"Vancouver's Big Oil Lawsuit, Eplained", 25 Jul 2022

Vancouver is on its way to becoming the first city in Canada to sue Big Oil for its role in causing the climate emergency.

City councillors have voted 6-5 in support of a motion that would set aside approximately $700,000 — or roughly $1 per every Vancouver resident — in order to fund litigation against the country’s biggest producers of oil and gas.

Companies such as ExxonMobil — which owns the Canadian oilsands producer Imperial Oil — are being singled out because they privately researched climate change decades before it was a mainstream issue and determined that burning fossil fuels creates grave global threats, according to extensive documentation surfaced by researchers and journalists.

But instead of acting on that life-saving information, Exxon and others then ran media campaigns throughout the 1990s and 2000s — crucial decades for getting the climate emergency under control — to convince the public that human-induced warming isn’t real. It’s an alleged disinformation campaign that continues to this day.

“There are companies that absolutely knew that if they continued to sell their products it would increase greenhouse gas emissions,” Adriane Carr, the Green Party of Vancouver city councillor who is lead sponsor on the lawsuit motion, told The Tyee. “They knew that would create climate change and that would have damaging effects on people.”

Vancouver is now footing the bill for decades of oil industry denial, Carr said, spending roughly $50 million per year in order to deal with and prepare for the impacts of climate change. That includes last year’s heat dome, which led to 99 deaths in the city proper and more than 390 deaths across the Lower Mainland. It also includes last November’s catastrophic flooding, which the Insurance Bureau of Canada now estimates led to $675 million in insured damage.

... The recent city council vote is just a first step. No litigation has yet been filed, and the $700,000 funding commitment could be vetoed if Vancouver civic elections in October lead to a city council no longer interested in suing Big Oil.

Still, it’s being celebrated as a “historic” win by West Coast Environmental Law and other advocacy organizations trying to build a popular movement around bringing legal accountability to Canada’s oil and gas industry.

...Part of the reason Carr wants Vancouver to sue Big Oil is to “draw attention” to the Canadian oil patch’s own role in spreading disinformation. “I don’t think people are very aware of that history,” she said.