william boyd

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William Boyd in Salon: Two new climate lawsuits give Big Oil the tobacco treatment

Two new lawsuits from Minnesota and Washington, D.C. hint that climate lawsuits against Big Oil might be mounting a comeback. William Boyd, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the two new lawsuits might get more traction than past attempts. “These are broad consumer protection statutes, and the facts that are alleged in the complaints are pretty damning for the big oil companies in the sense that they show a systematic effort to suppress and divert climate science and to mislead the public about the impacts of climate change,” said Boyd. Oil companies did “essentially what the tobacco companies did in funding and supporting a whole campaign through a whole network of organizations to essentially mislead the public,” Boyd said.