Judges Press County Suing Oil Giants To Explain How Companies Worsened Its Floods

State appeals judges on Wednesday pressed a Pennsylvania county suing oil giants over climate change Wednesday to explain how the companies’ alleged deception worsened local floods.

Bucks County’s lawyer acknowledged that proving that link would be challenging as he urged the Commonwealth Court to revive the lawsuit that a county judge threw out in 2025. Judges also pushed back on the oil companies’ lawyer, and one asked whether the court should wait for the Supreme Court to rule on a similar Colorado case the justices heard Oct. 5.

The justices’ ruling in that case could decide whether similar suits by states and cities across the country can go forward.

“So causation will be a challenge in this case. Bucks doesn’t shy away from it, but that’s not any part of the preemption analysis,” Dan Flynn, arguing for the county, told the judges during the hearing.

Flynn said the companies knew for more than half a century what burning fossil fuels would do to the climate but “mounted a campaign of disinformation” instead. He argued that the climate can absorb some warming before weather turns more extreme.

“And our theory, which we intend to prove is that because of their deceptive conduct, that created an increased demand for fossil fuels, which pushed us over that threshold,” Flynn said. “And now Bucks and other counties have to respond.”

“But you have to get back to the damages issue, which is all that’s really pleaded,” one judge told Flynn. “It really goes back to the fossil fuel emissions. So that’s why the trial court said it’s preempted.”

Theodore Boutrous, a Gibson Dunn & Crutcher lawyer arguing for Chevron and the other oil companies, told the judges the county’s claims “at their root, at their core, are claims that these defendants caused global greenhouse gas emissions to be too high.”

“Bucks County is consuming and burning a lot of oil and gas. They’re participating in this activity, and then they’re suing, saying that this is like … the end of the world, and they need warnings,” Boutrous told the court.