Carrboro sues Duke Energy, alleging ‘climate deception’

The Town Council of Carrboro has filed a lawsuit against Duke Energy, alleging the utility misled the public about fossil fuel emissions and the timeline for renewable energy adoption. Supported and funded by NC WARN, the suit seeks damages for climate-related harms, pointing to Hurricane Helene’s impact as an example. The suit was filed in Orange County Superior Court in Hillsborough.

“Carrboro’s lawsuit is a sensational attempt to win a high-dollar judgment against Duke Energy. Nevertheless, the lawsuit ought to be laughed out of court,” said Jon Sanders, director of the Center for Food, Power, and Life at the John Locke Foundation. “The idea that, as stated in the lawsuit, ‘Duke’s Actions Are Substantially Responsible for Causing and Accelerating Climate Change’ is ridiculous and unprovable. The lawsuit even calls Hurricane Helene ‘a stark example of a climate-change fueled hurricane,’ which is antiscientific nonsense, strictly at odds with climate science.”

Similar climate lawsuits have been filed in towns like Honolulu, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. However, this is the first to be filed by a municipality against an energy utility.

“We have to speak truth to power as we continue to fight the existential threat that is climate change. The climate crisis continues to burden our community and cost residents their hard-earned tax dollars,” said Carrboro Mayor Barbara Foushee. “Duke Energy’s knowledge of the environmental injustice being caused by the use of fossil fuels has unfairly plagued our community for decades.”

Critics, including the Consumer Choice Center, argue the lawsuit is political theater, prioritizing politics over progress and undermining North Carolina’s clean energy progress, which includes nuclear power and reduced carbon emissions.

Data released in November by the US Energy Information Administration show that North Carolina’s carbon dioxide emissions from electricity have declined by 52% since 2005. During this time, the Energy Institute reports that China has increased it emissions by 5,139.12 million metric tons of CO₂.

“North Carolina’s decline, which one would think Carrboro would welcome, of nearly 40 million metric tons is a drop in the bucket against China’s massive, massive increase,” said Sanders. “It’s not just China; most of the rest of the world is continuing to increase emissions from energy. Not the United States, however, which has cut more CO₂emissions from energy since 2005 than any other country in the world: 1,234.14 million metric tons.”

Over the summer the US Supreme Court was asked by a group of climate activists, called Our Children’s Trust, to consider a lawsuit claiming that US energy policy violates their rights to be protected from climate change. In May, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that the lawsuit be dismissed.

“Litigation like this is less about meaningful environmental progress and more about scoring political points at the expense of energy consumers,” said Consumer Choice Center’s deputy director Yaël Ossowski. 

“This lawsuit exposes Duke Energy executives as using the tobacco scandal playbook. They’re making the global climate crisis worse despite widespread and accelerating misery,” said Jim Warren, executive director of NC WARN. “And they’re still expanding fossil fuels and suppressing renewables — in flat defiance of scientists demanding that we do the exact opposite. We need the judicial system to hold Duke Energy leadership accountable and finally break their corporate control over our political system and public decisions.”

Duke Energy supplies more than 90% of North Carolina’s retail electricity sales. 

“This effort is meant to prop up a nationally struggling solar industry and slow down the progress of nuclear energy in providing a reliable clean energy future, a cause these groups and the plaintiff in NC claim to champion,” Ossowski said. “North Carolina has one of the lowest per capita natural gas usage rates, has seen energy bills reduced by $212 million in 2023, and has diversified its energy grid so fast that nuclear is one-third of the state’s portfolio.” 

Even environmental experts from the left have criticized using storm damage in this way, with President Barak Obama’s undersecretary for science in the US Department of Energy, Dr. Steven E. Koonin, saying in his book “Unsettled” that, “Pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-caused climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest.”