WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - For the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to review the merits of long-running climate change litigation that represents an alliance between personal injury lawyers and government officials nationwide.
Companies like Sunoco, Exxon and Chevron are among the defendants hoping the Supreme Court will put a stop to lawsuits that seek compensation to address alleged climate change-caused infrastructure problems.
The oil industry has claimed these suits are an improper attempt by states, cities and counties to regulate emissions standards that can only be set by federal authorities. The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled last year the cases are about disinformation and not emissions.
On Feb. 28, the defendants asked the Supreme Court to address the Hawaii decision. They want the court to answer whether federal law precludes state-law claims for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions.
“State court litigation is not a constitutionally permissible means to establish global climate and energy policy, said Theodore Boutrous of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, who is representing Chevron.
"As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held in dismissing a similar New York City lawsuit, ‘such a sprawling case is simply beyond the limits of state law.’”
That decision in the Second Circuit was nullified when plaintiffs won a battle at SCOTUS over where the cases should be heard. The Supreme Court let stand rulings that they should be tried in the respective state courts they were filed in and not by the federal judiciary.
Officials and the contingency-fee lawyers they hired, like the firm Sher Edling, crafted their complaints to avoid federal jurisdiction by centering them on state-law claims for public nuisance, SCOTUS ruled.
"The Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision was incorrect, and it provides this Court with the ideal opportunity to address whether the state-law claims asserted in this nationwide litigation are even allowable before the energy industry is threatened with potentially enormous judgments," the defendants' petition to SCOTUS says.
"Contrary to the Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision, state law can only provide redress for harms caused by instate sources of emissions.
"Without this Court’s intervention, years might pass before another opportunity to address this pressing question comes along. The Court should grant review and clarify whether state law is competent to impose the costs of global climate change on a subset of the world’s energy producers chosen by respondents."
A recent Delaware ruling pared that state's case down to damages stemming from in-state emissions rather than global.
In its lawsuit, Delaware accuses the oil companies of “influencing the tenor of the climate change debate,” “maintaining strong working relationships between government regulators” and organizations “carrying defendants’ message,” and pushing for long-term solutions to climate change instead of immediate regulations on carbon emissions.
The state says those alleged deceptions caused consumers – presumably including the state itself, which operates thousands of vehicles and owns buildings heated with fossil fuels – to consume more oil and gasoline products than they otherwise would, increasing global warming and damage to state property.