An Existential Threat to the Oil Industry

I n late June 2021, the ghost of summertime future visited the Pacific Northwest.

For three days, a heat dome hovered over Multnomah County, Oregon, broiling Portland’s drizzly landscape of evergreens and ferns with temperatures of 116 degrees Fahrenheit—much hotter than any resident, even the centenarians, had ever experienced there.

Along the rocky ocean shore, sea stars and clams cooked alive in the tide pools.

The heat buckled highway lanes and melted the cables that route power to the light-rail network.

Not everyone had air-conditioning, and as the days wore on, getting an ambulance or a hospital bed became more and more difficult.

Sixty-nine locals died.

At the county’s administrative headquarters, in East Portland, the board of commissioners got to thinking that someone should pay for all of this damage and loss of human life.

Until recently, it would have been absurd to hold a person or company financially responsible for a sweltering spell of summer weather.

Heat waves were like storms or fires: acts of God or products of chance, depending on your metaphysics.

But climate scientists’ understanding of Earth’s atmosphere is getting only more sophisticated, and a growing number of them have come to believe that specific local weather events are traceable to human actions.

They say that, with state-of-the-art computer models, they can now link a stifling heat dome like the one that settled over Multnomah County all the way back to the derricks, refineries, and glass office towers of specific oil companies thousands of miles away.

The scientists who launched this field knew that it could have legal ramifications, and hoped that it would.

Now their work—still new, and not without its challenges—is being put to the test.

During the past five years, dozens of American cities, counties, and states have used it in claims filed against ExxonMobil, Chevron, and scores of other companies, demanding not only payment for disasters that have already happened, but also mitigation funds for those that are bound to strike in the future.