The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an argument that aimed to restrict states from suing oil companies for financial damage related to climate change.
The argument was brought to the high court by 19 Republican attorneys general, representing states including Alabama and West Virginia, who were trying to prevent other states, led by Democrats, from pursuing lawsuits against the oil industry. Those states include California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
Those Democratic-led states have sued major fossil fuel companies for allegedly deceiving the public for decades about the effects of their greenhouse gas emissions. The cases include a 2023 lawsuit filed by California’s attorney general against five of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, including BP and Exxon Mobil, and the American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group that represents fossil fuel interests.
“This was never anything more than an attempt to run interference, help the defendants in our cases avoid accountability, and play politics with the Constitution,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in a statement. He filed his state’s deception suit in 2020.
Now, with the Supreme Court’s official rejection, those cases can proceed.
There are dozens of pending cases designed to force fossil fuel companies to pay monetary damages related to climate change, according to Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
In January, the Supreme Court signaled it might not agree with the effort by Republican attorneys general to block lawsuits like these, when the justices denied an oil-industry request to review a Hawai’i Supreme Court decision that allows the state’s climate deception lawsuit to go to trial.
Supporters of the effort have argued that the state cases are unconstitutional and could affect interstate commerce. “Each individual state cannot set its own priorities to which commercial activities it will encourage or discourage,” said Donald Kochan, a law professor for the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.
For example, Mr. Kochan said, if one state wanted to encourage fossil-fuel production, its ability to do so could be affected if oil and gas prices rose because of the liability risk from the other states’ lawsuits.
Legal experts have called the Republican-led effort in the Supreme Court unusual because it took aim at state claims before they had been addressed by state courts. Mr. Gerrard said in an email that, because of this, it would have been “surprising” for the nation’s highest court to hear the arguments since it could open a Pandora’s box for requests to prematurely end other kinds of litigation.
“The Supreme Court is saying it’s not going to interfere,” he said, “at least for now.”
The lawsuits are separate from, but related to, a group of new climate “superfund” laws that also aim to require polluters to account for the effect of their greenhouse gas emissions on their city, county, or state. They are called superfund laws because they are loosely modeled on the longstanding Superfund program to clean up toxic waste sites.
The first climate superfund law went into effect in Vermont last summer, followed by New York’s version in December. Both have faced legal challenges. A coalition of 22 states, led by West Virginia, sued New York for passing its law in February.