Maryland’s Supreme Court has rejected three lawsuits that seek to hold the oil and gas industry financially liable for climate change, delivering a win to fossil fuel companies — and the Trump administration.
In a ruling issued Tuesday, a majority of the court’s justices said the lawsuits brought by the cities of Baltimore and Annapolis, along with Anne Arundel County, are barred by federal law because the local governments seek to “regulate air emissions beyond their jurisdictional boundaries.”
The notion that local governments can use state law to seek relief from injuries arising from global greenhouse effects, the justices said, is “so far afield from any area of traditional state or local responsibility that it cannot be seriously contemplated.”
The decision marks a split among state supreme courts on the issue. The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to review a Colorado ruling that allowed a similar lawsuit from Boulder to proceed in state court.
Maryland’s ruling comes as the Trump administration has escalated efforts to thwart state efforts to tackle climate change. The administration and two dozen Republican-led states took the unusual step last July of urging the Maryland Supreme Court to dismiss the cases, arguing they’d “override policy choices made by the federal government.”
The cases are among more than two dozen brought by cities, counties and states seeking compensation for dealing with the effects of rising seas and extended wildfire seasons. The lawsuits accuse oil and gas companies of deceiving consumers about the dangers of burning fossil fuels and could lead to multibillion-dollar payouts to local governments — if the legal challenges are successful.
The Maryland court repeatedly invoked rulings by the nation’s highest bench, with Justice Brynja Booth writing for the majority that “for over a century, the United States Supreme Court has held that cases involving regulation of interstate pollution arise under federal law.”
Under the high court’s jurisprudence, Booth added, “we conclude that any state law claims are displaced by federal common law.”
To the extent local governments seek recovery for harm caused by foreign emissions, she added, “foreign policy concerns would foreclose a federal common law action targeting emissions emanating from beyond our borders.”
The National Association of Manufacturers, which opposes the climate liability lawsuits, welcomed the Maryland decision, with Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the association’s Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, saying the ruling reflects a “growing trend” among state and federal courts that have found state law can not govern international emissions or global climate change.
“As the court made clear, managing these issues presents serious and complex public policy challenges that cannot and should not be solved through a patchwork of state law claims,” Goldberg said. “Public nuisance and other state laws are simply inapplicable to the production and sale of energy worldwide.”
Ted Boutrous, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who represents Chevron in the climate lawsuits, echoed Goldberg saying the ruling adds to a “growing chorus” of climate lawsuit dismissals by federal and state courts, including in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico and South Carolina.
Boutrous noted the court found that allowing every state to impose its “own preferred policy solutions for climate change” would create a “plainly irrational system of regulation.”
Claims for climate-related damages under state law, he added, “are precluded by clear U.S. Supreme Court precedent.”
Dissenters say majority followed ‘misleading’ framing
Two members of the Maryland Supreme Court issued partial dissents, with Justice Peter Killough writing that the majority accepted a “compelling, if misleading” framing of the case presented by the fossil fuel industry.
Killough wrote that BP and the other oil and gas producers named in the litigation “recast” the lawsuits as involving emissions, global climate regulation “and the imposition of Maryland tort law on the energy decisions of billions of people worldwide.”
But he said the cases don’t challenge emissions regulations and the governments “do not ask this court to set a standard that conflicts with any federal rule.”
He wrote the local governments allege the companies knew their products were causing “catastrophic harm, concealed that knowledge from the public for decades, and profited from the resulting delay in response. That is a fraud case.”
Killough said the majority’s decision does not hold because federal law does not “foreclose state authority over deceptive marketing.” He said the Clean Air Act does not bar the lawsuits either, because it “has never addressed deceptive marketing.”
Sara Gross, chief of the affirmative litigation division in the Baltimore City Department of Law, said the city agreed with Justice Killough’s dissent when he wrote that the majority’s conclusion that the cases are “tantamount to emissions regulation is not a finding — it is a prediction about what discovery would show, dressed up as a legal conclusion and deployed to close the courthouse door before discovery could confirm or refute it.”
Judge Shirley Watts also said she agreed the claims were not preempted by federal law but noted Maryland does not have a recognized common law public nuisance tort under which a local government may recover damages “or one that proscribes the conduct alleged.”
Watts also said she would have granted the local governments’ request to stay the case, pending U.S. Supreme Court review of the Colorado case. In that case, Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy have argued that federal law bars local governments from seeking relief for climate change in state courts.
“The issue of whether claims like the ones brought by the local governments in these cases are displaced or preempted by federal law is ultimately a question for the Supreme Court of the United States, not this court,” Watts wrote.
Booth said in the majority opinion that the justices believed it could be “useful” for the U.S. Supreme Court to have a state-level ruling that differs from decisions in Colorado and Hawaii that allowed climate lawsuits to proceed in state courts.
Both of those findings, she wrote, found that climate liability lawsuits relate only to the companies’ “use of deception to promote the consumption of fossil fuel products” and do not concern emissions standards.
Booth wrote that because the Supreme Court asked the parties to determine whether it has the authority to hear the case — which has not yet reached a final resolution in the Colorado courts — it is possible the justices may not reach the merits stage of the case.
Tuesday’s decision upholds two lower court rulings that local governments appealed. The cases involving Annapolis and Anne Arundel County were rejected last year by a state judge who wrote that the “U.S. Constitution’s federal structure does not allow the application of state court claims” against the oil and gas companies, including BP and Chevron.
That came after a Baltimore City Circuit Court in July 2024 found the Charm City’s 2018 challenge against BP and other oil producers “goes beyond the limits of Maryland state law.”
Tuesday’s decision comes as several states are considering legislation that would bar local governments from pursuing such lawsuits. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) on Monday signed a bill into law that gives immunity to corporations and individuals for climate-related harm.
Plaintiffs would need to show by “clear and convincing evidence” that unavoidable damage was a result of violating a permit or law.
