The big headline is that it’s Chicago versus the oil companies. This week, the city sued a host of firms along with the American Petroleum Institute, a major lobbying group, for both contributing to the mounting effects of climate change that threaten the city, and knowingly covering up the dangerous effects of fossil fuels since at least the 1960s.
But while the city is suing on behalf of all residents, a close reading of the nearly 200-page lawsuit tells a different, more specific story about how climate change harms Chicago and which groups are bearing the brunt of that harm.
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A large portion of the lawsuit is devoted to detailing what the oil and gas industry knew about climate change and when. It details how the industry essentially pioneered climate science, with researchers employed by the likes of BP and Chevron rightly suggesting that burning fossil fuels would lead to sea-level rise and other devastating effects — only for such findings to be buried.
The section that details how climate change is playing out in Chicago, however, has a very pointed environmental justice slant. It highlights such infamous events as the deadly 1995 heat wave, and how it killed a disproportionately large amount of non-white Chicagoans.
Climate change is already bad in Chicago — but it’s even worse for Black and Brown residents.
“Many of the victims of the 1995 heat wave were elderly, low-income, and Black,” the suit reads, “living in areas that experience urban heat island effects, apartments without ventilation or air conditioning, and in neighborhoods lacking social infrastructure and critical resources to withstand extreme heat events.”
This is very much the running theme of the climate effects section: between the loss of ice on Lake Michigan to increased flooding across the city, climate change is already bad in Chicago — but it’s even worse for Black and Brown residents. The lawsuit quotes the city’s own climate action plan, which says, “While all Chicagoans directly experience climate change impacts, frontline communities experience the most immediate and worst effects.”
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In addition to highlighting instances like the heatwave where extreme weather had a disproportionate effect on people of color, the lawsuit makes a point of showing how these are overarching structural trends. It includes maps showing how extreme heat risks overlap almost perfectly with neighborhoods that fall on the high end of the environmental-justice index, and also includes a similar pair of maps showing increased floor risks compared to the index scores.
Chicago’s lawsuit against the oil companies is just the latest of this type from American cities and states. New York City and Washington, D.C., have both filed similar suits against oil companies, as have a number of states, including California.
It’s not only the vagaries of climate change that have a disproportionate effect on Black and Brown communities — they are, as the suit notes and is rightfully the case, getting a lot of Chicago’s resources to combat climate change. The city is investing $188,000,000 “in meaningful, substantive, and justice-oriented climate projects that will provide the City’s underserved communities with resilient infrastructure and green workforce development opportunities”
That amount of money is nothing compared to what Chicago will need for new and improved green infrastructure going into an unstable climate future. As such, the city is seeking “unspecified monetary compensation,” as The Guardian reported, and is also looking to stop the deception of the fossil fuel companies once and for all.