Supreme Court to Hear Pivotal Climate Case With Billions at Stake

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Oct. 5 regarding a lawsuit from Boulder, Colorado, demanding compensation from energy companies for local weather damage allegedly caused by global greenhouse gas emissions.

The question before the court, however, is not whether global warming theories hold water. It’s whether local courts throughout the United States should have the authority to extract billions of dollars from energy companies for damage allegedly caused by global emissions.

The energy companies argue that giving such power to local courts would allow municipalities to effectively impose a massive nationwide carbon tax with the potential to bankrupt the U.S. energy industry.

Experts say the court’s decision in this case could have a dramatic impact, both on U.S. energy production and on what Americans pay for oil, gas, and electricity.

“It is actually bigger than climate change,” O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told reporters at a pre-hearing conference. “It’s about [climate activists’] overall ability to weaponize courts to accomplish policy goals that are sweeping, that are multi-billion dollars in scale, and that could end up with an order that basically rewrites the American economy.”

Boulder County originally brought its suit in 2018, charging that the products of Suncor, a Canadian energy company operating refineries in Colorado, and ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. energy company, caused climate-related damage, and that these companies concealed information about those risks.

The lawsuit argues that the defendants are liable under local tort laws for creating a public nuisance, trespassing, unjust enrichment, conspiracy, and failure to warn consumers that use of their products could cause extreme weather events.

In a brief supporting Boulder county’s authority to apply local tort law, the American Association for Justice, a nonprofit legal group, wrote that “states have a manifest interest in both applying their own laws when their citizens are affected and in providing residents with a convenient forum for redressing injuries inflicted by out-of-state actors.”

The energy companies, and their backers, including the Justice Department, counter that federal law, including the Clean Air Act, precludes, or preempts, state law because the emissions that allegedly cause global warming extend beyond state borders. The Supreme Court will separately consider whether it has jurisdiction to hear the challenge.

Claiming federal preemption, the Justice Department has sued Minnesota, Hawaii, and Michigan to block climate lawsuits brought in those states, and sued New York and Vermont over “polluter pays” climate superfund laws that seek to tax fossil fuel companies according to their CO2 emissions.

“When states seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authority, they harm the country’s ability to produce energy and they aid our adversaries,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement.

Billions at Stake

Boulder County’s suit is one of dozens of climate lawsuits currently moving through courts across the country. While Boulder’s lawsuit has not named a dollar figure for damages, a similar climate lawsuit in Multnomah County, Oregon, is claiming $50 billion from Exxon, Chevron, and other energy companies for damages and for an abatement fund against heat waves and wildfires.

Critics of the lawsuits say that, in the wake of failed attempts to pass climate legislation like the Green New Deal, these climate lawsuits are an attempt by activists to achieve a similar outcome through municipal courts.

“They’re going around to these cities and states, using tort litigation and public nuisance lawsuits in a coordinated way to effectuate the same result, but without having to go through their democratically elected officials,” former Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox told reporters at a pre-hearing conference. “They’re essentially trying to regulate through litigation.”

The outcome of the suits, should they succeed, will likely be to drive up the cost of energy for consumers, restrict the use of fossil fuels, and potentially bankrupt oil and gas companies altogether, Cox said.

Oral arguments in the case will begin on Oct. 5, and a ruling is expected some time between late fall 2026 and June 2027. If the Supreme Court allows Boulder’s lawsuit to proceed, dozens of other climate lawsuits across the country will likely also proceed to discovery and trial.

If the Court dismisses the suit, “it will kick the legs out from this public nuisance approach,” Skinner said. “It would basically conclusively end this type of attack by the left in state courts to reshape our energy industry and our nation.”

On Sept. 28, Justice Samuel Alito announced that he would recuse himself from the Boulder case, without citing a reason, creating the possibility of a 4–4 split decision.

Litigation Versus Legislation

The proliferation of climate litigation extends well beyond U.S. cities and states. According to a 2025 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report, there are more than 3,000 such lawsuits against energy companies worldwide.

“Climate litigation has evolved into a powerful global tool for advancing climate action, and accountability,” UNEP’s executive director Inger Andersen said in a statement.

However, many U.S. courts have disagreed with this view, ruling that national legislation in which the voting public has a voice is the appropriate way to set national energy policy.

In dismissing climate lawsuits, numerous courts have pointed to federal legislation, in particular the Clean Air Act of 1970, as the proper legal authority on issues that cross state borders. Even in blue states like New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, appellate judges have rejected local tort litigation as a tool to address global warming.

In dismissing a New York City lawsuit in 2021, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stated that local CO2 emissions “may contribute no more to flooding in New York than emissions in China,” and that “such a sprawling case is simply beyond the limits of state law.”

And in 2024, Baltimore Judge Videtta Brown dismissed the case of Baltimore City v. BP, et al., stating that the suit was an attempt to regulate CO2 emissions and “simply a way to get in the back door what they cannot get in the front door.”

One foreign government recently came to the same conclusion. On May 12, New Zealand outlawed climate lawsuits in the country.

On the New Zealand government’s website, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith stated: “The courts are not the right place to resolve claims of harm from climate change, and tort law is not well-suited to respond to a problem like climate change, which involves a range of complex environmental, economic and social factors.”

By contrast, state supreme courts in Colorado and Hawaii have ruled that municipal tort law is appropriate in these cases, and have green-lit them to proceed. Before Boulder v. Suncor made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado Supreme Court in 2025 rejected defendants’ claims that federal environmental law preempted local jurisdiction.

In order to avoid a conflict with federal regulations, climate litigants have claimed that they are merely seeking compensation for local injuries and that their cases are not intended to regulate emissions.

Presenting arguments in 2025 before Maryland’s Supreme Court for climate lawsuits brought by Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County, plaintiff’s attorney Victor Sher stated the suit “does not involve capping, regulating or limiting emissions by the defendants or anybody.

“It doesn’t involve changing pollution control measures or installing equipment or anything like that by these defendants or anyone else,” Sher stated. Rather the lawsuit was about local residents getting compensation for “nuisance, trespass and failure to warn.”

Contradicting this claim, David Bookbinder, an attorney who formerly represented Boulder Colorado in its climate lawsuit, stated at a 2025 Federalist Society panel discussion that “tort liability is an indirect carbon tax. You sue an oil company; an oil company is liable; the oil company then passes that liability on to the people who are buying its products.

“The people who buy those products are now going to be paying for the cost imposed by those products,” Bookbinder said, calling the lawsuits “a convoluted way to achieve the goals of a carbon tax.”

According to Skinner, this process of achieving political goals through litigation, if it succeeds, is unlikely to end with energy companies.

“These cases should matter to everybody,” Skinner said. “If they are able to bring lawsuits over energy companies producing oil and gas, then they’ll go after utilities, they’ll go after car manufacturers making the wrong kind of cars.”

A Network Supporting Climate Lawsuits

Although the scientific theories underpinning the lawsuits are not at issue in the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court hearing, critics have charged that a concerted effort has been ongoing both to fund the climate lawsuits and to convince local judges that the plaintiffs’ claims have merit.

In September, a coalition of 25 state attorneys general called on the federal government to defund NASEM, stating that it used taxpayer money to produce reports in support of global warming narratives and so-called attribution methodology, which is a way to calculate specific dollar claims of harm to local communities from greenhouse gas emissions.

The Federal Judicial Center has since removed the chapter on climate science from its judicial manual, and NASEM pledged an internal investigation into how its reports were produced.

In addition, a 2024 Senate Commerce Committee report stated that Sher Edling, a law firm that represents more than 20 municipalities in climate lawsuits, will “not only … receive approximately one-third of any amount it extracts from energy companies if it is somehow successful, far-left funds are offsetting any risk the firm would otherwise have in pursuing these absurd claims by bankrolling Sher Edling to the tune of millions of dollars each year.”

The report stated that left-wing nonprofits such as the Resources Legacy Fund and the New Venture Fund have given Sher Edling more than $13 million since 2017.

The Epoch Times reached out to Sher Edling for comment but did not receive a response as of publication time.