sidesteps this shared responsibility for social choices, painting oil companies as singular villains. We can’t build a sprawling, global civilization powered by oil and gas and then turn around and sue the industry that supplied us with so much inexpensive energy. Quite literally every plaintiff in these climate damage suits–every city, state, and now individual–has been and continues to be a longtime customer of the fossil fuel industry. The hypocrisy is off the charts.

Demand for justice or ideological crusade?

And while Leon’s complaint frames the suit as a quest for justice, her demands expose just how disingenuous the case is. Beyond unspecified damages, Misti Leon seeks to force these companies to fund “a public education campaign to rectify Defendants’ decades of misinformation.” This smacks of activism, not justice. It suggests the goal is less about compensating a loss than about scoring points in the culture war over climate policy. 

The Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group backing the case, frames it as a landmark effort to hold “Big Oil” accountable. Yet, their rhetoric—calling the lawsuit the first to tie an individual death to a “climate disaster”—reveals a strategy of emotional manipulation, leveraging Juliana’s death to galvanize public sentiment rather than establish legal merit. 

Ultimately, this lawsuit cheapens a genuine tragedy. Juliana Leon’s death should be mourned, not exploited. Climate change is a real challenge, but addressing it demands rigorous science, honest policy, and collective action. Frivolous lawsuits that clog courts don’t aid in those efforts. This case, like many before it, will likely falter under its own weight, a cautionary tale of zeal outpacing reason.