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Michigan Judge Tosses State's Antitrust Suit Against Big Oil
A district judge in Grand Rapids has dismissed a lawsuit brought against several oil supermajors that accused the companies of conspiring to interfere with competition in alternative energy and electric cars.
The lawsuit was filed by Michigan Attorney General Dan Nessel, alleging Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute colluded to try to “restrain the emergence of electric vehicles and renewable primary energy technologies in the United States,” as quoted by Reuters.
According to Judge Jane Beckering, however, antitrust legislation does not provide a remedy for such grievances, except one—an allegation that Big Oil overcharged Michigan citizens. Yet she dismissed the allegation of a concerted effort to overcharge Michiganders.
“The distance is too great between the alleged conspiracy and Michigan’s and its residents’ overcharges to find that the conspiracy proximately caused the overcharges,” Judge Beckering said. An attorney for Chevron had described the case as “baseless as demonstrated by multiple related court dismissals,” Reuters noted in its report on the news.
Climate litigation has in recent years become a favoured tactic by various environmentalist groups in a bid to punish the oil and gas industry for alleged violations based on climate science research, which has recently faced growing criticism and revisions; the IPCC itself admitted recently that its worst-case scenario about CO2 emissions was unrealistic.
However, while in some cases courts have sided with such plaintiffs, in others, the judges have ruled in favour of Big Oil, especially in the United States. In Europe, the most notable Big Oil case was the suit that environmentalists brought against Shell, where the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, ordering Shell to slash its emissions by 45% by 2030. Shell appealed. The case reached the Netherlands’ Supreme Court in May this year. The court is yet to announce its ruling.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
