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Posted on 02/27/2026 6:49:11 AM PST by Twotone
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will take up a major climate change lawsuit targeting the energy industry — a case that could determine the future of similar lawsuits filed by left-wing states and municipalities across the country.
The Court agreed to review Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. They granted the hearing after the Colorado Supreme Court allowed Boulder County’s state-law claims to proceed, rejecting arguments from energy producers that the lawsuit is preempted by federal law.
The decision comes amid a wave of nearly three dozen lawsuits brought by leftist jurisdictions seeking to hold oil and gas companies financially liable for alleged climate change damages.
Boulder County’s lawsuit accuses energy companies of knowingly contributing to climate change and claims the resulting environmental effects have caused millions of dollars in damage to local property and residents. Energy producers have countered that such claims attempt to regulate interstate and global emissions through state tort law, an approach they argue is incompatible with the Constitution and federal environmental statutes.
Legal experts say the Supreme Court’s intervention signals concern about allowing state courts to set national energy and climate policy.
Christopher Mills, a constitutional attorney and former law clerk to Clarence Thomas, said the Court is correctly recognizing the national stakes involved. “The Court’s action shows that it rightly recognizes that this is a national issue in need of an immediate national resolution,” Mills said. “Letting these copycat lawsuits fester in state courts across the country is a recipe for uncertainty, undermining American energy production and harming consumers.”
Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, described the case as a test of whether local governments can effectively impose national policy through litigation. “For years, trial lawyers and left-wing municipalities have used state law as a backdoor to impose their preferred energy policies on the entire country — without a vote, without Congress, and without accountability,” Zywicki said, adding that the Constitution does not permit such an end run around federal authority.
Former Bush administration official John Shu emphasized that greenhouse gas emissions, by definition, do not respect state borders, placing them squarely within Congress’s regulatory authority under the Commerce Clause and the Clean Air Act.
Boulder County, for its part, argued that Supreme Court review is premature because the case has not reached a final judgment. The justices nevertheless agreed to hear the dispute and directed the parties to address whether the Court has jurisdiction to review the case at this stage.
The incentive for Boulder to resist Supreme Court review right now is that State and local governments have generally had more success keeping these climate lawsuits alive in friendly state courts, where judges have been willing to treat them as traditional nuisance or consumer-protection cases. Once the Supreme Court weighs in, especially on the federal preemption question, a ruling against Boulder could wipe out not just this case but dozens of similar lawsuits nationwide in one stroke.
Oral arguments are expected in the fall, with a decision likely in 2026, and one that could determine whether state courts may continue serving as battlegrounds for national climate policy or whether such questions must remain with Congress.
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Once they file, they can't drop charges without the defense agreeing - and they can't withhold anything because they were the ones who brought suit. Oops.
Will SCOTUS see this case as an opportunity to slap POTUS, or will they perform their duties with honesty and professional competence?
I have lost faith in SCOTUS but have some slight hope they’ll get this one right.
Could you elaborate? What are you implying?
The defense can turn around in discovery and demand additional documentation. That documentation is going to show how fraudulent the claims are.
The plaintiff can't refuse to turn over anything, or refuse to answer any questions, because they filed.
Oh, okay. Thank you for clarifying.
Oh, this gonna be good! (I think)
Of course, the Lefties will refer to “science”. For an understanding of how “science” is determined by the research intelligentsia, view this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH68_VaFuB4
>> Will SCOTUS see this case as an opportunity to slap POTUS, or will they perform their duties with honesty and professional competence?
Good question!
The answer varies, justice by justice. ;-)
Wind direction and phase of the moon will also play a part in the decision of some of the justices.
Don’t care who you identify as, that there’s FUNNY!!!
These organizations are suing for “climate change” damage.
What climate change , it takes hundreds of thousands if not millions of years for the climate to change , will they wait ? LOL
The SC taking this case up makes me very nev
The SC taking this case up makes me very nervous. They should have tossed this BS case but they didn’t. If this goes the wrong way it will be catastrophic
Ultimately there’s no “control group” in climate research. You’d need a 2nd Earth to experiment on. It’s more like medical “science”, a cause-effect analysis by statistical means, where something is “statistically meaningful” but the theory being completely wrong.
Unless science now claims to “know everything”, in which case we should stop funding them(!), then they can’t “prove” anything to the extent of meeting a legal standard of criminal, or even a civil violation.
That said, they will be able to point to “endless papers” making it “settled science by consensus” - even if that ignores that science has nothing to do with “consensus”.
Good post.
You would really need many thousands of Earths to have any kind of meaningful results in a complex system like climate.
Each variable would need to be tweaked in isolation.
so the people that use the energy will also have to pay because if no one used the energy the companies would not exist ,LOL , insanity
Nah! Can’t be so. Otherwise why this?
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4368513/posts
Not like the end of the world hasn’t been done before.
The Little Ice Age lasted from 1350-1850. During that time, ponds in what became Monterey, CA froze five inches thick within a few hundred yards of the Pacific Ocean. Snow was two feet thick in Paso Robles, CA, and on the hills from Point Conception into San Diego bay in May.
IOW climate can change rapidly having NOTHING to do with human activity.
Boulder can SEE the huge coal burning power plant in the winter from the steam and somehow they only went after gas and oil?
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