Local weather lawfare is a Large Enterprise. State, county, and metropolis attorneys have filed over 30 lawsuits, alleging that oil corporations misrepresented the impacts of their merchandise and prompted billions of {dollars} in local weather and climate damages.
After being approached by EarthRights Worldwide, Boulder and Boulder County, Colorado, joined San Miguel County in April 2018 to sue Suncor Vitality and ExxonMobil.
Leaving out the hurricanes and rising seas emphasised by coastal litigants, plaintiffs’ 105-page grievance alleges that the oil corporations have severely harmed their property, well being, and security by inflicting greater temperatures, extra droughts and wildfires, and dwindling snowpack that adversely impacts water provides and the farming and snowboarding industries.
They need a trial by native jurors and search billions of {dollars} to compensate their jurisdictions for previous and future damages and prices, consider and mitigate local weather change impacts, abate and remediate its hazards, and compensate them for decreased agricultural and concrete property values.
Defendants argue that the case raises main, difficult nationwide and even worldwide points and subsequently belongs in federal, not state courts.
However after years of authorized wrangling, the Colorado Supreme Court docket dominated in Might 2025 that the lawsuit might certainly proceed in state court docket.
So now Suncor and ExxonMobil have petitioned the US Supreme Court docket to assessment the case. Plaintiffs strongly oppose this.
However there are compelling the explanation why the Supremes ought to transfer it to federal venues, after declining earlier lawsuits that they mentioned didn’t current a ripe or excellent case for assessment.
Fifty-plus years in the past, I lived in Boulder and Denver and sometimes went downhill and cross-country snowboarding. We had variable snow seasons: early and lengthy, late and brief, nice snowpack or rocks.
Again then, the mantra was international cooling and a brand new ice age, nevertheless it later shifted to “international warming” when common international temperatures rose barely, and at last to the all-encompassing “local weather change” narrative.
I noticed the aftermath of Colorado’s worst pure catastrophe ever, the 1976 Large Thompson flood. I witnessed different monster rainfalls, droughts and mud storms, and a number of wildfires. A long time-long Anasazi droughts underscored Nature’s damaging forces centuries in the past.
Plaintiffs can’t presumably make a convincing historic or scientific case that right this moment’s local weather and climate are uncommon or unprecedented. Nor can they separate pure forces and results from fossil fuels or different man-made influences.
Workforce Boulder claims its case includes solely native damages, points, authorized claims, and treatments. Nonetheless, ExxonMobil and Suncor manufacturing and refining actions, gross sales, emissions, and alleged local weather impacts are hardly confined to 2 counties and even the State of Colorado.
The lawsuit’s results would ripple like tsunamis throughout the USA and the world.
Certainly, present and former county attorneys and officers have mentioned the first targets of this litigation embrace imposing an “oblique carbon tax” on defendants’ merchandise; “elevating the worth” of these merchandise in order that they change into too costly for many households; curbing fossil gasoline use; and effecting “systems-level change” to America’s power, financial, and social methods.
These merchandise embrace transportation fuels for [American vehicles such as cars, trucks, tractors, and aircraft, as well as natural gas used to generate electricity for lighting, computers, medical equipment, and essential heating and air conditioning systems; they also provide] petrochemical feedstocks for over 6,000 very important merchandise, together with paints, plastics, prescribed drugs, cosmetics, fertilizers, and [various types of skis, ski boots, and clothing].
Local weather activists have been unable to enact nationwide laws to curb or get rid of using coal, oil, or pure gasoline, or persuade Congress to ratify worldwide treaties that compel all nations to slash their fossil gasoline use and greenhouse gasoline emissions.
Local weather lawfare, through native and state courts, has thus change into a central tactic for imposing their radical agenda, controlling our lives, and decreasing our dwelling requirements.
They know COP30 was an abject failure, and overtures to “local weather cataclysms” are falling on deaf ears.
They wish to keep away from federal courts and attorneys that may carefully study their far-fetched claims from nationwide, worldwide, scientific, and financial views.
They know a US Supreme Court docket ruling in defendants’ favor would doubtless finish any choice for them to bypass federal legislative and judicial processes.
Climateers additionally know that US states that implement wind and solar energy mandates have electrical energy costs a minimum of two occasions greater than these that don’t.
Worse, residential costs in climate-obsessed Britain, Germany, and different European nations are 2-3 occasions greater than the US common: 30 to 40-plus cents per kilowatt-hour in Europe versus 15 cents within the USA.
They know (however vigorously deny) that German, British, and different European electrical energy costs have prompted their industries to lose thousands and thousands of jobs and left households unable to warmth their houses correctly, resulting in 1000’s of useless deaths each winter.
Iberia’s peninsula-wide blackout in April 2025 proved that reliance on wind and solar energy might be disastrous, even lethal.
It’s hardly stunning that no different metropolis or county has joined the lawsuit. Colorado’s governor and former governor have refused to assist it. Or that Colorado’s personal legal professional normal joined 14 different state AGs in signing an amicus curiae temporary opposing a really related go well with by California cities.
The AGs argued that cities shouldn’t be ready to make use of the frequent nuisance regulation to “harness the facility and status of federal courts to treatment international local weather change.”
Additionally they famous that “questions of world local weather change and its results … are political questions not fitted to decision by any court docket.”
Certainly, such judicial interference would trample on “Congress’s rigorously calibrated technique of cooperative federalism the place states work in tandem with EPA to manage the federal Clear Air Act.”
These points are for Congress and the Government Department to debate, stability competing wants and pursuits, and determine on the nationwide stage. In dismissing New York Metropolis’s related local weather lawsuit, Federal Decide John Keenan made the identical factors.
Maybe most significantly, over the previous few years, the US Supreme Court docket has considerably curtailed the powers of federal companies.
In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), it held that, within the absence of clear legislative authority, authorities companies can’t unilaterally subject rules which have “main” financial or political significance.
Loper Vivid Enterprises v. Raimondo (2023) reversed the “Chevron deference” rule. Silent or ambiguous statutory texts now not give administrative companies unfettered energy to interpret legal guidelines in ways in which allow them to improve management over folks’s lives and livelihoods.
Cities, counties, and states definitely shouldn’t have better energy than federal companies — or be capable to make use of frequent regulation rulings — to manage America’s fossil gasoline manufacturing, use, and merchandise, in a futile try to manage Earth’s perpetually altering local weather. Particularly when the overwhelming majority of world greenhouse gasoline emissions now come from China, India, Russia, and different nations.
The local weather litigation charade should finish.
Let’s hope the Supreme Court docket agrees that Boulder’s lawsuit is a wonderful alternative to terminate frivolous local weather lawfare, increase on the steering it supplied in these two earlier circumstances, and finish makes an attempt by local weather activists to impose damaging nationwide insurance policies via native and state courts.
Paul Driessen is senior coverage analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and the creator of Eco-Imperialism: Inexperienced Energy, Black Loss of life, plus different books and articles on power, local weather change, financial growth, and human rights.
