“The Big Apple Loses to Big Oil as Judge Dismisses Climate Liability Suit”, 20 of July 2018

A federal judge ruled on Thursday in favor of a motion by five big oil companies to dismiss a lawsuit brought against them by New York City, which demanded they pay the costs of adapting the city's infrastructure to climate change, The New York Times reported. The ruling comes nearly a month after a federal judge in San Francisco dismissed a similar case brought by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco…While both judges acknowledged the reality of climate change, they thought that crafting policy around it was too large an issue for the courts to settle. “Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government,” Keenan wrote in his decision. But environmentalists pointed out that fossil fuel companies like the defendants had done everything in their power to stop the other branches of government from acting…New York City spokesperson Seth Stein said the city would appeal the decision…The city had argued that the defendants ― Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell ― had known about the risks posed by burning fossil fuels since the 1950s and had “engaged in an overt public relations campaign intended to cast doubt on climate science,”…