Leon v. Exxon Mobil Corp.

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.

The court denied a motion by out-of-state defendants to dismiss the action against them for lack of personal jurisdiction. The court found the plaintiff established “sufficient minimum contacts” with Washington State to sustain personal jurisdiction.

A trial court in Washington State denied fossil fuel industry defendants’ motion to stay proceedings pending the outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court’s review of Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The Washington trial court found that the outcome of the Boulder proceedings was “far from certain,” including whether the Court would issue a substantive ruling and whether the Court would resolve the issues in this case. The court also found that a potentially 14-month stay could prejudice the plaintiff’s ability to conduct discovery, that the public interest weighed against the stay, and that potential prejudice to the defendants was mitigated by the fact that some documents had already been preserved and some discovery had already been conducted in other similar cases.

The daughter of a woman who died from hyperthermia in Seattle during the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome filed a lawsuit in Washington Superior Court on behalf of her mother’s estate seeking to hold manufacturers, distributors, and sellers of fossil fuels liable for causing the acceleration of climate change and the extreme heat event that caused her mother’s death. The complaint alleged that the defendants had known for decades that fossil fuel combustion was the primary cause of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide would increase global temperatures and have “destructive consequences for human and ecological systems.” The complaint alleged that the defendants nonetheless acted to “undermine public certainty about climate science,” to downplay the seriousness of climate change, and to misrepresent their own actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The complaint alleged that the defendants’ deceptive conduct delayed measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change and was the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s mother’s death. The plaintiff asserted claims of wrongful death and survival under Washington’s wrongful death statute, failure to warn under the Washington Product Liability Act, and public nuisance under Washington’s public nuisance statute. The relief sought included economic and non-economic damages, general and special damages, equitable relief (including a “public education campaign to rectify Defendants’ decades of misinformation” but expressly not including any regulation of fossil fuel activities or greenhouse gas emissions or interference with the defendants’ ability to lobby or petition any government or engage in non-deceptive speech about climate), exemplary or punitive damages, and costs and attorneys’ fees.