Supreme Court deals blow to oil companies by turning away climate cases

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed lawsuits brought by municipalities seeking to hold energy companies accountable for climate change to move forward in a loss for business interests.

The court turned away oil company appeals in five cases involving claims brought by cities and municipalities in Colorado, Maryland, California, Hawaii and Rhode Island as part of efforts to hold businesses accountable for the effects of climate change.

The relatively narrow legal issue is whether the lawsuits should be heard in state court instead of federal court. Litigants care because of the widely held view that plaintiffs have a better chance of winning damage awards in state court.

“Big Oil companies have been desperate to avoid trials in state courts, where they will be forced to defend their climate lies in front of juries, and today the Supreme Court declined to bail them out,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental group.

Business groups expressed disappointment in the Supreme Court’s decision, with Phil Goldberg, a lawyer with the National Association of Manufacturers’ legal arm, saying that climate issues should be dealt with at the national or international level.

“The challenge of our time is developing technologies and public policies so that the world can produce and use energy in ways that are affordable for people and sustainable for the planet. It should not be figuring out how to creatively plead lawsuits that seek to monetize climate change and provide no solutions,” he added.

The Biden administration urged the court not to hear the case, and in a change to the legal position taken by the Trump administration, said the lawsuit and others like it should be heard in state courts.

In all five cases, companies including BP, Chevron and Shell had lost in lower courts.

The municipalities’ lawsuits say they have been harmed by the affects of climate change caused by carbon emissions that the oil companies are heavily responsible for.

In an earlier case, the Supreme Court in 2021 ruled in favor of oil companies on a procedural issue in a similar lawsuit brought by the city of Baltimore.

On a separate legal issue, the court in a major ruling last year limited the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to address climate change under a provision of the Clean Air Act.