With each coming year, climate change is becoming a more apparent, urgent and expensive challenge for the city of Chicago. Punishing weather events, worsening floods and lake erosion, and threats to public health from heat waves and air pollution are all placing an ever greater burden on our critical infrastructure, businesses and residents — with Black, brown and low-income communities often hit the hardest.
While Chicagoans pay the price for climate change, the fossil fuel corporations that are most responsible for engineering this crisis are raking in all-time record profits — more than $200 billion last year alone, according to one estimate. Major oil and gas companies such as ExxonMobil knew as early as the 1980s that their products could cause catastrophic harm to the climate. Instead of being part of the solution, these polluters poured fuel on the fire and stymied climate action through a decadeslong disinformation campaign that spread doubt and denial in order to protect their industry’s profits.
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In recent years, Chicago has supported bold and ambitious action to ensure that the city is at the forefront of climate solutions, which includes a revamped Climate Action Plan. But we also know that protecting our communities against the new climate reality will not come cheap. It’s time to make the polluters that created this mess pay their fair share. As we usher in a new era of leadership, Chicago should join the growing number of cities and states across the U.S. that are taking legal action to hold Big Oil companies accountable for their role in the climate crisis and make them pay for the damage they cause.
From New York City and San Francisco to Minnesota and Charleston, South Carolina, state and local governments are turning to the courts to ensure that the corporate polluters that have profited from the climate crisis don’t leave residents holding the entire bill. The fossil fuel industry wants us to point fingers at each other and believe we’re all equally responsible for climate change, but that simply is not true. The vast majority of the climate pollution driving present-day global warming has been linked to fewer than 100 companies.
It’s also well documented that many of the largest fossil fuel producers have been lying to the public about their culpability for decades. Earlier this year, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declared, “Some in Big Oil peddled the big lie.” According to a House Oversight Committee report from December, the fossil fuel industry’s ongoing deception “could doom global efforts” to confront the climate crisis.
We’ve all heard this story before. When tobacco companies were caught lying about the dangers of their products, they faced lawsuits and were held accountable. The same with opioid distributors, which were recently forced to pay more than $26 billion — including $760 million to the state of Illinois — to address the harm that they caused.
As the effects of climate change become more pronounced and expensive in Chicago, city government cannot stand by and allow our residents to pay the price while the corporations responsible continue to escape accountability and make billions of dollars at our expense. Some may claim it would be better to work with the fossil fuel industry on solutions. But the truth is they had their chance years ago, and these companies have shown time and again that their claims of moving toward cleaner energy are not backed up by their actions. Instead of investing their record-breaking profits last year into climate solutions, companies such as Exxon, Shell and BP announced that they were doing the opposite and turning back plans to reduce their pollution.
The argument for taking big oil companies to court is simple: They knew, they lied and, now, they need to pay. Courts have consistently ruled in favor of the communities that have already filed climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, and the U.S. Justice Department recently put its support behind them as well.
History, justice and the law are all on our side. The only question is whether Chicago has the political will to take action so that polluters — and not our communities — are the ones who will pay.
Chicago Ald. Matt Martin represents the 47th Ward.
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