In a 45-page filing on Tuesday, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell urged U.S. District Judge William Alsup to dismiss the lawsuit seeking billions of dollars to pay for costs associated with global warming. “This is not the first (or even the second or third) time a plaintiff has tried to plead global-warming related tort claims,” the oil companies said. They have tried to maneuver around troublesome precedents, including the Ninth Circuit’s 2009 decision Kivalina v. ExxonMobil dismissing a lawsuit by Eskimo villagers, by painting their case as a public nuisance lawsuit seeking money to remediate the damages caused by global warming. That approach should fail, the oil companies say, because any damages are necessarily caused by CO2 emissions and only the EPA, acting under the authority of Congress, can determine a reasonable level of C02 emissions. “In fact what we have here is a typical tort lawsuit for damages,” Faulk said.

Source: Forbes March 21, 2018 09:00 UTC