Chevron is asking a court to disregard two climate studies — as well as review whether the research was “supported or otherwise influenced” by a top lawyer in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against fossil fuel companies.
The unconventional motion, filed Friday in Multnomah County Oregon Circuit Court, asserts that the lead counsel for Multnomah County’s 2023 lawsuit against the oil and gas industry failed to tell the court about his involvement with two papers published in April and May in the scientific journal Nature and referenced in court documents.
In one paper, “partial support” from the counsel, Roger Worthington, was listed in the acknowledgments. Early drafts of the other journal article were posted on the website of his firm, Worthington & Caron.
Chevron’s motion comes as the oil and gas industry and its allies, including the Trump administration, escalate efforts to quash nearly two dozen lawsuits that have been filed by local cities, counties and states seeking financial compensation from polluters for the rising cost of climate change.
The Trump administration in April sued Michigan and Hawaii in an effort to prevent the states from filing climate lawsuits. The Department of Justice last week asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the cases.
Multnomah County’s lawsuit seeks $51 billion from the industry, accusing Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, McKinsey & Co. and hundreds of other defendants of contributing to a deadly 2021 heat wave. In its motion, Chevron asserts that the county’s legal briefs that cite the studies “raise questions as to whether plaintiff’s counsel has been candid with this court.”
Worthington declined to comment on Chevron’s move but said the firm looks “forward to challenging Chevron’s motion to strike” with a “robust reply.” Worthington last October accused oil companies of working with a conservative research firm to “chill collaboration and communication between donors and the universities.”
The firm, Argus Insight, made at least 10 public records requests for documents related to the Multnomah lawsuit, POLITICO’s E&E News reported at the time. That included requests seeking communication among county officials, University of Oregon Law School staffers and lawyers at Worthington & Caron, as well as county emails referencing the Rockefeller Family Fund.
Worthington was named in some of the inquiries, and he told E&E it was a “blatant and shameless form of intimidation and harassment.” It’s unclear who hired Argus, but one of the firm’s three partners is also employed by the conservative public affairs firm CRC Advisors, whose clients have included the oil giant Chevron and groups funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Theodore Boutrous, a lawyer for Chevron, said the company “has no knowledge of — or involvement in — that public records request activity.”
He added that the company filed the motion because the county’s attorney “has engaged in activities that harm the integrity of the judicial process.”
‘Ethical concerns’
In the motion, Chevron said Multnomah Country cited in a court brief an April Nature article that looked at carbon majors “and the scientific case for climate liability.” The plaintiffs also cited a May article that researched how “anthropogenic climate change contributes to wildfire particulate matter and related mortality in the United States.”
Chevron’s attorneys said the county and its experts treated the studies “as though they are independent works of scientific research, when they are not. Such misconduct threatens to work what the United States Supreme Court has deemed a fraud on the court.”
Oil companies have long funded research on climate-related topics. It is standard practice for researchers to acknowledge that support in papers, which the companies may then use in legal or regulatory disputes.
But Chevron said the county did not disclose to the court Worthington’s involvement when citing the May article as “evidence that “[it] is overall ‘likely’ that anthropogenic climate change increased the likelihood and severity of the severe wildfire smoke air pollution episode that affected Oregon in September 2020.”
The oil company also argued said that the authors of the April article did not disclose any funding or support by Worthington, but that pre-publication versions of the article appeared on his website without explanation.
The company argues the failure to disclose “does not appear to be an isolated instance, but part of a broader pattern confirming the lack of disclosure is intentional.”
Chevron contends that before filing briefs in the case, Worthington wrote op-eds in Oregon newspapers promoting the lawsuit without disclosing he was lead counsel. Instead, he signed as owner of a local brewery.
That failure to identify, the attorneys said, suggested his interest in the case “is as a mere local brewery owner, when in truth he stands to make millions of dollars” if the county prevails.
Chevron noted that in one incident, a disclosure was added to an op-ed after a reader pointed to the omission.
“As the reader recognized, Mr. Worthington’s original non-disclosure ‘raises serious ethical concerns about misleading readers and eroding trust in the public discourse,’” the company wrote.
In addition to asking Circuit Judge Benjamin Souede to strike references to the two studies, Chevron asks that he consider a hearing “to determine the full extent of plaintiff’s counsel’s misconduct.”
Corbin Hiar contributed to this report.
