The long-running climate lawfare campaign targeting “big oil” suffered another major blow in South Carolina on Wednesday when State Judge Roger Young dismissed a case brought by the city of Charleston against Chevron, Colonial Pipeline, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and an array of additional oil companies whose deep pockets city officials and their trial lawyers had hoped to plumb.
Judge Young granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss without wasting time and money on a trial, ruling that the city had no authority to pursue the specious claims of ill-defined harm caused by worldwide carbon emissions from the use of oil and gas. “Plaintiff does not (and cannot) predicate its claims under South Carolina law on Defendants’ allegedly wrongful conduct only in South Carolina, since this State accounts for a negligible share of the global emissions that Plaintiff alleges have caused its damages,” Young wrote in his decision, which adds to a growing list of similar rulings made by judges in at least nine other cases around the country.
The reason why these rulings are all so similar is that claims from the grasping local policymakers who’ve signed up for this cynical money grab are equally similar, and that the longstanding principles of law are so unambiguously clear. Regardless of how cleverly the trial lawyers attempt to mask their claims in various unrelated state laws or local ordinances, the practical impact of a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would be to enable every state and local government to write and enforce their own regulations. In the end, companies trying to conduct nationwide business would be faced with trying to comply with a patchwork of hundreds of competing sets of regulations, making it almost impossible to continue to do business in the United States.
This inevitable reality is why the federal government has always asserted primacy to regulate interstate commerce in general and to specifically regulate emissions and air quality under the Clean Air Act. Judge Young addressed that longstanding principle of law in his decision, writing, “The U.S. Constitution makes certain matters the exclusive domain of federal law for good reason. If all fifty states, let alone the tens of thousands of political subdivisions therein, were permitted to apply their own laws to such federal issues as interstate and international emissions, the result would be conflicting state standards that would be impossible for energy companies to navigate.’”
Chevron’s lead counsel, Ted Boutrous, Jr. of Gibson-Dunn, applauded Judge Young’s decision, saying, “This ruling adds to a ‘growing chorus’ of climate lawsuit dismissals by federal and state courts…Judge Young rejected Plaintiffs’ ‘artful’ attempts to frame its claims as solely about consumer deception, holding that ‘Plaintiff cannot avoid that its claims turn on emissions.’ ‘These lawsuits promise to create a chaotic web of conflicting legal obligations for Defendants as each state . . . imposes its own de facto regulations on the worldwide production, marketing, transport, and sale of fossil fuels. Neither federal nor South Carolina law permits such a result.’”
So, will this latest ruling against the plaintiffs end this cynical lawfare? Unfortunately for the defendants, the answer is no. The Supreme Court had a chance to do that in the case brought by the City and County of Honolulu in January, and took a pass after the Biden-era Justice Department weighed in on the side of the trial lawyers. Given that it is safe to assume the Trump DOJ won’t be taking a similar posture, we can always hope for the highest court to do the right thing whenever another case rises to that level.
Until then, the baseless wasting of time and money will continue. It brings to mind an old saying about “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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