Utility companies shouldn’t be allowed to exploit public concern about climate change to prop up polluting factory farms. Customers of Oregon’s Northwest Natural Gas are suing the company over misleading claims at the heart of its Smart Energy program, which the company advertises as a way for customers to “offset” their natural gas emissions. But Northwest Natural Gas sends customers’ Smart Energy funds to methane digesters that actually promote further pollution.
The company claims that offsets paid for through the program are equivalent to taking hundreds of thousands of gasoline-powered cars off the road. But the fee consumers pay goes to support manure digesters at factory dairies like Boardman, Oregon’s Threemile Canyon Farms, where over 61,000 cows produce between 9 and 16 million pounds of methane per year. These methane emissions are not affected by how the manure of these tens of thousands of cows is managed via digesters.
FarmSTAND and Sugerman Dahab represent the customers in this class action, who claim that Northwest Natural Gas’s greenwashing is a breach of contract under Oregon law and violates the state’s prohibition on unfair and deceptive marketing claims.
Northwest Natural Gas filed a motion to dismiss the case as well as a motion to strike the case under Oregon’s anti-SLAPP law. Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws are meant to prevent bad actors from using baseless, expensive lawsuits to intimidate people and organizations from exercising their First Amendment rights.
Here, Northwest Natural Gas aimed to abuse this law, trying to claim that our lawsuit aims to silence them — when in fact our lawsuit challenges their breach of contract and deceptive commercial advertising, not their public speech on issues of public interest. The court found in our favor, denying the motion to strike and most of the motion to dismiss, allowing our case to move forward. Northwest Natural Gas has appealed the court’s judgment.