Chicago City Hall has won clearance from a federal judge to move ahead in Cook County's Democrat-stacked and famously plaintiff-friendly courts with a lawsuit seeking to extract a potentially massive payout from oil and gas companies for allegedly "deceiving" people and businesses into using oil and gas to heat and power their homes, cars, factories and other necessities of modern life.
On May 16, U.S. District Judge Franklin U. Valderrama ruled against a collection of petroleum companies, including Chevron and BP, and granted the city of Chicago's request to send the case back to Cook County Circuit Court.
The city had initially filed the case in Cook County court in February 2024.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson
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In that lawsuit, the city, joined by a collection of prominent trial lawyers, seeks to make Chevron, BP and other petroleum producers and distributors pay for allegedly misleading consumers and the public for decades about the alleged climate altering affects of using oil and gas products in transportation and many other economic sectors.
The lawsuit claims so-called "climate change" has in turn led to more frequent bad weather events, such as floods, droughts and severe storms, among other alleged harms, costing the city large amounts of money to address.
The Chicago lawsuit asserts this makes oil and gas use a "public nuisance" by allegedly also contributing to racial and social "inequities" for the city's low income and minority communities.
The lawsuit particularly takes aim at what it calls "disinformation" from the oil companies, which the city claims has misled consumers into continuing to use the products for decades after the energy companies allegedly knew of the supposed harms caused by the use of their fuels.
"This successful climate deception campaign had the purpose and effect of inflating and sustaining the market for fossil fuels, which - in turn - drove up greenhouse gas emissions, accelerated global warming, and brought about devastating climate change impacts to the city of Chicago," the city wrote in its lawsuit at the time.
The city's lawsuit largely copies a path blazed by other local government lawsuits against the same energy companies, as well as by earlier litigation against tobacco companies, pharmaceutical companies and others who have supplied many of the products common to American life.
The city is joined in the action by trial lawyers from the firms of DiCello Levitt LLP, of Chicago, and Sher Edling LLP, of San Francisco.
The Sher Edling firm has also served as counsel on dozens of virtually identical climate-related lawsuits against the oil and gas industry throughout the country. Published reports indicate Sher Edling has received millions of dollars in funding from a dark money group backed by billionaires, known as the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience and Adaptation." That funding has drawn scrutiny from members of Congress, who have noted it pays for the firm's lawsuits on behalf of local governments aimed at bankrupting the nation's oil and gas companies.
To date, those claims have met with mixed results in court, at best.
On May 16, for example, as Judge Valderrama was sending Chicago's case back to Cook County court, a judge in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, tossed a similar lawsuit brought by the Bucks County government and their hired trial lawyers against Exxon, Chevron and other energy companies.
In that ruling, Judge Stephen Corr said his court would "join a growing chorus of state and federal courts across the United States, singing from the same hymnal, in concluding that the claims raised by Bucks County are not judiciable by any court in Pennsylvania."
While cases in Hawaii and Boulder, Colorado, have survived attempts to snuff them out in the initial stages, judges in New York, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware have dismissed so-called "climate disinformation" suits as improper attempts to use lawsuits to regulate federally controlled emissions standards.
In Chicago, the oil and gas companies sought to remove the case from Cook County court to federal court. They also argued the lawsuit amounted to an illegal attempt by progressives at City Hall, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, to use state courts to force energy companies which operate globally and are regulated by federal law to comply with the political demands of anti-oil activists and politicians in the notoriously Democrat-dominated city of Chicago and state of Illinois, and then pay large sums of money in the process for their alleged past transgressions.
"The scope of Plaintiff’s (Chicago's) theory is breathtaking — it seeks to regulate the sale of oil and gas anywhere in the world, including all past and otherwise lawful sales, including sales to the federal government," the energy companies said in their petition in federal court, filed in April 2024.
"Because Plaintiff challenges the extraction, sale, and consumption of fossil fuels over the past several decades, the Complaint necessarily calls into question longstanding decisions by the federal government regarding, among other things, national security, national energy policy, environmental protection, the maintenance of a national strategic petroleum reserve program, development of energy resources on the United States’ outer continental shelf lands, mineral extraction on federal lands (which has produced billions of dollars in revenue for the federal government), and the negotiation of international agreements bearing on the development and use of fossil fuels and the appropriate response to the problem of global climate change."
After more than a year of proceedings over that dispute in federal court, Judge Valderrama sided with the city, sending the case back to Cook County court.
In his ruling, Valderrama noted the oil and gas companies have consistently failed throughout the rest of the country to bump local governments' "climate disinformation" lawsuits into federal court.
In this case, Valderrama similarly rejected the companies' attempts to argue federal regulations, federal contracts and federal government directives concerning the extraction of oil and production of fuels should mean the case belongs in federal court under the so-called "federal officer" theory.
The judge agreed with the city that the regulations and directives do not "demonstrate ... (the companies were) closely controlled by the government, but rather demonstrate 'the story of a narrow business relationship'" which he said he and other courts "found to be insufficient" to hold up their "federal officer" theory claims.
Further, the judge agreed with the city that its lawsuit "does not take aim" at the companies' "production of fossil fuels."
"Instead, the Complaint takes issue with Defendants’ alleged campaign of deception and misrepresentation in the 1980s of the dangers of fossil fuel vis-à-vis the environment. The fact that Defendants acted under the federal government by operating and managing government-owned and/or government-funded petroleum production facilities is of no import.
"... This case is about Defendants’ alleged misrepresentations; not their work with or on behalf of the government that led to or contributed to fossil fuel emissions," Valderrama wrote.
Valderrama was appointed to the federal bench in 2020 by President Donald Trump during his first term in office. Valderrama had previously served as a Cook County Circuit Court judge.
Cook County courts have consistently been named among the top destinations of choice for trial lawyers suing businesses. The American Tort Reform Association, for instance, has consistently awarded Cook County's courts the distinction of standing as one of America's worst "judicial hellholes." Court systems are selected for such criticism by business advocates and court reformers because they assert business defendants struggle to receive a fair opportunity to defend themselves against lawsuits.
Cook County's courts are also heavily dominated by Democrats. In 2024, for instance, a Republican candidate made news as the first non-Democrat to seek election to a countywide judgeship in Cook County in 14 years.
The Democratic Party in recent years has become increasingly hostile to the use of oil and gas and to the companies who extract and refine the fuels, as they seek to use the cause of combatting so-called "climate change" to enact laws and regulations that increasingly force Americans to abandon the use of internal combustion powered cars, landscaping tools and other implements, while also shutting down reliable traditional power plants in favor of so-called "renewable" energy sources, such as solar and wind.
Following the ruling, the energy companies told the court they intend to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. They have requested Valderrama put a hold on enforcing his ruling until they have filed their appeal.
The city has opposed that request. As of May 20, Valderrama had not yet ruled on the motion to stay pending appeal
The oil and gas companies are represented in the action by attorney Patricia Brown Holmes and others with the firms of Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila, of Chicago; Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco; Susman Godfrey LLP, of Houston; and Stern Kilcullen & Rufolo, of Fordham Park, New Jersey.
The city is represented by attorney Chelsey B. Metcalf, and others with the city's Department of Law; attorney Daniel R. Flynn, and others with the DiCello Levitt firm; and Matthew K. Edling and Victor M. Sher, and others with the Sher Edling firm.