Connect with us

News

Oil companies face a wrongful death suit tied to climate change

Published

on

Oil companies face a wrongful death suit tied to climate change

The sun begins to set beyond an oil refinery in California.

Mario Tama/Getty Images/Getty Images North America


hide caption

toggle caption

Advertisement

Mario Tama/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

A lawsuit filed in a Washington state court claims oil companies are responsible for the death of a woman in Seattle during a record-breaking heat wave several years ago.

The case marks the first time oil companies have been sued over the death of a person in a “climate disaster,” according to the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group.

Julie Leon, 65, was found unresponsive in her car on June 28, 2021 — the hottest day in Seattle’s history. The temperature in the city that day peaked at 108 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time Leon died of hyperthermia, her internal temperature had risen to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in King County Superior Court.

Advertisement

The suit names six oil companies, including ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron, that have allegedly known for decades that burning fossil fuels alters the Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in more extreme weather and the “foreseeable loss of human life.” But rather than warn the public, the suit says the oil companies deceived consumers about the risks.

“Defendants have known for all of Julie’s life that their affirmative misrepresentations and omissions would claim lives,” the lawsuit says. “Julie is a victim of Defendants’ conduct.”

In a rapid attribution study released days after the event, a team of scientists said the 2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

Representatives of Shell, ConocoPhillips, BP and Phillips 66 declined to comment on the wrongful death lawsuit. A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said a comment from the company wasn’t immediately available. Chevron didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Julie Leon’s daughter, Misti Leon, who filed the wrongful death lawsuit in Washington state, wants the oil companies to pay damages in amounts that would be determined at trial. Misti Leon is also trying to force the oil companies to conduct a public education campaign to correct “decades of misinformation.”

Advertisement

Fossil fuel companies already face dozens of other climate lawsuits filed by states and localities for allegedly misleading the public for decades about the dangers of burning fossil fuels, the primary cause of climate change. Those lawsuits seek money to help communities cope with the risks and damages from global warming, including more extreme storms, floods and heat waves. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, has said repeatedly that the lawsuits are meritless and that climate change is an issue that should be dealt with by Congress, not the courts.

Those kinds of lawsuits have had mixed results. A Pennsylvania judge recently dismissed a climate lawsuit that Bucks County filed against several oil companies. Court of Common Pleas Judge Stephen Corr said the lawsuit was beyond the scope of state law. Since it was primarily about greenhouse gas emissions, he said it was a matter for the federal government to deal with under the Clean Air Act. Judge Corr noted that other courts have dismissed similar lawsuits by cities and states, including New Jersey and Baltimore.

Chevron’s lawyer in the Pennsylvania case, Ted Boutrous, told WHYY that climate change is a “policy issue that needs statewide, nationwide and global cooperation to resolve. These state lawsuits just don’t really do anything other than clog the courts.”

Other cases, though, are moving forward. In January, the Supreme Court rejected an effort by oil and gas companies to block a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, and in March the justices turned down a request by Republican attorneys general to try to stop climate lawsuits filed by states including California, Connecticut, Minnesota and Rhode Island. The American Petroleum Institute said in statements to NPR at the time that it was disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decisions, saying the lawsuits are a “distraction” and “waste of taxpayer resources.”

However, the issue has caught the attention of the Trump administration. On May 1, the Justice Department sued Michigan and Hawaii to try to stop those states from filing climate lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry.

Advertisement

Douglas Kysar, faculty director of the Law, Environment and Animals Program at Yale Law School, said Leon’s lawsuit stands out from other climate cases that are working their way through the courts.

“The advantage of this lawsuit is that it puts an individual human face on the massive harmful consequences of collective climate inaction,” Kysar said in an email to NPR. “Not only that, the complaint tells a story of industry betrayal of public trust through the eyes of a particular person.”

News

Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Published

on

Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

Mario Tama/Getty Images


hide caption



toggle caption

Advertisement

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

Advertisement

The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

Continue Reading

News

Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

Published

on

Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

Advertisement

City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

Advertisement

Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

Advertisement

Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

Advertisement

“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

Advertisement

Advertisement

Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

Advertisement

Image from @Bogs4NY via X

Advertisement

The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

Advertisement

Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

Advertisement

Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

News

DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

Published

on

DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

Advertisement

“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

Advertisement

Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending