Leon v. Exxon Mobil Corp.

The federal district court for the Western District of Washington remanded a climate change-related wrongful death action to state court. The plaintiff seeks to hold manufacturers, distributors, and sellers of fossil fuels liable under product liability and public nuisance theories for her mother’s death during the Pacific Northwest heat dome event in 2021. The court rejected the defendants’ position that there was federal diversity jurisdiction because one of the defendants—a company that owned a pipeline—had been fraudulently joined. The court was satisfied that the pipeline owner was a citizen of Washington. The court further found that the defendants did not meet their “heavy burden” of demonstrating that the company could not be liable for violating Washington’s product liability and public nuisance statutes. The court also concluded that the defendants’ arguments regarding procedural misjoinder were without merit because they raised state law issues that did not implicate federal subject matter jurisdiction. The court denied the plaintiff’s request for fees and costs, finding that removal was not “objectively unreasonable.”

Chevron Corporation and Chevron U.S.A. Inc. (Chevron) filed a notice of their removal to federal court of a wrongful death action filed by the daughter of a woman who died from hyperthermia in Seattle during the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. All other fossil fuel industry defendants consented to the removal of the litigation. Chevron argued that there was diversity jurisdiction in federal district court because “the single purported Washington Defendant, Olympic Pipe Line Company LLC [(Olympic)], has been fraudulently joined and procedurally misjoined.” Chevron contended that “deception-based claims” could not be asserted against Olympic, which “merely transports fossil fuels—the company does not produce, let alone market to consumers, any fossil fuels,” and that even if a claim could be stated against Olympic, it would not arise out of the same transaction or occurrence as the claims against the other defendants.

In a wrongful death action in which a plaintiff alleges that fossil fuel industry defendants caused her mother’s death during the 2021 extreme heat event in the Pacific Northwest by engaging in deceptive conduct that delayed measures to mitigate climate change, a Washington Superior Court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim. The court described the case as “factually distinguishable” from cases in which municipalities bring “claims for the ongoing and continuing effects of climate change.” The court instead described this case as “about a single individual and an allegation that a single weather event contributed to her untimely passing” and as seeking damages as opposed to prospective relief regarding future emissions. The court further stated that the plaintiff would be held to a theory of liability based on failure to warn Washington consumers and for deceptive marketing to Washington consumers. With the claims framed in this way, the court concluded that the state law claims were not preempted or precluded by the Clean Air Act or other federal law. In addition, the court found the claims were not non-justiciable political questions. The court stated that it was “skeptical” of the plaintiff’s ability to establish causation but found that causation was sufficiently alleged to survive a motion to dismiss. The court also found that the plaintiff sufficiently alleged the application of the discovery rule for purposes of the statute of limitations; that the plaintiff properly pled both public nuisance and Washington Product Liability Act (WPLA) claims; that the WPLA did not preempt the public nuisance claim; and that the issue of whether the dangers were known or obvious was a disputed fact for purposes of the WPLA claim.

The court dismissed ConocoPhillips and ConocoPhillips Company (together ConocoPhillips) from the case on personal jurisdiction grounds, finding that the complaint did not adequately connect alleged pre-2012 ConocoPhillips contacts with Washington to the 2021 extreme heat event. The court also found that a ConocoPhillips subsidiary’s contacts with Washington could not be imputed to ConocoPhillips in the absence of an agency relationship.

The court dismissed Olympic Pipeline Company LLC (Olympic Pipeline) from the case. The court found that the WPLA claim failed because Olympic Pipeline was not a product seller and there was no allegation that it had control over the product it transported. The court also found that given the plaintiff’s counsel’s admission that there was no evidence that Olympic Pipeline participated in advertising or marketing, the complaint’s allegations were insufficient to state a public nuisance claim against Olympic Pipeline based on misleading and deceptive advertising and marketing of petroleum products.