Supreme Court rejects bid to move climate change lawsuits

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear five appeals from oil and gas companies seeking to move climate change lawsuits they face from state to federal courts.

The city, county and state governments that the fossil fuel firms are fighting are expected to fare better in state courts.

The orders handed down by the high court Monday affected cases brought by municipalities in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland and Rhode Island. More than a dozen similar suits are pending in state courts around the country.

“Since we filed this case nearly five years ago, the climate crisis has worsened, the costs to Baltimore taxpayers are skyrocketing, and the defendants have pocketed trillions of dollars in profits while trying to dodge accountability for their deception,” Sara Gross, an attorney with the Baltimore City Law Department, said in a statement.

The central question with all five petitions hinges on whether federal common law, which is law developed over time by courts, or state law applies to lawsuits over greenhouse-gas emissions that cross state lines.

The Justices rejected the petitions in a summary order with no explanation. Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that he would have granted a hearing in the Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, Colorado case. Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from all five cases.

Oil companies including Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, BP and Shell are facing lawsuits alleging environmental harms from greenhouse gas emissions, including sea level rise.

“Climate change is an issue of national and global magnitude that requires a coordinated federal policy, not a disjointed patchwork of lawsuits in state courts across multiple states,” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a partner in the Los Angeles firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who represents Chevron in several of the lawsuits, said in a statement.

The oil companies knew the dangers of fossil fuels but “deceived and failed to warn consumers about it even as they carried on pocketing trillions of dollars in profits,” the California cities of Santa Cruz, San Mateo and Richmond and Marin County said in a joint statement.

In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled for the fossil fuel companies in an earlier phase giving them another shot at persuading the appeals courts to order the cases to be heard in the federal judicial system. Oakland and San Francisco won an appeal in federal court in October to have their lawsuit heard in state court.

In that case, San Francisco and Oakland sued in state court under California’s law allowing damage for “public nuisance,” private actions that harm public health. All the suits allege that the oil companies have deceived consumers about their impact on climate change.

San Francisco’s offering documents in a 2017 bond sale – which reference climate change – were used by the oil companies to attempt to demonstrate the city couldn’t definitively describe the impact of climate change on seawall rise.

The bond documents for San Francisco’s October 2017 sale do cite climate change and rising sea levels as a risk factor.