This post was originally published on Word in Black.
By: Willy Blackmore
When someone dies in a historic storm, or a record-breaking heatwave, who is to blame? The oil companies — which not only produce and sell the fossil fuels that generate the vast majority of carbon emissions but also spent decades covering up the pioneering science they conducted that showed such emissions would do devastating harm to the environment — seem like a fair target.
A new legal theory being discussed at law schools across the country and will soon be published in the “Harvard Law Review,” as the Guardian reported, suggests that there’s a dramatic step to take beyond blame. Rather than suing oil companies in civil court over their role in climate change, the organization Public Citizen says that they can and should face criminal homicide charges.
Every year, 5 million people die from extreme temperatures, while other climate-related disasters, including hunger and disease, kill another 400,000. If, as Public Citizen argues, oil companies could be charged with negligent or reckless homicide for both having tried to hide the fact of climate and have fought to limit efforts to fight it, who would be the victims?
There’s a solid case to be made that they’re the Black and brown Americans who are disproportionately bearing the brunt of climate change — and who more readily die because of it, too.
According to a 2022 analysis of 89 peer-reviewed studies published between 2017 and 2022 on the health impacts of climate change, “Risk of dying associated with higher temperatures and extreme heat events was elevated among Black, Latinx, and Native American individuals compared to Whites.”
For hurricanes, which most often hit Black population centers in the southeast, another study found that 94% of excess in the wake of three decades’ worth of storms were among “socially vulnerable communities.”
While there’s no truly escaping climate change and the extreme weather that it causes, the effects of any given climate disaster are disproportionately felt because of where, exactly, people do or don’t live. Due to redlining, Black people and other minority groups were forced to live in neighborhoods that were prone to weather-related disasters long before climate change was a well-understood phenomenon — and if a neighborhood had a tendency to flood in the 1930s, that tendency is only worse today.
As Public Citizen’s David Arkush pointed out to the Guardian, energy companies have been hit with criminal charges in past disasters, and have pleaded guilty to them too. Pacific Gas and Electric faced manslaughter charges after its equipment sparked the deadly blaze in Paradise, California, in 2018, and BP was also charged with manslaughter after the 2011 explosion of its Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers.
With homicide, the question of intent is a bigger legal hurdle than it is with manslaughter charges, which will certainly make the first of such climate cases, if and when they happen, challenging to win. What’s very clear, however, is who the victims in such a case might be.
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