New York’s mayor has announced that the city has field a lawsuit against five oil majors to help protect the city from climate change.
The city is seeking damages from BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell for “billions of dollars”.
The mayor’s office said it would spend the money to “protect New Yorkers from the effects of climate change”.
The city is going after damages to “pay for harm that we’ve already seen and … expect to happen over the course of this century,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
The statement said: “Recently uncovered documents make it clear that the fossil fuel industry was well aware of the effects that burning fossil fuels would have on the planet’s atmosphere and the expected impacts of climate change as far back as at least the 1980s.
“Nonetheless, they deliberately engaged in a campaign of deception and denial about global warming and its impacts, even while profiting from the sale of fossil fuels and protecting their own assets from the effects of rising seas and a changing climate.
“More than half of the greenhouse gas pollution from the fossil fuel industry has occurred since 1988, according to a recent analysis.
“Sea levels have risen about one foot since 1900 with much of that rise due to climate change, the most powerful storms are becoming more frequent, and flooding is becoming more frequent and intense.”
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