The Supreme Court allowed Honolulu’s lawsuit against oil companies to move forward on Monday.
The justices declined without explanation to hear several energy companies’ challenge to a Hawaii Supreme Court decision rejecting their effort to dismiss the case.
The City and County of Honolulu, later joined by the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, sued the companies in 2020, alleging their fossil fuel products harmed the region by contributing to climate change.
“This case presents the Court with its only foreseeable opportunity in the near future to decide a dispositive question that is arising in every climate-change case: whether federal law precludes state-law claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate,” the companies argued in their petition filed last year.
Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP) special counsel Phil Goldberg said selling energy is “not a liability inducing event and, if it becomes one, it will make energy much more expensive for all of us.”
“The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear this case at this time is unfortunate because it prolongs litigation when there is general agreement that state law—in this instance, Hawaii’s—cannot govern, let alone impose liability on, the manufacture, sale and promotion of energy around the world,” Goldberg said in a statement. “We are confident that when Hawaii courts consider these claims, they will join the many courts that have already found that this climate litigation has no legal or factual foundation.”
Executive Director of the Antonin Scalia Law School’s Center for the Study of the Administrative State Adam White said cases like this “will only continue to proliferate as more and more state officials try to make themselves national energy policy czars.”
“I hope that the Court will hear the issue someday, for the sake of constitutional accountability and the public interest,” White wrote in a statement.
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