Climate crimes: Advocates urge murder prosecution charges against Big Oil for heat wave deaths

Phoenix Arizona; Homeless Encampment; The Zone; Heat Wave Mario Tama/Getty Images

Last summer, an unhoused man attempting to jump over a school fence to reach shade broke both his legs and died. In another case, a 73-year-old man fell while hanging his laundry and his body was found covered in burns and with a core temperature of 107 degrees. A woman also died in her $1 million Scottsdale home when the AC malfunctioned while a 33-year-old man collapsed and died while on a Saturday hike.

These are a few of the 403 people who died from a brutal heat wave that hit Maricopa County in July 2023, a summer marked by record-breaking temperatures that exceeded 110º F for 31 days straight.

According to climate experts, these surging heat waves are far from natural — climate change from burning fossil fuels is driving our planet into hotter and hotter extreme weather. And given that fossil fuel companies bear the brunt of this crisis, some advocacy groups want to see Big Oil companies like Chevron and Shell criminally prosecuted.

"What struck me was the scope," co-author Aaron Regunberg told Salon. A former Rhode Island assemblyman and currently the senior policy counsel at Public Citizen, Rugenberg described climate change as "a massive public safety threat" and pointed out that "not everyone is going to make it when the heat breaks, and dozens of communities have already recorded deaths this summer from extreme heat. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands more are going to lose their lives before the summer ends?"

The memo makes the case that a person or institution is guilty of reckless manslaughter if it is proved beyond a reasonable doubt that they caused a victim's death through reckless conduct. Second degree murder, on the other hand, is defined as "recklessly causing the death of another person by creating a 'grave risk of death' under circumstances 'manifesting extreme indifference to human life.'" To prove the latter, the state needs to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant(s) caused the deaths of the victim(s) through reckless conduct which created a grave risk and demonstrated extreme indifference to human life.

Public Citizen argues that a strong case exists for both of these charges when it comes to the 403 people who died from the Maricopa County heat wave last year. Many desert cities could one day become too hot for people to live, even with plenty of air conditioning.

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"Following the July 2023 heat wave, an extreme event attribution study determined that the occurrence of such heat in the American Southwest would have been 'virtually impossible' but for human-caused climate change, with lead author Mariam Zachariah, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London, saying, 'Had there been no climate change, such an event would almost never have occurred,'" writes the report.

"These climate disasters are the specific result of decisions and actions that were made by particular actors," Regunberg said. "Massive oil and gas companies, as we detail and report, are responsible for generating a big portion of all the greenhouse gas emissions that have caused the plan to heat up and are deceiving the public about the dangers of those emissions in ways that lead to even more heating and warming. I think the inclination that these heat deaths might be more than just tragedies, but actually crimes, was strongly reinforced through this research process."

The Public Citizen memo is only a sample document; on its own, it carries no legal weight. However, Regunberg and his associates believe that it will spark a much-needed conversation about how to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.

But there are a few cases that have been taken to court with varying results. A 2023 report by the U.N. Environment Programme and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law found that the total of climate cases has more than doubled over the past five years and such litigation is expected to keep growing. More recently, a group of 13 young people sued Hawai'i's Department of Transportation for failing to protect the environment. Last week, the case was settled, forcing the state to decarbonize its transportation network, among other stipulations. Hawai'i's governor Josh Green released a statement acknowledging "the constitutional rights of Hawaiʻi’s youth to a life-sustaining climate."

"Certainly our hope is that this kind of work is leading to real conversations," Regunberg said. When asked what ordinary people can do to help their cause and hold Big Oil accountable, Regunberg said "if you're someone who is in a community that has experienced a climate disaster, or are a victim of a climate disaster yourself, we think it's important for folks to be sharing those stories with their local prosecutor in the same way they might for any other street level offense."

Ultimately Public Citizen's goal with the sample memo is to emphasize that — while their particular document focuses on Maricopa County — everyone has a case against the fossil fuel companies.

"Though this memo focuses in on this specific scenario, its analysis we think applies similarly to basically any jurisdiction that has experienced climate heat deaths," Regunberg said."We hope that this can be something of a memo for any public officials who want to investigate how they might seek justice for climate victims."