Flooding on Loiza St. in San Juan from Hurricane Maria in 2017
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit seeking to hold the energy industry liable for hurricanes in Puerto Rico, finding 37 municipalities waited too long to sue.
Judge Silvia Carreno-Coll last week granted the motions to dismiss of defendants like Exxon, Chevron and Shell, who argued they weren’t responsible for 2017’s hurricane season. The plaintiffs filed a racketeering complaint against Big Oil in 2022, claiming their actions caused the climate change that created Hurricane Maria, which killed nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans.
As lawyers sued more than four years after the storm, Carreno-Coll dismissed the case as untimely. It’s a loss for the firms hired by the municipalities – Milberg Coleman and Smouse & Mason.
“The court correctly ruled the claims were long-since time-barred, because ‘there is overwhelming evidence of public knowledge of articles, reports, and cases’ making the same allegations many years before these plaintiffs’ belated lawsuit,” said Chevron’s lawyer, Theodore Boutrous Jr. of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher.
“The civil justice system exists to resolve current disputes, not to attack and second-guess policy resolutions that have been widely discussed and grappled with openly since Lyndon B. Johnson was president.”
It took the judge 125 pages to sort out the arguments of the defendants, who also include the American Petroleum Institute. The complaint alleged a years-long campaign to misrepresent the risks of using fossil fuels.
Lawyers tried to tie various corporate stances on climate change to a pattern of racketeering, then said the statute of limitations was tolled because the defendants concealed information from the public.
“Even if Plaintiffs relied, as they claim, on statements by Defendants that concealed their connection to Plaintiffs’ injuries, the public information was more than enough to raise suspicion, and that in turn means they had to exercise due diligence in investigating,” Carreno-Coll wrote.
“The fraudulent concealment doctrine thus does not save their Puerto Rico law claims.”
Climate change cases stateside have not sought damages for past events like hurricanes but instead seek payment for the costs of upgrading infrastructure. Dozens of states, cities and counties have sued but their theory – also brought by private lawyers who scored government contracts – has been met with skepticism by judges.
Seven judges have said the cases do not deal with state-law claims like consumer deception and public nuisance and instead effectively seek to disrupt federally established emissions standards.
Judges in South Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Pennsylvania have said this is better left to the federal government, and President Donald Trump has issued an executive order banning any new cases.
In Colorado and Hawaii, the state supreme courts allowed cases to move past the defendants’ motions to dismiss. Suncor Energy and Exxon have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take a look at the Colorado ruling, though SCOTUS previously refused to review Hawaii’s.
