WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chevron’s appeal of a Ninth Circuit decision reviving a climate-change lawsuit by the City of Oakland, possibly ending a short-lived period of hope for the oil industry that it could either have such litigation dismissed or at the very least shift it to more favorable federal courts.
The high court, without comment, yesterday refused a writ of certiorari filed by Chevron, ExxonMobil and other major oil companies seeking to reverse the Ninth Circuit’s decision from May 2020, which sent Oakland’s lawsuit back to state court. Last month, the Supreme Court reversed on narrow technical grounds several rulings by federal courts remanding climate lawsuits to state court, without delving into the principal defense argument that such cases are preempted by federal law and cannot be adjudicated in state court.
By refusing to hear Chevron’s appeal of the Ninth Circuit decision, the Supreme Court appears to have endorsed the strategy of government plaintiffs and their private, contingency-fee lawyers to draft lawsuits based entirely upon state consumer-protection laws. The lawsuits generally accuse oil companies of downplaying the risks of human-induced climate change and misleading consumers into burning more fossil fuels than they otherwise would have.
Chevron acknowledged this latest defeat at the Supreme Court but expressed confidence the court would eventually decide the question of which courts should hear climate-change lawsuits. The oil industry maintains that such cases raise exclusively federal questions about energy policy, interstate regulation of industrial emissions, and foreign policy. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Chevron’s appeal could set up a circuit split over the question of whether these cases belong in state or federal court, raising the prospect of a successful appeal in future.
In April, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York also dismissed New York’s lawsuit, rejecting the city’s “artful pleading” as an unsuccessful attempt to dodge federal jurisdiction. ExxonMobil cited that ruling in a more recent request to stay Connecticut’s climate lawsuit.
Chevron and its co-defendants sought to appeal the Ninth Curcuit’s reversal of a June 2018 decision by U.S. District Judge William Alsup dismissing Oakland’s lawsuit on preemption grounds. The city, represented by private lawyers at Sher Edling, based its claims on state public-nuisance law.
“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” wrote Alsup, who was the first judge in any of the cases to issue a ruling on dismissal arguments. “While it remains true that our federal courts have authority to fashion common law remedies for claims based on global warming, courts must also respect and defer to the other co-equal branches of government when the problem at hand clearly deserves a solution best addressed by those branches.”