Puerto Rico Dismissal Deals Climate Lawfare Campaign Another Setback

Oil company defendants in a lawsuit claiming damages related to climate change celebrated another victory on September 11 after a U.S. district court judge in Puerto Rico dismissed a case brought by thirty-seven municipalities. The case, part of an ongoing lawfare effort in which local governments have been recruited to serve as plaintiffs, sought to hold the companies liable for damages the island suffered as a result of Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico in 2017.

Federal District Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll dismissed the case based largely on the fact that it wasn’t brought until 2022, after the four-year statute of limitations had expired. Judge Carreño-Coll further ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to establish that all the ten named defendants, along with various unnamed companies and individuals even had sufficient connections to Puerto Rico to justify the filing of the lawsuit to begin with.

“The only contact with Puerto Rico alleged in the amended complaint is membership in trade associations,” the judge writes on Page 42 of her lengthy decision, “something that was ‘performed in the US with US groups and targeted US legislation and the US public, including the Municipalities and their citizens in Puerto Rico.’”

Theodore Boutrous, Jr., counsel for Chevron in the case, praised the judge’s decision to dismiss, saying that she “correctly ruled the claims were long-since time barred, because ‘there is overwhelming evidence of public knowledge of articles, reports, and cases’ making the same allegations many years before these plaintiffs’ belated lawsuit. The civil justice system exists to resolve current disputes, not to attack and second-guess policy resolutions that have been widely discussed and grappled with openly since Lyndon B. Johnson was president.”

Phil Goldberg, Special Counsel for the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, said in a statement that the decision to dismiss the case “the strong trend among courts nationwide that these cases are legally unsound and counterproductive. Litigation is not a substitute for meaningful climate action, and we urge policymakers to focus on collaborative efforts that deliver real and lasting climate solutions.”

Despite the favorable ruling for the defendants, however, the judge also pointed out that she was not ruling on the merits brought by the plaintiffs. Richard Wiles, the president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said that means “the door is still open for others to bring similar racketeering claims against the fossil fuel industry.”

The plaintiffs’ case overall suffers from the same reality that has plagued previous cases involved in this lawfare effort: That a decision in favor of the plaintiffs would open the door to state and local regulation of air emissions. This is an area of regulation which the federal courts have consistently and repeatedly ruled to be the sole province of the federal government under the Clean Air act. The American Petroleum Institute’s general counsel, Ryan Meyers, was quoted by the New York Times as saying in a statement that the decision again shows that “climate policy should be decided by congress, and not the courts.”

Judge Carreño-Coll’s decision is also among the first of these cases to establish more prominently the expiration of the statute of limitations as a key element justifying dismissal, an argument made by the defendants in several of the other cases which have been part of this long campaign. As importantly, it is also the 11^th time in which a federal or a state court has ruled in favor of the defendants to dismiss a case at the motion to dismiss phase.

Though perhaps on life support now, this lawfare campaign remains alive with cases brought by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, and the city and county of Honolulu, Hawaii still making their ways through the court system. API’s Meyers, in concluding his statement on the matter, characterized the long-running lawfare as an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers is nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of taxpayer resources.”

To this point, most federal and state judges who ultimately decide these lawfare cases seem to agree with that assessment.