NC City Suing Duke Energy For Deceptive Practices: Utility Supported Anti-Science Groups For Decades

RALEIGH, N.C.—The state’s first climate deception case unfurled Thursday in North Carolina Business Court, where attorneys for the town of Carrboro and Duke Energy spent six hours sparring over legal arcana to answer a single question: Should a jury hear a case alleging that Duke Energy is responsible for lying about the link between climate change and extreme weather that has inflicted millions of dollars of property damage on the town?

The case began in December 2024, when Carrboro sued Duke Energy, alleging the utility has funded and promoted a decades-long deception campaign to dismiss the connection between fossil fuels and climate change. The long-term effects of the alleged deception reinforced the public’s reliance on coal and natural gas, town attorneys argue, which led to increased greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated climate change in the form of heat waves, greater precipitation, intensified storms and more flooding. Carrboro has incurred millions of dollars in damages to 47 miles of roads and other town-owned property, allegedly because of more frequent and extreme weather that resulted from a warming planet.

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If the case goes to trial, Quinn said the town would present climate attribution scientists—experts who study the link between extreme weather events and climate change—to prove causality to a jury. The alleged deception began in earnest in the 1990s, Carrboro says in its complaint, when several energy front groups, in part funded by Duke Energy, knew fossil fuel emissions were warming the planet but launched a public relations campaign rebutting that climate change was real.

The Global Climate Coalition, of which Duke was an influential member, falsely claimed in a 1994 edition of Climate Watch Bulletin that “new scientific evidence” showed fossil fuels might help maintain “an essential atmospheric balance” and that “cutbacks in fossil fuel use may actually enhance the greenhouse effect,” the complaint says. Duke was also an “active participant” in a trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, which knew as early as 1968 that fossil fuels were altering the planet’s atmosphere, according to the complaint.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26092025/duke-energy-storm-damage-lawsuit/