On September 19, San Francisco and Oakland served papers on five of the world’s largest oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell — to pay for their role in climate change.
Both cases, filed separately in state court with similar language and identical tables of content, demanded the creation of an “abatement fund” to protect the cities against rising tides. The infrastructure cost — from seawalls to sewers — could be in the billions. In San Francisco’s suit, the city predicts it will cost taxpayers $5 billion to build a better seawall. Oakland issued a $40 million bond in 2014 to upgrade its sewer system against floodwaters.
Cases like this aren’t exactly new. Two adjacent counties, Marin and San Mateo, and one other city in California filed similar suits earlier this year. And back in 2008, when the small town of Kivalina (population: 374 from a 2010 census) found itself sinking on Alaska’s coast, local officials also tried to get oil companies to pay up.