The 2021 “Heat Dome” Killed Her Mother. Now, She’s Suing The Oil Companies Responsible

It was, in a word, devastating. Wildfires raged. Roads buckled; power cables melted. Cities were at once flooded and droughted. And, of course, people died.

At least 1,400 people across the region died as a result of that month’s extreme weather – but it’s one in particular, Juliana Leon, who is now making headlines. Why? Because her daughter, Misti Leon, is seeking redress for her death, filing a lawsuit this week against seven oil and gas companies whom she blames for her mother’s wrongful death.

But could it work? Well… maybe.

Precedence for suing Big Business 

It may seem ambitious – but Leon isn’t the first to seek damages from big business like this. In 2018, Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay out $4.69 billion in punitive and compensatory damages to women who claimed its talcum powder products had caused them to develop ovarian cancer; DuPont was fined $16.45 million by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2004 for its role in the spread of “forever chemicals” – the largest civil penalty under US environmental law at the time. 

Perhaps most relevant of all, individuals have been suing tobacco companies for decades – often successfully – in wrongful death suits after loved ones succumb to the various ailments caused by the product.

Fossil fuel companies have already faced legal action for their behavior, too. Between 2018 and 2020, the states of first Rhode Island, then New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and Connecticut all filed lawsuits against multiple oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, BP, and Chevron. The Supreme Court of Colorado ruled only this month that the city of Boulder could move forward with a similar suit against Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy; meanwhile, Hawaii and Michigan are both now launching cases against various oil and gas companies for their role in climate change.

But those suits were based on claims that the companies knew about their products’ effects on climate change – which they did – yet continued to produce and promote them while withholding that information. Some cases go further, arguing that the corps not only hid their findings but actively misled the public over the impact of fossil fuel usage on the climate and environment. Leon’s claim is different – and so far, legal experts believe, unique. 

“As early as the 1950s – around the time Julie was born – defendants knew that their fossil fuel products were already altering the Earth’s atmosphere,” Leon said in her lawsuit, filed this week in Washington state court. “Her lifespan is a bridge between cause and effect.”

“The day Julie died was the hottest day ever recorded in Washington with temperatures in Seattle, where Julie died, peaking around 108F [42C],” the filing states. “The extreme heat that killed Julie was directly linked to fossil fuel-driven alteration of the climate.”

In short, Leon’s case is based not on unethical or illegal business practices – though it does include those allegations as part of the suit – but on wrongful death. The actions of these oil and gas companies led directly to her mother’s death in 2021, she argues, and therefore, they should pay.

“Why shouldn’t we hold someone legally accountable for this kind of behavior?” David Arkush, director of the climate program at Public Citizen, an advocacy group that has called for bringing criminal charges against fossil fuel companies, told the New York Times.

“There would be no question that we would hold them accountable if they caused other types of deaths,” he said. “This is no different. They foresaw this, they did it anyway, and they hurt people.”

Is this even possible?

It’s a bold strategy, but does it have legs? Well, it’s definitely plausible from a scientific viewpoint: the fossil fuel industry has obviously played a huge part in human-caused climate change, with coal, oil, and gas now accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions.

“We’ve seen a really advanced scientific understanding about [the] specific effects that climate change can cause in individual extreme weather events,” Korey Silverman-Roati, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told The Washington Post. “Scientists today are a lot more confident in saying that but for climate change, this would not have happened.”

It’s equally clear that the companies behind all these emissions knew the potential impacts of their business at least as far back as the mid-1950s. And not in a “hey, this might be a bit iffy in a few hundred years” kind of way – by 1954, the fossil fuel industry had been explicitly informed, by scientists on their own payroll, that the “concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere” was a matter “of well recognized importance to our civilization,” and that explained that “the possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO₂ in the atmosphere with reference to climate […] may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization.”

Nevertheless, these companies continued to sell, promote, and lobby for their industry – with the result being a massive increase in both emissions and global temperatures. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense thanks to climate change, and indeed the heat dome that killed Juliana Leon would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” according to an analysis from World Weather Attribution, an international group of scientists and meteorologists in 2021.

Overall, therefore, “there’s a reasonable framework for a complaint,” Cindy Cho, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at Indiana University Bloomington and is not involved in the case, told the New York Times. “You have a chain of causation, and yes, you have to back it up with that evidence. But the allegations, taken at face value, are reasonable.”

“It is predictable or – to use a legal term, foreseeable – that the loss of life from these climate-fueled disasters will likely accelerate as climate chaos intensifies,” agreed Don Braman, associate professor at George Washington University Law School, talking to The Washington Post. “At the heart of all this is the argument about the culpability of fossil fuel companies, and it rests on a large and growing body of evidence that these companies have understood the dangers of their products for decades.”

Will it succeed?

The case may have legs in theory, but actually getting it through the courts – and winning – is another challenge entirely. The industry has already hit back at Leon, accusing her of “exploiting a personal tragedy to promote politicized climate tort litigation […] contrary to law, science, and common sense.”

“The court should add this far-fetched claim to the growing list of meritless climate lawsuits that state and federal courts have already dismissed,” added Chevron Corporation counsel Theodore Boutrous Jr, in a statement reported by The Washington Post.

Boutrous’s definitions of “science”, “common sense”, and “far-fetched” notwithstanding, this bluster might not be as impotent as supporters of Leon’s case hope. As he pointed out, previous lawsuits against oil and gas companies have been thrown out of courts across the US – and with the new Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel stance, the Department of Justice is newly motivated to quash such claims before they ever see the inside of a courtroom. 

Hawaii and Michigan, for example, are right now catching heat over their intentions to seek damages from fossil fuel companies, with the federal government imposing seemingly impossible conditions on states’ abilities to seek redress: “on the one hand the US is saying Michigan, and other states, can’t regulate greenhouse gases because the Clean Air Act does so and therefore preempts states from regulating,” Ann Carlson, environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The Independent this month. “On the other hand, the US is trying to say that the Clean Air Act should not be used to regulate. The hypocrisy is pretty stunning.”

That said, as the saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This case may be the first of its kind, but legal scholars seriously doubt it will be the last: “It’s hard to imagine this will be an isolated incident,” said Braman. “We’re facing an escalating climate crisis.” 

“It’s a sobering thought that this year, the hottest on record, will almost certainly be one of the coolest we’ll experience for the foreseeable future,” he added.

Indeed, the filing of this case isn’t even all that surprising. Braman and Arkush argued in a 2023 paper that fossil fuel companies could potentially be charged with “every type of homicide short of first-degree murder,” saying that “the extreme lethality of [their] conduct and their longstanding awareness of the catastrophic consequences” amounted to homicide by “reckless or negligent acts or omissions.”

Even if Leon’s suit fails, it will surely be followed by others – whether in Charleston, Vermont, France, Nigeria, or even further afield. No doubt every step forward will be opposed zealously by the fossil fuel industry – but how long they can succeed, in a world rapidly becoming aware of their impact, remains to be seen.