DAVID BLACKMON: South Carolina Judge Makes Climate Lawfare Campaign A 10-Time Loser

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.