From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone Gladstone. This week, New York City hosted the 2024 United Nations General Assembly. The topics were wide-ranging. Among them, Ukraine, of course, and pandemic prevention and unavoidably, climate change.

News clip: Thousands of people have been killed in catastrophic flooding in Libya.

News clip: Catastrophic infernos now marking the deadliest wildfire in modern US history.

News clip: Canada, not California, is suffering from disastrous fires right now and it's making the entire northeast look like the surface of Mars.

Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez: Humanity has opened the gates of hell.

Brooke Gladstone: That's United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez known in international policy circles for not mincing his words.

Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez: Many of the poorest nations have every right to be angry. Angry that they're suffering most from a climate crisis they did nothing to create.

Brooke Gladstone: The leaders of some of the world's biggest polluters were conspicuously absent, such as Emmanuel Macron of France, Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Rishi Sunak of the UK. In fact, the conference opened with only one member of the UN's Permanent Security Council in attendance, the host nation, but Joe Biden kept calm and carried on.

Joe Biden: We see it everywhere. Record-breaking heat waves in the United States and China, wildfires ravaging North America and Southern Europe, a fifth year of drought in the Horn of Africa, tragic, tragic flooding in Libya.

Brooke Gladstone: But seeing does not necessarily translate into action. The United States was not invited to speak at the UN's Climate Ambition Summit because Guterres said only countries who took climate action seriously would have a seat at the table. Just blocks away, protestors rallied against funding fossil fuels.

News clip: Loud, angry, and defiant, hundreds of activists from all over the country marching on the city's financially-- [crosstalk]

News clip: Demanding Biden stop approving new oil and gas drilling permits.

News clip: We need to have leaders in crisis mode. I don't sense that. The countries are not doing enough.

Brooke Gladstone: We stand, it seems, at another climate crossroads, no longer debating the impact of humanity on the state of the planet, but still averting our eyes, some of us anyway, from the climate catastrophe already upon us. Yes, Biden seems to have undergone a genuine conversion on the issue, embracing a range of progressive climate policies, but for those protesting outside the UN this week, that wasn't nearly enough. Even if it were, our current Congress will not be moved. Where to go when stymied by the Big Oil behemoths? How about big legal?

News clip: The State of California is suing some of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, accusing them of over 50 years of deception. The lawsuit claims that the companies covered up the risks fossil fuels pose to the environment and protected their profits over the health of the planet.

News clip: Now more than two dozen US cities and states from coast to coast have filed suit against Big Oil. Yesterday-- [crosstalk]

News clip: Leaders of nine small island nations have brought a case to the UN Maritime Court to protect the world's oceans and themselves from catastrophic climate change.

News clip: 16 youngsters sued the State of Montana alleging they've been harmed by climate change. They won.

Brooke Gladstone: A report published this summer sponsored by the UN Environment Program and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University tracked the surge in climate lawsuits and found that the caseload stood at 2,180 as of last year. That's more than double the number in 2017. They're not just cases in the US. Around 30% were filed elsewhere in the world with an increasing number from the global south, which faces the brunt of climate impacts. Now, different parts of the world bring different climate arguments before the bar.

The US suits tend to focus on Big Oil while human rights won the day for the Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders of Australia, though Australia has yet to act. Last year, Brazil's Supreme Court found that the government had a duty to act on climate change, interpreting the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement as a human rights treaty that superseded domestic law. This essentially sent Brazil back to the drawing board to devise stronger protections for the Amazon rainforest.

Rebecca Leber: In the US, this would look very different than we've seen in Brazil and Germany.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Leber Leber covers climate change for Vox.

Rebecca Leber: One important theme in this report is cases being determined in one part of the world can influence what's happening elsewhere. Just because we might not see a successful lawsuit saying the US must adhere to its admissions cuts in the Paris Agreement, we're seeing other kinds of cases like the Montana youth lawsuit that does find it credible that young people do have a climate right to a safe and healthy future.

Brooke Gladstone: I found it interesting and remarkable that the argument won.

Rebecca Leber: A group of young people sued the state over language in its constitution that actually guarantees a right to a clean and helpful environment. Ironically, Montana is a huge exporter and producer for coal, oil, and gas, and the case really rested on this discrepancy here, that Montana was not adhering to its own constitution. The judge sided with that argument and said the state needs to step up because Montanans have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. We might see someday this land at the Supreme Court to ultimately settle this question.

Brooke Gladstone: What about the racketeering argument?

Rebecca Leber: The racketeering charges echo what happened with tobacco years ago. There were cases against tobacco companies for similar charges of misleading the public on the science in a way that resembles organized crime, and ultimately, those cases led to changes in federal and state policy, and also big funds to repair some of the damages of what tobacco companies did. Now, oil companies could face the same fate. We've seen dozens of these cases, not just around racketeering, but around oil deception.

Just this week, the governor of California announced that the state would sue Big Oil over similar claims joining the dozens of lawsuits throughout the country. Going after Big Oil and saying they need to pay up for the damages they're causing.

Brooke Gladstone: I guess the bigger question is, have these cases had an impact in the aggregate? Have the big guns changed their policies based on the fear of litigation?

Rebecca Leber: Shareholders have been pushing back on companies raising resolutions saying that oil companies and financial institutions that back them have to seriously assess the risks of continuing to invest in fossil fuels. We're still a little bit early on to see the true consequences because few of these cases have been decided, but there was an interesting analysis done by the London School of Economics looking at the whole body of climate litigation. That research showed that climate activists are winning a little over half the time.

Brooke Gladstone: If corporations and governments see that they have a 50% chance of losing, that would tend to make them more risk averse perhaps?

Rebecca Leber: Right. It's telling governments and corporations that people are trying to hold them to account and potentially succeed in courts so I think this is just the start for climate litigation of seeing its consequences.

Brooke Gladstone: What specifically are the various plaintiffs asking for?

Rebecca Leber: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that we've hit a record number of billion-dollar disasters already this year. The question around who pays is very much a live one. One area where we see climate science and litigation strategies really converging is trying to get to the bottom of how much a company's emissions contributed to a specific disaster.

Brooke Gladstone: This is really fascinating to me. There's an idea that all of us are to blame for climate change, but this new technology is able to actually assign blame.

Rebecca Leber: Climate attribution science, the fact that we can now drill down into the question of how much did ExxonMobil contribute to a hurricane or a wildfire, that's pretty new territory, and it's playing a really big role in the lawsuits against oil because you have to prove in courts, what were the damages, and what role did these companies play here. The fact that there's now an actual accounting, really changes the game here, makes these arguments a lot more convincing to judges who can then determine what kind of payouts for these kinds of disasters.

Brooke Gladstone: You've observed that back in 2014, the climate march theme was the People's Climate March calling for greater ambition on climate activism, but you noted that this year, during Climate Week, the protesters were very focused on the fossil fuel industry, and that's because much of the damage can now be directly attributed to that.

Rebecca Leber: The march this week in New York was literally called The March to End Fossil Fuels. We're seeing a narrower focus.

Brooke Gladstone: One thing that we've often observed here on the show is that lawsuits are great for keeping issues in the headlines. It's something to cover. It has characters, good guys and bad guys, depending on your point of view. Lawsuits can change the narrative. Do you think that lawsuits are changing how climate change is covered?

Rebecca Leber: When we cover climate change, we're talking about emissions, regulation, and worldwide action. Putting a face to that can be hard, but when you get past the emissions and talk about people, things really start to click and make a lot more intuitive sense. That's what these lawsuits are doing because they are telling that story of how a town or community is affected by decisions made throughout the decades by these massive oil companies.

By shifting the narrative around climate change from this idea that everyone's responsible, we must all do our part to what the science actually reflects, which is a few powerful entities have played a disproportionate role in fueling the situation we're in. These lawsuits are shifting that narrative and focusing it more on the actual perpetrators.

Brooke Gladstone: The Wall Street Journal last week published an investigation regarding oil companies fostering climate change skepticism that made this discovery from a lawsuit that didn't end up moving forward, a lot of internal documents came out of it.

Rebecca Leber: These lawsuits can have an impact, even if they don't necessarily win in courts through discovery. We can expect as dozens of these lawsuits move forward that attorneys general and hopefully eventually the public gets its hands on more of these documents of internal oil company decisions throughout the years. This Wall Street Journal story is a great example of that important investigation that showed how Exxon much later than we previously understood, has fostered doubt around climate science.

Now, as some lawsuits uncover documents, they will start to feed into lawsuits we're seeing elsewhere and building this larger narrative that oil companies did foster this deception campaign, and has played a really instrumental role in delaying climate action.

Brooke Gladstone: Later on in the hour, we're going to be discussing radical, even criminal action against climate change, but do you think that this emphasis on lawsuits now represents a greater faith in working within the system?

Rebecca Leber: I think the lawsuits do reflect some level of faith that this is a space where the law is on climate activist sides, and they can use that as a tool to enforce what governments have already promised.

Brooke Gladstone: I can't help thinking though, that it's the continuous bombardment of catastrophe and disaster reflecting climate change. That's the biggest driver of it all.

Rebecca Leber: We've seen this year climate change become personal for billions across the world. More people than not are experiencing hotter than average temperatures, disasters in places that haven't traditionally faced them like Maui's wildfires, like a tropical storm in California, wildfire smoke throughout the Northeast earlier this summer.

Brooke Gladstone: Inundation in Libya, submerging thousands upon thousands.

Rebecca Leber: There's actually been a shift in public perception around climate where it used to battle for attention with issues like health care and the economy in public polling, but now, it is top of mind, especially for Democrats. These lawsuits continue to keep climate change in the headlines even at times of the year that we might not be dealing with constant disasters. They continue to remind the public, this is not going away. This is only going to amplify.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Leber, thank you so much.

Rebecca Leber: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Leber Leber is a senior reporter at Vox, covering climate change. Coming up, what action is most likely to yield serious substantive climate policy now and in the future? Can extreme activism win the hearts and minds? This is On The Media.

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