Some of the world’s largest oil companies are hoping to convince the US Supreme Court to decide whether they should be held liable for climate change.
In the middle of a years-long legal fight with state attorneys general across the country, Exxon Mobil and the Canadian oil company Suncor Energy filed a petition with the Supreme Court earlier this month, asking the justices to overturn a ruling by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals that sent a climate lawsuit filed by local officials in Colorado to state court.
That might sound like a technicality, but it has potentially significant implications for efforts by state and local governments to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for their greenhouse-gas emissions as both sides battle for a more favorable setting in which to make their case.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2011 that federal pollution laws prohibited corporations from being sued for greenhouse gas emissions, effectively blocking litigation through the federal courts.
But the opinion, written by the late liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did not address state laws, leaving open the question of whether plaintiffs could still sue on the basis of state nuisance laws that allow financial compensation for environmental damage.
So far, oil companies have been unable to convince federal court judges to hear their cases. But attorneys representing Exxon and other companies believe that, if they can get the Supreme Court to declare federal courts the correct venue for the lawsuits, they will have a better chance of winning their argument that federal pollution laws preempt state law, said James Coleman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University.
“States have to follow the federal laws just like they do the Constitution,” Coleman said. “But there’s a realist judgment that state judges are more protective of state laws and less willing to say a state law has been preempted.”