BREAKING: Michigan intends to sue Big Oil

Attorney General Dana Nessel said her office will seek to recover climate costs from fossil fuel majors on behalf of the state.

May 09, 2024

Emily Sanders is senior reporter at ExxonKnews.

Attorney General Dana Nessel just announced that Michigan is taking steps to sue Big Oil, arguing that the companies that hid the dangers of burning fossil fuels should bear the costs of climate damages now facing communities across the state.

"Big Oil caused these problems and they ought to pay the expenses related to these damages," Nessel told The Detroit News.

According to a request released by the attorney general’s office today, Nessel will seek proposals from law firms and attorneys to serve as Special Assistant Attorney General in a case against oil majors for “deceiving the public about the climate changes that they knew their products would cause, and for the costs the State of Michigan has spent and will continue to spend to address and recover from the impacts of climate change.”

The request details the “catastrophic and [potentially] irreversible consequences” of a changing climate in Michigan, including extreme weather events, rising seas, drought, harmful algae blooms, increased invasive species and disease-bearing pests, and warmer ocean and atmospheric temperatures. Those impacts come at great expense to the state’s residents and resources, including increased strain on public services, healthcare, infrastructure, and recreational industries, and threats to land and lives, the attorney general’s office explained.

Nessel said her office was working with other state departments on a “massive discovery effort” to assess the range of Michigan’s climate costs, which could include upgrading storm water systems to adapt to more intense flooding, responding to climate-driven disasters and supporting the state’s tourism economy.

“These impacts threaten not only our way of life but also our economy and pose long-term risks to Michigan’s thriving agribusiness,” Nessel said in a statement. “The fossil fuel industry, despite knowing about these consequences, prioritized profits over people and the environment. Pursuing this litigation will allow us to recoup our costs and hold those responsible for jeopardizing Michigan’s economic future and way of life accountable.”

Michigan’s case would likely target the same oil and gas giants as other lawsuits have — like Exxon, Shell, Chevron and BP — but could also include utilities and other climate polluters, according to Nessel’s interview with the Detroit News.

Michigan has a history of taking legal action to help communities recover damages from corporations that deceived the public. Michigan and other states sued Big Tobacco for deceitful advertising and marketing about the health harms caused by tobacco, and through a historic 1998 settlement the state has received billions of dollars in payments to help offset healthcare costs in the state associated with smoking. Since Nessel took office in 2019, she has sued PFAS manufacturers for knowingly marketing and distributing the dangerous “forever” chemicals to Michigan residents, as well as major drug distributors for their role in the opioid crisis.

Now, the state is poised to join eight other states and a growing number of communities across the country seeking to hold the industry accountable for campaigns of climate denial they say delayed action for decades.

“I hope that we're at a place right now, where people no longer believe the lies that have been propagated by this industry,” Nessel told Bridge Michigan. “Just the way that people now have come to understand how badly Big Tobacco lied to us and how badly the drug manufacturers and distributors lied to us, that they know now that the fossil fuel companies did the same.”

The evidence of those lies is rapidly growing as the industry comes under sharper scrutiny — just last week, Congress unveiled new documents following a years-long investigation into Big Oil’s evolving deception.

According to lawmakers’ report, oil companies and their trade associations tried to obstruct that investigation by redacting documents and failing to hand others over to committees in the House and Senate. The industry has tried to avoid facing evidence in court, too, attempting to get cases dismissed by arguing its deceptive marketing is protected free speech, and trying to move cases based on state common laws out of state court entirely. In February, oil company defendants filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court appealing a 2023 Hawaiʻi Supreme Court decision in Honolulu’s case, which allowed the case to move forward to trial in state court.

But judges haven’t bought oil companies’ First Amendment arguments, and the U.S. Supreme Court already has rejected their pleas to move state and local governments’ cases to federal court three different times. In the last two years, a wave of new lawsuits have been filed against the industry, including by Multnomah County, Oregon; the state of California; two Pacific coast tribal governments; Chicago; and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The deadline for attorneys to submit a proposal to Nessel’s office is June 5 — stay tuned.