Supreme Court should not let climate lawfare set US energy policy

Boulder, CO lawsuit gives SCOTUS a superb opportunity to end these legal abuses

Paul Driessen

Climate lawfare is a Big Business. State, county and city lawyers have filed some 30 lawsuits, alleging that oil companies misrepresented the impacts of their products and caused billions of dollars in climate and weather damages.

After being approached by EarthRights International, Boulder and Boulder County, Colorado joined San Miguel County in April 2018 to sue Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil.

Leaving out the hurricanes and rising seas emphasized by coastal litigants, plaintiffs’ 105-page complaint alleges that the oil companies have severely harmed their property, health and safety, by causing higher temperatures, more droughts and wildfires, and dwindling snowpack that adversely affects water supplies and the farming and skiing industries.

They want a trial by local jurors and seek billions of dollars to compensate their jurisdictions for past and future damages and costs, evaluate and mitigate climate change impacts, abate and remediate its hazards, and compensate them for decreased agricultural and urban property values.

Defendants argue that the case raises major, complicated national and even international issues and therefore belongs in federal, not state courts. But after years of legal wrangling, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in May 2025 that the lawsuit could indeed proceed in state court.

So now Suncor and ExxonMobil have petitioned the US Supreme Court to review the case. Plaintiffs strongly oppose this. But there are compelling reasons why the Supremes should move it to federal venues, after declining earlier lawsuits that they said did not present a ripe or perfect case for review.

Fifty-plus years ago, I lived in Boulder and Denver and often went downhill and cross-country skiing. We had variable snow seasons: early and long, late and short, great snowpack or rocks. Back then the mantra was global cooling and a new ice age, but it later shifted to “global warming” when average global temperatures rose slightly, and finally to the all-encompassing “climate change” narrative.

I saw the aftermath of Colorado’s worst natural disaster ever, the 1976 Big Thompson flood. I witnessed other monster rainfalls, droughts and dust storms, and multiple wildfires. Decades-long Anasazi droughts underscore Nature’s destructive forces centuries ago.

Plaintiffs cannot possibly make a convincing historical or scientific case that today’s climate and weather are unusual or unprecedented. Nor can they separate natural forces and effects from fossil fuel or other manmade influences.

Team Boulder claims its case involves only local damages, issues, legal claims and remedies. However, ExxonMobil and Suncor production and refining activities, sales, emissions and alleged climate impacts are hardly confined to two counties or even the State of Colorado. The lawsuit’s effects would ripple like tsunamis across the USA and world.

Indeed, current and former county attorneys and officials have said the primary goals of this litigation include imposing “an indirect carbon tax” on defendants’ products; “raising the price” of those products so that they become too expensive for most families; curtailing fossil fuel use; and effecting “systems-level change” to America’s energy, economic and social systems.

The products include transportation fuels for Colorado and US cars, trucks, tractors and aircraft; natural gas to generate electricity for lights, computers, medical equipment, and lifesaving heating and air conditioning; and petrochemical feedstocks for over 6,000 essential products, including paints, plastics, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fertilizers, and skis, ski boots and clothing of all descriptions.

Climate activists have been unable to enact national legislation to curb or eliminate the use of coal, oil or natural gas – or persuade Congress to ratify international treaties that compel all countries to slash their fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. Climate lawfare, via local and state courts, has thus become a central tactic for imposing their radical agenda, controlling our lives and reducing our living standards.

They know COP30 was an abject failure and overtures to “climate cataclysms” are falling on deaf ears.

They want to avoid federal courts and lawyers that might closely examine their far-fetched claims from national, international, scientific and economic perspectives. They know a US Supreme Court ruling in defendants’ favor would likely end any option for them to circumvent federal legislative and judicial processes.

Climateers also know that US states that enforce wind and solar power mandates have electricity prices at least two times higher than those that have not. Worse, residential prices in climate-obsessed Britain, Germany and other European countries are 2-3 times higher than the US average: 30 to 40+ cents per kilowatt-hour in Europe versus 15 cents in the USA.  

They know (but vigorously deny) that German, British and other European electricity prices have caused their industries to lose millions of jobs and left families unable to heat their homes properly, leading to thousands of needless deaths every winter. Iberia’s peninsula-wide blackout in April 2025 proved reliance on wind and solar power can be disastrous, even deadly.

It’s hardly surprising that no other city or county has joined the lawsuit. That Colorado’s governor and former governor have refused to support it. Or that Colorado’s own attorney general joined 14 other state AGs in signing an amicus curiae brief opposing a very similar suit by California cities.

The AGs argued that cities should not be able to use the common nuisance law to “harness the power and prestige of federal courts to remedy global climate change.” They also noted that: “questions of global climate change and its effects … are political questions not suited for resolution by any court.” Indeed, such judicial interference would trample on “Congress’s carefully calibrated process of cooperative federalism where states work in tandem with EPA to administer the federal Clean Air Act.”

These issues are for Congress and the Executive Branch to debate, balance competing needs and interests, and decide at the national level. In dismissing New York City’s similar climate lawsuit, Federal Judge John Keenan made the same points.

Perhaps most importantly, over the past few years, the US Supreme Court has significantly curtailed the powers of federal agencies. In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), it held that, in the absence of clear legislative authority, government agencies cannot unilaterally issue regulations that have “major” economic or political significance.

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2023) reversed the “Chevron deference” rule. Silent or ambiguous statutory texts no longer give administrative agencies unfettered power to interpret laws in ways that let them increase control over people’s lives and livelihoods.  

Cities, counties and states certainly should not have greater power than federal agencies – or be able to employ common law rulings – to control America’s fossil fuel production, use and products, in a futile attempt to control Earth’s perpetually changing climate. Especially when the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions now come from China, India, Russia and other countries.

The climate litigation charade must end.

Let’s hope the Supreme Court agrees that Boulder’s lawsuit is an excellent opportunity to terminate frivolous climate lawfare, expand on the guidance it provided in these two previous cases – and end attempts by climate activists to impose destructive national policies through local and state courts.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development and human rights.