<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/04/carrboro-north-carolina-duke-energy-lawsuit>
"A small North Carolina town has launched the nation’s first-ever climate
accountability lawsuit against an electric utility.
The litigation, filed by officials from Carrboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday
morning, accuses Duke Energy of waging a “deception campaign” to obscure the
climate dangers of fossil fuels. Those efforts resulted in delayed action to
curb planet-heating pollution, which has pushed up the costs of climate action
today, the lawsuit says.
“When you’re dealing with something like the existential threat of climate
change, that requires us to make bold moves,” said Carrboro’s mayor, Barbara
Foushee, who helped bring the suit.
The litigation follows a November report from the non-profit research group
Energy and Policy Institute, which found some of the utility companies that
comprise today’s Duke Energy Corporation – including Duke Power, Carolina Power
& Light, and Public Service Indiana – were cautioned about the climate crisis
decades ago.
“Although Duke has understood the dangers of climate change for decades, the
company actively participated in a far-reaching, decades-long campaign to
deceive the public and decision-makers about these dangers,” the suit says.
In 1969, the lawsuit says, officials from utilities now owned by Duke attended
a meeting of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group, where they were
informed that scientists believed increasing carbon emissions would be a
“long-term problem of major consequence”.
The same trade group in 1984 commissioned a study that included two
hypothetical news stories from the future – one in which fossil fuel emissions
continued unabated and caused devastating impacts, and another in which
emissions were reined in and a safer future was secured, the lawsuit says.
Despite these warnings, Duke continued to build out fossil fuel infrastructure,
oppose legal limits to planet-heating pollution and back efforts to promote
doubt about climate science, according to the suit."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
