Bucks County officials, on Monday, announced a sweeping lawsuit targeting, what county leaders called, "titans of the fossil fuel industry,' alleging the companies intentionally deceived the public about the role of oil in accelerating the climate crisis.
As detailed in a statement on the lawsuit, officials allege that the companies named in the court documents -- BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Philips 66, Shell and API -- have "known for decades, with startling precision, that their products would bring about climate change and destabilization."
“These companies have known since at least the 1950s that their ways of doing business were having calamitous effects on our planet, and rather than change what they were doing or raise the alarm, they lied to all of us,” said Bucks County Commissioner Gene DiGirolamo, in a statement. “The taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for these companies and their greed.”
In a statement, officials said the lawsuit -- through which the county is seeking a financial amount for damages, though it doesn't explicitly specify a total amount sought -- seeks to hold these "big oil" companies accountable for the damage that oil has done to the environment.
Get top local stories in Philly delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC Philadelphia's News Headlines newsletter.
The suit alleges that the impacts of climate change -- worsened by the intentional deception regarding oil's role on the concern -- "has exposed, and will continue to expose, Bucks County and its residents to weather events of growing severity, including storms, heat waves and flooding made worse by the rising tidal waters of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers," county officials said in a statement.
Contacted Monday, most of the companies targeted in the lawsuit either declined to comment or had not immediately replied to NBC10.
However, a representative of API argued that the county's lawsuit amounted to little more than a "waste of taxpayer resources."
Local
Breaking news and the stories that matter to your neighborhood.
"The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to U.S. consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint," API's senior vice president and general counsel, Ryan Meyers, said in a statement. "This ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers is nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of taxpayer resources. Climate policy is for Congress to debate and decide, not a patchwork of counties and courts.”
Monday's lawsuit follows similar actions after Bucks County filed litigation against social media companies and companies that profited off of the country's opioid crisis.
Sign up for our Breaking newsletter to get the most urgent news stories in your inbox.
