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Arjun Singh
From the levers reader supported newsroom, this is lever time, I'm Arjun saying floods, heatwaves, hurricanes and extreme weather are starting to form a morbid new normal for millions around the world. This summer alone, Americans have endured sweltering heat waves, ones were roughly two thirds of the country has seen temperatures of 90 degrees or higher. And those have led to the deaths of 1000s. And that doesn't include the deaths from other climate change related events that are happening all over the world. For decades, scientists have warned humanity about the dangers of climate change. Now we're living through an unprecedented period of weather disaster. And there's a consensus that fossil fuels have played a major role in it. But rather than face accountability, fossil fuel companies have flourished often with the express approval of governments around the world. Because that change. That's the goal of a group of activists, scientists and lawyers, who are taking oil companies to court and calling for the justice systems around the world to not just hold them accountable, but charge them for homicide because of the countless deaths caused by climate change. Today on lever time, we're gonna go to the lever senior investigative reporter lowest partially to hear exactly how they'll do it.

Lois Parshley
Back in 2020, Lisa just had her second child in Montreal, when a storm approached her mother's home in France. It dropped torrential rain across Europe, and rivers burst over their banks. But Eliza didn't know until her brother called concerned that he hadn't heard from their mother

Elisa
communication West kept because of the storm. So all communication and it to city everything like literally that was for days like it was no phone no nothing while her

Lois Parshley
brother and Uncle drove until the road was closed, and then continued on foot to her mom's village, Elisa got online. As she watched video after video of floodwaters sweeping houses away, she was horrified.

Elisa
Me I was more like the one the person calling that line every three hours. And I was trying to find any video footage, like any anything on internet that I can find that was showing video of the storm. It was really the purpose of trying to see your home on any video of any people that was, you know, like that was really broad. Like I was just like taping stuff Instagram, Facebook, trying to see videos, people that I even don't know, but that maybe they do get food age that will show that out so something left or anything that can give me instruments that the house was still there. Her

Lois Parshley
brother hiked over a mountain before finally reaching the village. halfway around the world, Elisa waited desperately to hear what he found. But it wasn't until he hiked back up that he had enough reception to call his sister.

Elisa
And he came back up. And it's when he came back up the mountain that he was able to call me and tell me that there is no more outstays nothing, no trace, like completely erased from the valid like no foundation, no thing, no thing. And, and so this is when we realized that she probably didn't get out of the house, she probably didn't have the time because my brother was able to talk to the, you know, team over there that was taking care of like, you know, like the fire team and whatever. And they said that, at the time that they wanted to go up in this area of the valley, it was already too late. The bridge was scared. It was already like impressed and practical.

Lois Parshley
It would take another 10 days for her mother's body to be found. Even then she was only discovered because a neighbor noticed wolves behind his house.

Elisa
I guess they were smelling the body decomposing literally. That's the reality. And and then a chance somehow because like, you know, no one could have guessed that someone was there. Like a body was there. So like it's, it's, I feel it's it's weird to say but when they found their body I felt like oh, you know, I don't think you you're gonna say that about you know, your mom's dead body that you feel lucky but this is how I felt a bit of relief that she we could have, you know, do what she she or will for the end of life and you know, like being able to respect her body and respect her. You know, that's the whole process.

Lois Parshley
Her mom was only 67 years old. For me

Elisa
like Joe When, even before body was found, right, we realized that there was she was a victim of climate change.

Lois Parshley
This spring, Lisa and her brother became two plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against total energy's a French oil company that's one of the world's sixth largest carbon emitters. The case claims that total energy's board of directors and its main shareholders like global acid company, Blackrock have deliberately endangered the lives of others in an involuntary manslaughter case. Each offense is punishable with at least a year in prison, as well as a fine

Hadrien Goux
litigations against energy or against other majors are nuts that's new or disruptive. They are mainly all on civil litigations or other stuff that we felt was really useful to, but were not efficient in the way that they do not really scare the executives and shareholders behind the company to ones taking the decisions, because if they only have to pay fines, this is not the systematic change for them.

Lois Parshley
That hydrogen gooks, a fossil fuel campaigner bloom Association, one of the organizations behind the lawsuit, he's talking to me from his office in Paris, dressed casually in a graphic shirt printed with clashing colors, but he goes serious as he explains his goal.

Hadrien Goux
The main objective of our litigation is really to hold them responsible for past decisions and past and current and future impacts of climate change

Lois Parshley
to prove their case. 100 Random bloom turned to climate attribution researchers, scientists whose job it is to determine if climate change is making extreme weather worse, and by how much. If you haven't been following the science super closely, it may surprise you to learn that it's now possible to say with confidence, just how much warmer temperatures have contributed to a particular heat wave or hurricane. This field is called Event attribution. A combination of factors have made it much easier to tease out how much warmer temperatures are to blame for extreme weather in the early 2000s. Computer models required a lot of computing power. Today, it's much easier to combine models and run them multiple times, increasing confidence in their results.

Otto
I'm Dr. Fred Yato. I'm a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Science at Imperial College London. Dr.

Lois Parshley
Otto is one of the world's leading climate attribution researchers.

Otto
I think a few years ago, most people were still really thinking, Oh, but this is also uncertain, I can't really think that you can do this. And I think that has changed back

Lois Parshley
in 2015. She formed a group of international scientists called World weather attribution, with the goal of analyzing how much climate change contributed to an event almost as quickly as disaster strike.

Otto
We have done a huge number of attribution studies. The most recent one was extreme heat, actually in Central America, Mexico, and also parts of the US. If it feels like there have been heat waves over heatwave and flooding after flooding everywhere in the world in recent months. So we have looked at flooding in Afghanistan and Pakistan before that he and before that looked at flooding in Brazil, there was also flooding in Dubai that actually made a lot of headlines, mainly because it disrupted so many international flights. We have looked at at also extreme heat in large parts of Asia. So Western Asia, which includes Palestine and Israel, so particularly affecting people in refugee camps. It's been a very busy few months with really extreme weather events.

Lois Parshley
Groups like bloom are hoping to use this kind of attribution research to demonstrate how oil and gas companies like total energies are directly responsible for the deaths of people like Elisa smother,

Hadrien Goux
the attribution science is describing better and better every day this causal link that could end up being a proof for the judges of the link between x activities of fossil fuel companies and impacts of climate change

Lois Parshley
in the US, groups like nonprofit Think Tank Public Citizen have also been working toward similar lawsuits. Erin Regan Berg, the group senior Climate Policy Council, has recently spoken with defense attorneys in states from Oregon to Texas about this prosecution strategy.

Aaron regunberg
You know, one of the biggest pushback that we've heard when we talk about this idea of climate homicide is causation. So how can you actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt that This particular group of fossil fuel company, defendants is legally responsible for causing these particular deaths. And so it's been, it's been helpful really drilling into that causal chain between fossil fuel companies conduct and climate related deaths. So you need to show that at three stages, right? You need to show that an event a climate related weather disaster caused these victims deaths, you need to show that climate change caused this event. And then you need to show that fossil fuel companies caused climate change. And I think that there's a really strong argument at each stage right, you can show that this particular, for example, extreme heatwave caused these particular deaths right.

Lois Parshley
In the United States, the law considers some killings as worse than others, separating homicides in degree from negligence to extreme indifference to human life. The least serious homicide charge Public Citizen believes that fossil fuel companies can be tried with is negligent homicide, meaning that the company caused deaths through their careless behavior. There's also involuntary manslaughter, or essentially causing death through reckless conduct with a disregard for the substantial risks. Finally, there second degree murder, which implies acting with indifference to human life. And in addition to how recklessly someone acted, their intent also matters. Lawyers talk about the legal concept of mens rea, or the mental state of the person accused of committing a crime. So

Aaron regunberg
it's basically you didn't do this in order to kill someone, but you basically knew you do this thing. People are probably going to die. And you did it anyway. It's

Lois Parshley
actually surprisingly easy to show that oil companies knew that their behavior was incredibly harmful decades earlier than they admitted to the public all the way back in 1965. The American Petroleum Institute found that fossil fuels were causing rising amounts of carbon dioxide.

Aaron regunberg
You know, API, the American Petroleum Institute was sharing all this research with all of its member companies going back decades and decades. And so you have you have internal memos where they're talking about that their conduct is going to cause quote, globally catastrophic climate harms, it's going to cause the submersion of New York City, right, that reveals their actual lines that they are talking about. So I think, again, recklessness is being aware of unconsciously disregarding a substantial risk that your conduct could cause an injury in this case of death.

Lois Parshley
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have published papers showing that almost 40 years ago, Exxon knew the consequences of their business was shocking precision. In the 1980s, companies, scientists projected fossil fuel burning would cause around point two degrees Celsius of global warming per decade. The researchers recently concluded quote, we find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming consistent with subsequent observations. But there was a huge gap between what Exxon knew and what they told the public oil companies denied and delayed releasing this kind of information, spending at least 31 million on research and campaigns to deny climate science. In both

Commercial
places, we're tapping our country's most abundant form of energy, coal. The energy we produced from these mines is being used every day by power plants to supply electricity to hundreds of 1000s of homes. In our laboratories, we're working with the United States government to find ways to burn coal more cleanly, the process being between

Lois Parshley
1989 and 2004. For example, ExxonMobil ran ads intended to see doubt about warming temperatures. To

Commercial
help clean up the air. Exxon specially formulates phase four gasolines for reduced evaporation during those hot summer months. All of which makes us feel pretty good. After all, we live here to for cleaner air and high performance on the lie on the tiger.

Lois Parshley
Exxon continues to use third party groups to mask its involvement in these efforts. As former Exxon lobbyists keep McCoy admitted on Earth, a Greenpeace UK group

McCoy
did me join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts. Yes, that's true. But there's nothing there's nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments we were looking out for our in our shareholders. These

Lois Parshley
strategies make it difficult to calculate the true extent of fossil fuel companies ongoing spending on climate denial. well known conservative foundations consistently fund these efforts, including through groups like Donors Trust and donors Capital Fund, which as donor advised funds are not required to disclose their funding sources. In 2022, Donors Trust gave over a million dollars to the climate Denine Heartland Institute, and over $600,000 to the American Enterprise Institute, who've claimed quote, climate change is not an existential threat. This dark money has buoyed the efforts of fossil fuel companies. Exxon, for example, has continued to publish advertising with misleading statements around unproven biofuels, while companies like Shell and BP spend millions on climate branding, despite only investing negligible amounts in renewable energy. Reagan Berg argues that these companies recklessness hinges not just on their total greenhouse gas emissions, but under deliberate and ongoing deception. This misinformation campaign has undeniably made climate change worse, they

Aaron regunberg
deceive the public about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, specifically in order that they could continue to produce market and sell fossil fuels and create more emissions.

Lois Parshley
So to recap, the first step, proving that oil companies knew their behavior could cost lives and lied about it is pretty straightforward. The next legal challenge Public Citizen notes is the distinction between suing fossil fuel companies and the individuals working for them. But in US law, separating the two isn't always straightforward. There's

Aaron regunberg
a doctrine responding to the superior that any employee engaging in conduct within the scope of their employment that the company can be held responsible. And it's particularly true if you're talking about a high managerial personnel director of some sort. And so I think all of the actions and decisions that we're talking about here, were made and committed by by officers, directors, you know, employees of these companies while they were engaged in the operation of the company while they were acting within the scope of their employment. I think in each case, the board that the CEO the top management, controlled company wide decisions regarding all of the causative acts, right, that control decisions about the quantity and extent of fossil fuel production, about the marketing and advertising of their products and how they communicated about, you know, the link between climate change and fossil fuel use. And they were absolutely aware of the decades of internal research that those companies had that precisely predicted the exact climate harms that we're seeing now.

Lois Parshley
Public Citizen has written a prosecutorial memo outlining a potential legal strategy for trying just such a case, using a LIFO heatwave in Phoenix last year as an example, as we

News anchor
get into Thursday and Friday, we will be inching up toward record heat. Friday's forecast taken us up to 116, which could tie the record. But before that happens Thursday, 115. A record breaker with that forecast. Hi. In fact, the record set back in 2020 is at 114 degrees. So again,

Lois Parshley
as temperatures stayed above 110 degrees for record breaking 31 days, an average of 13 people died every day from the heat.

Cindy Cho
When I first read this proposal, I was pretty skeptical. First of all, prosecuting any company and prosecuting any officers of companies is incredibly difficult, you know, just based on resources alone that typically accompany those particular defendants corporate defendants, that was

Lois Parshley
Cindy Cho, who has served as a federal prosecutor for over a decade and now teaches at Indiana University's Mars School of Law. talking at a recent public citizen meeting about climate homicide cases, I

Speaker 1
think you have to first reimagine the definition of violent crime that most line prosecutors have. Right. And it's absolutely the case that anybody who's sat at the desk, doing criminal case intake at a prosecutor's office has seen any number of difficult on the line cases that at first blush seem like they might be an uphill battle. And there are real world analogues to the difficulty of these cases. I mean, of course, we've got in the past we can think through tobacco cases. But on a more, I think, approachable level for a local prosecutor. I like to think about a charge that more prosecutors across the country have been pursuing and that's a drug dealing that results in death. The These are really difficult cases because you're drawing a line from one person to a harm cause potentially three or four or five people down the line.

Lois Parshley
Public Citizen recently introduced defense attorneys interested in this strategy to climate scientists Freddy Otto about how to incorporate the latest research. Dr. Otto says that the science is robust. But the conversation highlighted that scientists and lawyers think about uncertainty very differently. So

Otto
we can say the emissions of this company have definitely made this heatwave first worse. So we this kind of qualitative statement, we can give with very high certainty. But of course, if you then want to have a number on that and want to quantify it, then the results are much less certain. And you often end up with with quite a broad range of possible answers. And I think that's been that's been something that for me as a scientist was very obvious that that's the case. But I think is actually not very obvious if you haven't thought about it. And so I think that probably is also really important with respect to the legal cases that lawyers might rethink not focusing on a specific number, but rather framing the arguments around the qualitative statements that we can make with very high levels of certainty. Of

Lois Parshley
course, oil companies disagree that they should be held responsible Hadrian gooks. Bloom says,

Hadrien Goux
because of the size of the low students, we expect, the carbon majors to use as much defense as they can to put the responsibility away from them to say, we are not the ones responsible for that. They can either put the responsibility on other majors, and we have already heard arguments like these in the past, saying we were not alone. We were not the worst ones. Some of some of the majors even in the US, mainly in the US once more further than us in lying and building doubts in the past, they could also decide to put the responsibility on consumers, saying we are not the one burning all these fossil fuels. here

Lois Parshley
legally, prosecutors don't have to prove that fossil fuel companies were the only or exclusive cause of those deaths, just that they contributed in a significant way. In previous civil lawsuits. Even small amounts of emissions, like 2.5% of global totals have been considered a meaningful contribution and provide legal standing. In Arizona for example, science shows the heatwave would have been virtually impossible without climate change, and environmental heat was the direct cause of death. For hundreds of people. Blaming consumers is also a pretty weak defense. Companies may try to claim that the people actually burning the gas in their cars and houses break the chain of causation. But Reagan Berg says it will be hard to argue that companies didn't foresee their products being used just as they were intended. Public Citizen says their goal isn't necessarily to put people in jail. But to put pressure on the companies to change their business model.

Aaron regunberg
The best case outcome is that you have a case that is so significant that it leads to some sort of, again, either settlement or court order that really gets at the root of the problem. While

Lois Parshley
no criminal cases have been filed in the United States yet. This conversation is occurring during a groundswell of civil lawsuits against big oil. The attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and the District of Columbia, as well as dozens of municipal governments have recently filed cases against major oil and gas companies. Multnomah County, Oregon, for example, is seeking close to 52 billion in damages and future costs for climate adaptation from a dozen companies after a record breaking heat dome in 2021. I was actually there during that heatwave visiting my family. The night before the temperatures climbed. I looked at the forecast with my dad. He wanted me to cancel my plans. I thought he was overreacting. But sorry, dad. He was right. By mid morning, it was so hot it wasn't safe to be outside. We cut shades to try to cover the windows and keep more of the heat out. When we put bowls of ice by the fan. His cats plopped themselves right in front of it panting. It was honestly too hot to know. When indoor temperatures reached the high 90s electric fans won't prevent heat related illness. And I was really worried about what would happen if the power went out. Young children elderly people who are pregnant or on antidepressants and those without shelter are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat. During those days, 54 people died in Multnomah County and from my own experience, it's surprising it wasn't more.

Jeffrey Simon
Even an environmentally conscious committed like Multnomah County, people never imagined it would be 124 degrees in downtown Portland at anytime, much less than region. And so they weren't ready for it.

Lois Parshley
Jeffrey Simon, a trial lawyer and outside counsel to Multnomah County explains it was the county's largest mortality event ever.

Jeffrey Simon
They had not prepared for that kind of heat extreme. Because, you know, Portland is not Phoenix, and Phoenix they prepare for extreme heat events because they have a long history of experiencing them. And in Multnomah County the opposite was true. nearly 40% of the residents there didn't have central air conditioning because they never before needed it.

Lois Parshley
Want Noma county chair Jessica Vega Peterson says the county filed suit because its residents deserved better. Vega Peterson said in a written statement, quote, these businesses knew their products were unsafe and harmful. And they lied about it. They have profited massively from their lies, and left the rest of us to suffer the consequences and pay for the damages.

Lois Parshley
So listening to Leisa it's hard not to flashback to those gym days waiting indoors for the heat to break. scared for my own mom's health as a temperature climbed and knowing there was nothing I could do to help her.

Elisa
And I feel that more real example that you know, someone you can picture someone you can be never with or whatever. If we talk about our own experiences, and our climate change affected us personally, and the people we love, it's maybe going to be a wake up a little thing in people's mind. And they're gonna realize that they can happen to anyone, everyone, you know, like, it's like, I'm putting myself in the situation where it's difficult to talk about it openly and publicly and tell my story. And I feel like I'm putting myself naked in the middle of the you know, the role basically. But I feel that maybe that can help you know, people to visualize that. Yeah, you can lose your mom like this, you do it or in a fire or whatever it is, you know that it's just gonna happen and happen and happen again. And we it's are we going to die.

Lois Parshley
I wasn't prepared for the grief I felt after the thermometer finally dropped. Although I've spent a good part of my career documenting the climate crisis scene, my hometown bake felt haunting, and it's likely not the last time that people I love will be at risk because of global warming. It turns out there's a word for this particular kind of heartbreak, solace Teesha. The term mashes together the words solace and nostalgia, or what it's like to miss how your home used to be. Knowing you can never return to the environment you were born into. This isn't a story about disasters happening somewhere else, or in the future.

Jeffrey Simon
It's one thing to say well, there might be melting at the polar ice caps and exterior radically possible that the places that polar bears used to be able to roam will melt. It's quite another to say you're going to die in your home potentially.

Lois Parshley
In reporting like this, there's always a tension about what to include how to find a balance between the utter urgency and scale of the crisis, and encouraging a sense of fatalism in interviews with scientists recently. I often end by asking awkward questions, fishing for slivers of hope. And sometimes I can tell they feel as tired answering these as I feel wrestling and climate story into yet another bittersweet ending, striving to leave room for the possibility of another cooler future. This is something Eliza and I also talked about just how hard it is to talk about this kind of loss. Before ally says mother died. She had just retired and was loving being in her garden. Two days before the storm when Eliza called to show off her new son. She admired the strawberries and raspberries her mother just picked. That's what Eliza was remembering when her older son asked Just recently how his grandmother died. I

Elisa
told him like the truth but without too much explanation either because he's not in age to really understand what I just said that it was a storm and she was in our house and our house was to the way by the water and she was in it and she died. I don't want them to have anxiety at a really young age about this because it's pretty awful. You know, so like, I think it's important to be able to be like, relatively, you know, positive about what we can do to help you know, instead of like, we all gonna die, you know.

Lois Parshley
Shortly after we spoke, another devastating floods swept over the Alps, killing at least seven people in the region realizes mom died. Then while I was writing this draft, another extreme heatwave swept over Oregon, killing 17 more people. Environmental scholar Joanna Macy says the only alternative to despair is something she calls an act of hope. The idea that hope is something we do not something we have allies that has come to the same conclusion,

Elisa
I have two kids, and I'm like, What's going to be their future, you know, what's, you know, what we're like, the next generation, and it's really sad. And I feel like, I want to be able to tell my kids or even my grandkids, like, I did something more, you know, I took my story, I put it out there, and I tried something more than just walking on the street. You know, like, it's good to, but it's, you know, I just, I, and again, it's kind of, I feel that it's just an opportunity in life to do something, just a top, you know, top level and I just, I can help it to sing that, hey, I'm going to be proud to say to my kids that, hey, you know what, I tried something more. And

Lois Parshley
to her, that means taking steps to ensure corporate accountability. In 2022, Exxon made a record nearly 56 billion in profit. That's more than $100,000 every minute. And last year, Exxon, Chevron, and shell collectively made another 85 point 6 billion producing more oil and gasoline in the United States than ever before. We're all paying the price.

Elisa
It's not on individuals shoulders, and about, you know, like the responsibility for for those event, like a sink, often big company, they put that on Oh, yeah. But we filling up in demand. I disagree with that. So like, I feel that even if I do things to reduce my footprint, if I do it in my local business, tiny, miniscule, you know, business, even if you do it, even if my mom was doing it, we still don't solve the problem, literally. So I really feel that it's important to you know, put back the responsibility on those enormous gigantic companies that actually have a footprint, gigantic footprint, and that we actually release depression on individual shoulder and we target the real responsibles you know, like the real criminals and no, that's literally because people individually Yeah, if we do everything, we will not save ourselves.

Arjun Singh
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. Today's episode was produced by lowest partially with help from Chris Walker and engineered by me, Arjun sang along with editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with more episodes of leisure time.