The Supreme Court has blocked an attempt by 19 red states to end a set of climate lawsuits against the oil and gas industry.
In an order issued Monday, the justices rejected a request by Republican state attorneys general to challenge five of their Democratic counterparts who have sued oil companies for compensation for the costs of rising tides, intensifying storms and other disasters worsened by climate change.
The Supreme Court is the first — and only — court to hear legal battles among states, although the justices are not obligated to take up such cases.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who has taken a more expansive view of the court’s obligation to look at state disputes, wrote a dissent from Monday’s order, which Justice Samuel Alito joined.
Thomas wrote that the red states allege that the climate liability lawsuits against oil companies violate the separation of powers and the federal government’s “exclusive authority over interstate emissions.” He said he would grant the states the right to proceed with their case.
He said the court’s assumption that it has the discretion to decline to review lawsuits between the states is “suspect at best” and a “modern invention that the Court has never persuasively justified.”
Thomas said the Supreme Court’s reluctance to accept jurisdiction in lawsuits between states is troubling because the court is the only one that can hear such cases.
“If this Court does not exercise jurisdiction over a controversy between two States, then the complaining State has no judicial forum in which to seek relief,” Thomas wrote. He added that the court’s decision Monday leaves the 19 Republican-led states “without any legal means of vindicating their claims,” despite raising what he said are “serious constitutional violations.”
The red states’ case began with a request led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, which argued that climate liability lawsuits launched by blue states against oil companies pose “grave consequences” for their own residents and would boost the price of gas.
Marshall said the red states are disappointed that the court declined to hear their case, Alabama v. California.
“States like California have benefited tremendously from traditional energy, yet they are now trying to impose crippling liability on companies for actions they took in Alabama and the rest of the world,” Marshall said in a statement. “The Constitution does not grant California such powers. Hopefully more courts will recognize that truth before lawsuits like those filed by California put affordable energy out of reach for more Americans.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is leading a climate liability lawsuit against the American Petroleum Institute and other industry parties, welcomed the Supreme Court’s Monday order. He said the red states’ effort was launched by the Republican Attorneys General Association, which he said “takes its marching orders from its largest donors: fossil fuel interests and Leonard Leo.”
Ellison said the Republicans’ effort was “never anything more than an attempt to run interference, help the defendants in our cases avoid accountability, and play politics with the Constitution. I am glad the Supreme Court saw through it all and put an end to their charade.”
Cities, counties and states have launched more than two dozen climate liability cases nationwide that — if they are successful — could put oil and gas companies on the hook for billions of dollars.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and four of his Democratic colleagues have countered that the climate liability lawsuits won’t affect other states and don’t pose a threat that the justices need to address.
Legal observers say the effort by Republican-led states is another prong of an industry-led pressure campaign to convince the Supreme Court to side with oil companies in the climate liability cases.
Most of the same Republican attorneys general who sought to sue blue states had signed a separate “friend of the court” brief in support of the oil industry’s unsuccessful petition for the Supreme Court to quash the climate liability cases.
