A Peruvian farmer traveled across the globe to file a lawsuit against the German energy
company, RWE, over greenhouse emissions.
He says the company should have to pay for the toll climate change is taking on his community.
Legal journalist Mollye Barrows with the national Trial Lawyer Magazine has more.
Why should the community have to pay for it?
Shouldn't the company who caused it pay for it?
Yes.
Isn't that kind of the, the question we ask all the time?
About why is it that we're letting these companies externalize all the costs and all the problems
and then they're taking all the profits and leaving us with this disaster.
And saying it's a political problem.
Yeah.
What's your take on this?
Well, I think it's fascinating.
I think this could very well set a good precedent.
One that's needed.
You have a lot of organizations like cities and counties which are suing these individual
energy companies, but this is the first guy who's brought an individual lawsuit and he's
from the Andes Mountains in Peru, surrounded by glaciers and you can see that they're visibly
starting to deteriorate.
And, and he's basing his suit on a study that was done by an organization that found that
this particular company, so he filed against RWE in Germany.
He traveled all the way to Germany in 2015 to file this lawsuit.
And at first it was dismissed and then it was revived three years later, basically a
higher court in Germany ruled that he did have legal ground to bring this suit.
And so it is being pursued in that regard.
But basically he's saying, you know, your company, this study that was done found that
your company is 0.5% responsible for the greenhouse gases that are being admitted.
So I want to hold you 0.5% responsible for paying for the, the risks to prevent flooding
or paying to prevent, you know, whatever it takes to shore up a town in his community.
In other words, he can quantify the damage.
Just like, just like we did on tobacco.
Right.
You know, our Law Firm handled the tobacco litigation.
We looked at each company said, you have this much of the market.
This is what you should have to pay for this particular bill.
We could, it's easy to quantify.
What I like about this is it's, it's taking place in Germany.
I liked that we have a better, can you imagine that, that we've become, our judicial system
has become so cranked.
It's become so peculiar that we have to go to Germany to handle something as significant
as this.
And as I look at it, as I compare notes on what his possibilities are over there, he's
got a better possibility in Germany than he has in the United States.
Right, and the reason he even went to Germany, is his lawsuit's being supported by a nonprofit
called Germanwatch group.
And basically he gave tours in his little town in the Andes and he met a tourist there
who said, you're right, your town is at risk.
You know, they've had problems with flooding from a lake that was fed by glaciers before
as the glaciers started to deteriorate.
So they've see, feel like this is their real danger of this particular lake being impacted
by this glacier.
So when you talked to this tourist, this tourist said, why don't you look into this organization?
So they are supporting him and his efforts to bring this because they recognize that
again, you have, whether it's this man's community or communities all across the country, all
across the world, they're facing flooding issues from this.
And if they open this door, it could help.
Here's what I really like about this.
The trial that takes place, if he can get that far, it won't be a jury trial.
It'll be, it'll really be kind of, it'll be what we call it, a bench trial, a judge trial.
This will be a list.
This will be several administrative judges probably, that will decide.
They'll listen to the science, they'll listen to the case in a different kind of way that
a, that a jury would, and they'll make decisions that will have a huge impact on any subsequent
cases that are brought around the world.
It's going to be admissible, for example, in Germany, if there's particular findings
where he says, yes, I told you I could quantify the amount of damage that was caused by this
company.
Here it is.
We can break it down.
There's no guesswork here.
It's, it's, it's very specific.
When he can get to that point, then we can then borrow that in the United States and
say, here's the formula.
And that's what they're hoping for.
And in fact, the court has appointed two hydrology experts who are going to go to this guy's
community.
Take a look at the measure of the risk essentially from the glacier.
Then determine what role climate change is playing in that risk.
And then again, boiling down to if it, if it's not, if it's not universally rooted,
in, in, well that's the argument.
I'm sorry I jumped ahead.
But basically they're going to take a look at these hydrology experts are going to take
a look at a situation and evaluate if this particular company, you know, if climate change
was involved, did this particular company play a role on it.
And so there's, that's where some folks are saying the suit may not have much of a chance
and that you can't prove that a specific company is specifically responsible for this specific
climate change.
Let me talk about that just a second.
It's always, we can't, we can't, don't do it.
Usually the people that are feeding that line is corporate America.
You're right.
You can't prove, we heard the same thing on tobacco.
We've heard it on pharmaceutical case after pharmaceutical case.
I heard it in the environmental case I tried up in, up in the Ohio River valley.
You can't prove this.
No, you can prove it.
There are experts that can take it down to, look, we can put, we can put a man on the
moon.
We can send a rocket to Mars.
You don't think experts can figure out how much damage was done by this company?
What impact that had.
Quantify the impact and say, you know what, the bill is $80 billion and you know what,
you're responsible for 0.5% of this.
Easily done.
This is not, you know, this idea, it's just beyond us, is such a ridiculous argument.
Right, and he's only asking for $20,000.
That's 0.5% of the bill.
If you're 0.5% the contributor of this problem, then he's saying, we're gonna need $20,000
to shore up this town from flooding that can be potentially catastrophic.
Well, I don't care if it's twenty thousand, ten thousand, eighty billion, what's going
to come out of it hopefully if it goes right is some precedent that we can't use directly,
but we can use a lot of the information that comes out of it.
Well, I'm excited for him.
I hope it moves forward.
Me too, thanks for joining me, okay.
Thanks Pap.