Since 2005, there have been 86 lawsuits (three times as many as in 2015, the year of the Paris Accords) filed worldwide against major oil, gas, and coal companies, such as: BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies. This was revealed in a report published by Oil Change International e Zero Carbon Analytics .
The three main categories of lawsuits involve (1) climate change claims (38% of cases); (2) greenwashing (16%); and (3) greenhouse gas reduction measures (12%). More than half of the lawsuits were filed in the United States (58%) while in Europe the share is 24%.
The geographical distribution of causes exactly reflects the qualitative distribution of causes, as can be seen from Figure 2 and 4.
ExxonMobil and Shell top the list of accused companies with 43 and 42 cases, respectively. Other oil companies include Spain’s Repsol with four cases, Norway’s Equinor and Australia’s Woodside with two cases each.
