The State of New York has filed a climate lawsuit against JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, seeking to hold it accountable for alleged misrepresentations and misleading marketing. The company has engaged in deceptive business practices and fraud through greenwashing claims about the environmental sustainability of its beef products and about its ability to meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across its supply chain to net zero by 2040, the State’s lawsuit argues.
Industrial agriculture, and especially beef production, is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate breakdown. The world’s five biggest meat and dairy corporations together account for more annual GHG emissions than oil majors like ExxonMobil, Shell and BP do individually, and JBS’s emissions in 2021 were greater than that of Ireland. Yet despite its sizable climate impact, JBS highlights its net zero climate commitment and makes other environmental claims through advertisements and marketing that cater towards environmentally-conscious consumers. According to the New York Attorney General Office, such representations are deceptive and take advantage of consumers’ preference for sustainable products. “When companies falsely advertise their commitment to sustainability, they are misleading consumers and endangering our planet,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “JBS USA’s greenwashing exploits the pocketbooks of everyday Americans and the promise of a healthy planet for future generations. My office will always ensure that companies do not abuse the environment and the trust of hardworking consumers for profit.” The lawsuit was filed on February 28 in the New York County Supreme Court in New York City against JBS USA Food Company – JBS’s American subsidiary – and alleges violations of New York business law for false advertising and deceptive acts or practices and violations of state law pertaining to fraudulent conduct. New York seeks a court order for the company to cease its misleading marketing, and it also seeks civil penalties and disgorgement of profits. The state says that JBS continues to promote its “net zero by 2040” climate commitment even while it plans to expand beef production and even after the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division determined that the company’s claims around this target were unsubstantiated and therefore create a misleading impression. According to the state’s complaint, JBS’s net zero target is “not feasible given the JBS Group’s current levels of livestock production and the company’s plans to grow global demand for its products.” The complaint points to a New York Times advertisement from April 2021 as an example of the company’s allegedly false representations. In that ad, JBS claims: “Agriculture can be part of the climate solution. Bacon, chicken wings and steak with net-zero emissions. It’s possible.” Climate scientists, however, explain in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest scientific assessment that greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture, namely methane and nitrous oxide, cannot be mitigated effectively though existing or proposed technologies, and that production of and demand for meat, especially beef, must be curbed. Animal agriculture is responsible for more than 14 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions annually. JBS defended its environmental commitments in a comment responding to the new lawsuit. “JBS takes its commitment to a more sustainable future for agriculture very seriously,” Nikki Richardson, a company spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. “We disagree with the action taken today by the New York Attorney General’s office. JBS will continue to partner with farmers, ranchers and our food system partners around the world to help feed a growing population while using fewer resources and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact. Our belief that American agriculture can help sustainably feed the world is undeterred.” Environmental advocates and campaigners applauded the New York Attorney General Office for taking legal action against one of the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters. “JBS is one of the top global companies contributing to climate change and has proven time and again it can't be trusted to self-police,” Monique Mikhail, campaigns director in agriculture climate finance at Friends of the Earth U.S., said in a press release. “Corporations should and must be held responsible when they mislead the public about their harmful impacts.” “As the largest meat company in the world, with a significant climate footprint, JBS has a responsibility to be fully transparent about its emissions, reduction strategies, and outcomes,” said Ben Lilliston, director of climate strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “The New York Attorney General’s action today not only holds JBS accountable for its unsubstantiated net-zero claim, but also sends a strong signal to other companies that empty promises do not pass for climate action.” In November the New York attorney general filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against PepsiCo to hold the company accountable for its single-use plastic packaging that is polluting the environment, since most plastic cannot be recycled. The lawsuit claims PepsiCo failed to warn consumers about health and environmental risks associated with its plastic packaging and misleads consumers about its efforts to tackle the plastic problem. Like animal agriculture and beef production, plastic is a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
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The city of Chicago filed a climate accountability lawsuit against half a dozen major oil and gas companies and their chief lobbyist group the American Petroleum Institute, charging them with deceptive conduct that resulted in escalating climate-related damages and costs incurred by the city and its residents. Chicago’s lawsuit is the latest from a US jurisdiction to target Big Oil for its alleged climate deception, and comes just five months after the state of California brought a similar climate lawsuit that was hailed as a “watershed moment” in the fight for climate accountability.
Chicago filed its complaint on Tuesday, February 20 in the Circuit Court of Cook County. The complaint alleges causes of action under state tort law, including public nuisance, negligence, and failure to warn as well as civil conspiracy and unjust enrichment and violations of local city laws concerning consumer fraud and misrepresentations relating to sales and advertising. In addition to API, the named defendants are BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, and Shell. These companies and API knew more than 50 years ago that burning fossil fuels would have potentially catastrophic consequences for society, yet rather than publicly acknowledging this they doubled down on production and distorted the public’s understanding of climate change to protect profits, the case argues, supported by documented evidence. The petroleum industry funded front groups and campaigns to promote climate denial and block regulatory and policy responses to the looming environmental threat, which has now grown into a full-blown crisis wreaking havoc in communities across the United States and beyond. With its legal filing, Chicago joins more than three dozen jurisdictions in the US that have turned to the courts seeking to hold the oil and gas industry liable for climate change harms. “These companies knowingly deceived Chicago consumers in their endless pursuit of profits. As a result of their conduct, Chicago is enduring extreme heat and precipitation, flooding, sewage flows into Lake Michigan, damage to city infrastructure, and more. That all comes with enormous costs,” Alderman Matt Martin said in a press release. The lawsuit demands that Big Oil shoulder some of these costs. Specifically, the city seeks compensatory and loss-of-use damages, penalties and fines for statutory violations, and disgorgement of profits, as well as a court order that defendants cease their deceptive conduct. While oil and gas companies no longer outright deny that climate change is real, they have shifted their misleading messaging to claiming that their products, particularly fossil gas, are climate friendly and that their industry is leading climate solutions. Oil industry representatives and their allies slammed Chicago’s lawsuit and said courts should not be deciding climate policy. Ryan Meyers, general counsel of the American Petroleum Institute, called Chicago’s action part of an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project – an industry-backed campaign that pushes back against lawsuits targeting corporate polluters – said in a statement that “this litigation is not the type of action that is going to lead to meaningful solutions,” adding, “courts are simply not the appropriate places to decide climate policy.” Chicago officials, however, say their lawsuit is not about climate policy, but about accountability. “There is no justice without accountability. From the unprecedented poor air quality that we experienced last summer to the basement floodings that our residents on the West Side experienced, the consequences of this crisis are severe, as are the costs of surviving them,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a press release. “Evidence shows that these Defendants intentionally misled Chicago residents about the climate change-related dangers associated with their oil and gas products,” said Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry. “We bring this lawsuit to ensure that the Defendants who have profited from the deception campaign bear responsibility for their conduct.” Montana Defendants Claim Trial Judge "Had No Authority" to Rule on Historic Youth Climate Case2/15/2024 In August 2023, Montana District Court Judge Kathy Seeley issued what has been described as a “landmark” and “historic” win for the sixteen young people who sued their state government over a policy that bans regulators from even considering climate change in routine environmental impact assessments. Following a seven-day trial in June, Seeley determined that Montana had violated its state constitutional guarantee of the right to a clean and healthful environment through this policy that shielded fossil fuel projects from scrutiny over their climate impacts – the first time in U.S. history that a government has been held accountable under constitutional provisions for actions that contribute to the climate crisis.
Now, Montana is urging the state’s highest court to overturn that ruling by arguing that Seeley should never have been allowed to decide on the case in the first place. In their opening brief filed with the Montana Supreme Court on February 12, state defendants in Held et al. v. State of Montana claimed that the district court “had no authority to decide this case” because the youth plaintiffs lacked what is called standing, or the permission to be in court bringing a lawsuit. Specifically, the state argues that the policy at issue in the case did not cause climate change injuries to plaintiffs. It also argues that invalidating the policy would not redress any alleged harm, because scrapping it would not substantially alleviate the global climate crisis. In making these arguments, state defendants say that the ‘causation’ and ‘redressability’ requirements for plaintiffs to have standing have not been met. However, the state is not refuting the facts and evidence underlying Seeley’s decision or directly challenging her determination that the policy was unconstitutional. Instead, the state is claiming that it was not her place to even make that judgment. “It was very interesting that the State did not argue that Judge Seeley was wrong in finding that the state law barring consideration of climate change in making energy policy violated the environmental rights provisions of the state constitution. This amounts to an admission,” Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said via email. While the Held lawsuit had a broader scope when it was filed in 2020, by the time it reached trial last year it had been narrowed in terms of challenged policies and requested relief. Seeley had denied plaintiffs’ request for ordering the government to develop a climate recovery plan to rapidly decarbonize in line with the best available science. The court could only declare government acts to be unconstitutional, not order a certain policy course change. By the time of trial, the sole policy or state law that she would be scrutinizing was a statute that prohibited assessment of climate impacts or greenhouse gas emissions under the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA). It was essentially a weakening or restriction of MEPA, mandating that state agencies like the Montana Department of Environmental Quality turn a blind eye to climate pollution when doing environmental reviews as part of the permitting process. Seeley referred to it as the “MEPA limitation.” Echoing the arguments made at trial, state defendants asserted in their appellate brief that MEPA is strictly procedural and has no bearing on permitting decisions. The MEPA limitation therefore has no substantive authority or influence on regulators’ issuance of permits for environmentally harmful activities like a coal mine expansion, according to defendants. Seeley did not find such arguments convincing, and the state does not appear to be claiming that she was wrong in her finding that the MEPA limitation policy is unconstitutional. What the state is saying is that courts cannot tell the political branches what to do. Even if the MEPA policy is unconstitutional, agencies “are not are not required to analyze GHG emissions and climate impacts in MEPA reviews”, defendants argue. In other words, the state contends that while Seeley’s decision may invalidate the MEPA limitation, it is not a mandate that regulators must analyze GHG emissions in every environmental review. They could, and they are not prohibited from doing so, but they are not required to do this analysis – or so their argument goes. |
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