A small North Carolina town about 40 minutes outside of Raleigh is taking on a utility giant. On Wednesday, the town of Carrboro filed its 70-page complaint against Duke Energy in Orange County Superior Court, alleging the utility "actively participated in a far-reaching, decades-long campaign to deceive the public and decision-makers about [the] dangers" of climate change, reports the Washington Post. The "David and Goliath" suit out of the tiny 7-square-mile town accuses Duke, which has 8 million customers across six Southern and Midwestern states, of sitting on the knowledge it had of those dangers for more than a half-century, instead engaging in "greenwashing" that made it seem as if the company was behind clean energy and "addressing the climate crisis."
"Duke's deception campaign has delayed the critical transition away from fossil fuels and thereby materially worsened" that crisis, the suit notes. Carrboro's complaint alleges that, due to Duke's machinations, the town has been slammed with millions of dollars' worth of infrastructure costs such as road repairs and bolstering stormwater protections, as well as spiking energy bills in an increasingly warm state. An attorney for the town of 21,000 estimates their climate-induced expenses could top $60 million. "The climate crisis continues to burden our community and cost residents their hard-earned tax dollars," Carrboro Mayor Barbara Foushee said in a Wednesday statement, adding that "we have to speak truth to power as we continue to fight the existential threat that is climate change."
The complaint accuses Duke of perpetuating a cover-up by paying dues to trade organizations that "served as mere front groups for purposes of perpetuating ... climate deceptions," as well as by taking out ads that pooh-poohed the concept of climate change. One that ran in a local paper in the early '90s read: "If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Kentucky getting colder?" (The suit notes "North Carolina has just suffered its hottest year on record.") "We are in the process of reviewing the complaint," Duke Energy says in a statement, per the News & Observer, which adds this may be the first suit of its kind out of a municipality; some states have filed similar complaints. Duke adds that it's "committed to its customers and communities and will continue working with policymakers and regulators to deliver reliable and increasingly clean energy while keeping rates as low as possible." (More Duke Energy Corp. stories.)
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