By Karen Savage

Climate change-driven heat waves have shattered records across the United States over the past several weeks. Globally, June 2020 was tied with 2019 for the warmest June ever recorded.

The extreme heat is doing more than just making us sweat. It has hampered efforts to contain the COVID-19 crisis and endangered our health. Both the extreme heat and the pandemic are disproportionately affecting communities of color. 

But if you’re one of the millions of Americans who get their news from three major networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—you’d never know it, according to research published last week by Media Matters, a non-profit media watchdog group.

Its researchers analyzed 40 separate broadcast segments aired by ABC, CBS and NBC between July 12 and July 19 and found that none of them connected the extreme heat to climate change. Fox News was not included in this research, however the network’s attacks on climate science and climate advocates, as well as its outright climate denial, is well-documented. 

Of the networks analyzed, only three aired segments connecting the heat to the COVID-19 crisis and none mentioned the disproportionate impact all three are having on communities of color.

“Sometimes they talked about it in the kind of terms that you think would suggest climate change, saying extreme heat, saying record temperatures, saying all of these things that are signals that this is a climate moment—and then not going to extra step to say, ‘and this is what is expected in a warming climate,’” said study co-author Allison Fisher, director of Media Matters’ climate and energy program.

“Those few words take two seconds to add on, so it’s not a question of they don’t have the time. It seems almost intentional and to have no one draw the connection was a little bit baffling and quite disappointing,” Fisher said.

The lack of major media coverage of the climate crisis has long played a role in the public’s clouded understanding of the issue. Investigative reporting by InsideClimate News and others has uncovered a decades-long effort by the fossil fuel industry to cast doubt on climate science. Many of the nearly dozen climate change-related lawsuits filed against fossil fuel companies by municipalities across the country include claims related to those disinformation campaigns. Still, the reluctance of television networks to report on climate change—and the current litigation—persists and has a direct impact on communities trying to hold the industry accountable for that deception and for its role in climate change itself: the public can’t support what it doesn’t understand. 

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In the past few years, a growing number of lawsuits have transformed the vague concept of climate liability into a burgeoning legal trend, and today we launch the Climate Docket, a site dedicated to bringing you all the news of those lawsuits. As a non-profit news organization, we’ll bring you coverage of the suits as well as related political and legislative issues.

These lawsuits have the potential to change how the country tackles climate change: instead of an intractable dilemma involving partisan legislation, regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency, it frames the issue as a matter of simple liability. The fossil fuel industry is the overwhelming driver of global warming—and research has shown the industry has known this for more than 40 years and worked to obscure this fact to the public—the plaintiff communities believe it should help pay for the very real damage it causes.

Since 2017, more than a dozen of these climate lawsuits have been filed by municipalities and one state (Rhode Island, so far) against the fossil fuel industry to hold companies accountable for their role in climate change and its costly impacts.

These communities have begun to succeed in steering cases to state courts, the venue they believe give them the best chance for success. Last week, the latest of those jurisdictional victories came when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that a group of lawsuits filed by California communities should be heard in the state courts where they were filed.

Rhode Island, a group of Colorado communities and Baltimore have also convinced federal judges their liability suits belong in state courts.

The lawsuits have sparked furious pushback from the industry and its allies, including trade groups and many Republican state attorneys general. They argue that courts should have no role in tackling climate change, that it should be left to the legislative and executive branches of government. This argument has been successful in the past, particularly in federal court, but the legal tide appears to be shifting.

The fossil fuel industry is also trying to shield itself from facing liability in other ways, including lobbying for liability waivers from the federal and state governments. Such a provision was initially included in a well-publicized carbon tax proposal, the Baker-Schultz plan, that the industry threw its support behind. Oil giants and other high-emitting companies have proposed that their support for the modest legislative proposals being put forth to tackle carbon emissions should shield them from lawsuits.

These are the issues that Climate Docket will cover, without editorializing or advocating. We will have no opinion pieces, just news stories with information from both sides of the issue.

The editorial team will be spearheaded by journalist Karen Savage, who has been covering the issue since the launch of our predecessor site, Climate Liability News, in 2017, and has recently been contributing to Drilled News.

By Dana Drugmand

ExxonMobil has dismissed a shareholder proposal calling for the company to disclose how it plans to align its business with Paris Agreement climate targets, calling it “materially false and misleading.” Other companies with significant stakes in fossil fuels are also resisting similar requests from shareholders to take responsibility for their contributions to climate change.  

The shareholder proposals are a way for investors to push companies to address climate change risks. But oil and gas majors like Exxon and Chevron have been largely unreceptive to them, refusing to include them in the materials that shareholders will consider and vote on at the companies’ annual meetings. The proposals ask the companies to issue a report on reducing their contribution to climate change and how they might align their investments and business activities with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission has previously allowed Exxon and Chevron to block these proposals on alignment with the Paris Agreement. The companies recently filed responses with the SEC saying they plan to once again dismiss the proposals. 

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