Chevron Fights California Cities’ Climate-Change Lawsuits With ‘Creative Lawyering’
Lawyers for Chevron Corp., hoping to keep climate-change lawsuits by California cities out of state courts, have sued Oslo-based Statoil, calling it “one of many” oil producers that should help foot the bill if the industry is found liable, reports The Los Angeles Times.
Kartikay Mehrotra writes that adding foreign companies to the litigation is a tactical maneuver to keep the dispute out of state court, where the cities have more favorable prospects, and force it into federal court.
She quotes Julia Olson, executive director and chief legal counsel for the environmental law group Our Children’s Trust: “The industry is grasping at straws while looking for any way out of these cases and using creative lawyering to do so. By cherry-picking Statoil, a sovereign Norwegian entity, Chevron hopes to reinforce federal jurisdiction.”