North Carolina town sues Duke Energy over the climate crisis

The town of Carrboro filed a lawsuit against Duke Energy on Wednesday, accusing the energy and utility giant of harmfully contributing to climate change and deceiving customers.

Mayor Barbara Foushee and city council members from the town of 21,000 located immediately west of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus pointed fingers at Duke Energy for knowing about the dangers associated with climate change but failing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

This marks the first lawsuit of its kind, in which a town is seeking action against a utility company in this manner, Foushee said. It was filed in Orange County Superior Court in Hillsborough. The state of Vermont passed a law earlier this year that requires fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change.

“We’re bringing this lawsuit because taking care of our town, each other, and our climate is at the center of everything we do here in Carrboro,” Foushee said. “The climate crisis is causing tremendous harm to our community’s health and well-being.”

The suit seeks “compensation for the damages (both past and future) that it is incurring as a direct and proximate result of Duke’s campaign of deception and resulting exacerbation of the climate crisis” — damages that the suit estimates will total in the millions of dollars.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Duke Energy said, “We are in the process of reviewing the complaint. Duke Energy is committed to its customers and communities and will continue working with policymakers and regulators to deliver reliable and increasingly clean energy while keeping rates as low as possible.”

Suppressing a long-known truth

Top executives at Duke Energy have known about the risks of fossil fuels for more than 50 years, according to the lawsuit. But that didn’t stop the company from a “widespread campaign” to misinform the public about its effects on the environment, the complaint argues.

An example of this deception occurred when one of Duke’s predecessor entities, Cinergy, released an annual report in 2004 claiming there was “an unresolved but robust debate on the ‘science’ of global warming.” The lawsuit points out how “science” is placed in quotation marks even though Cinergy and Duke were aware of the causes and consequences of climate change.

The lawsuit points out that “North Carolina has just suffered its hottest year on record, and temperatures for the region may increase as much as 6°-10°F by the end of the century.”

Climate change, it states, has also contributed to extreme weather events, like Hurricane Helene, which wreaked catastrophic damage across communities in western North Carolina earlier this year.

“For far too long, corporations like Duke Energy have prioritized their executives’ personal fortunes at the expense of our communities, our planet and our collective well-being,” Mayor Pro Tem Danny Nowell said.

Based in Charlotte, Duke Energy provides electricity to more than eight million customers in six states and natural gas to around two million customers in five states. With a near-monopoly in North Carolina, the company is one of the country’s largest operators of coal and natural gas power plants.

The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ranked Duke Energy as the nation’s third-biggest emitter of gases responsible for climate change on the Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index.

Taxpayers aren’t funding the lawsuit, Foushee said. A nonprofit organization is covering the legal fees.

Council member Randee Haven-O’Donnell said Carrboro has made efforts to mitigate climate change since the 1970s, aiming to protect the area’s natural surroundings and ecosystems.

The actions of Duke Energy, however, have set that process backwards.

“We’ve been working hard and in earnest to protect our climate, and the giant utility has been deceiving us,” she said. “Duke Energy’s deceptive public information campaign has been working against us, erasing the progress we’ve urgently been striving to make to address climate change.”

Echoing findings of a recent nonprofit’s exposé

The allegations in the lawsuit about the knowledge that Duke and its predecessors possessed decades ago and then subsequently suppressed, echo findings detailed in a lengthy report prepared by Sue Sturgis, Research and Communications Manager for the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute entitled “Duke Energy Knew: Documenting the Utility’s Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception About Climate Change.”

According to the report, which was released in November, warnings about greenhouse-gas-induced climate change from Duke’s corporate predecessors date as far back as 1968 and were regularly touted in the 1970’s as justification for efforts to expand nuclear power.

Later on, Sturgis wrote — particularly in the 1980’s and 90’s as nuclear power fell from favor — warnings about CO2 emission and climate change became muted or disappeared.

In an interview with NC Newsline for an upcoming edition of the radio show/podcast, News & Views, Sturgis described the sequence events:

“And then, when the consensus around the science really came together in the late 1980’s we saw both the Duke utilities and also the industry associations that they were involved in pivot at that point, in order to protect their business model. They realized that if they were saying that…the climate problem was going to cause difficulties for their business model…they moved away from that message. Rather than change their business model, they said, ‘well, maybe we’re not so certain about the science, after all.’ And so that’s really when we saw them selling the denial.”

Click here to explore Sturgis’ report. Read the Carrboro lawsuit below: