Fueling The Conversation, Week of September 29th, 2025
The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill and ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to rein in President Biden’s regulatory assault on conventional energy are huge wins for American families. It is also an unwelcome reality for Democrats and their green allies, who for years have leveraged the federal government to advance a climate agenda that has done little more than raise energy prices and make our electricity grid less reliable. Remember, it was President Obama who said that under his plan, electricity prices would “necessarily skyrocket.”
Now out of favor in the corridors of Washington, the greens and their political allies have adopted a new strategy, climate lawfare, accusing energy producers of harming the planet and seeking trillions of dollars in damages. This sidestepping of the political process is imposing real costs on energy producers that mirror those of federal regulations.
One example comes from Boulder County, Colorado, alongside the City of Boulder and San Miguel County. In May, the Colorado Supreme Court advanced a seven-year-old lawsuit from the three governments. Boulder sued Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy in 2018, alleging that the companies misrepresented the risk that their production poses to communities due to the effects of climate change and that these effects constituted state law violations, including public nuisance and trespass, requiring these companies to pay Boulder relief for “their past and future damages and costs to mitigate the impact of climate change.”
This argument is legally questionable for a host of reasons, but mainly because of the global nature of greenhouse gas emissions. As I argued previously, “To prove that energy companies created a public nuisance, plaintiffs have to get a court to agree that production by these companies caused specific events that led to harm. They must conclusively prove that a weather event was made worse or was caused by greenhouse gas emissions — a seemingly impossible endeavor.”
In August, Exxon and Suncor filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to allow the lawsuit to proceed. The companies made a similar plea in 2023 that was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, backed by a brief from President Biden’s Solicitor General declaring that the case was best handled by state courts because it didn’t involve a federal issue. The brief asserts that Clean Air Act preemption does not preempt climate-related claims arising under state law.
However, this position contradicts a 2021 decision from the Second Circuit Court in City of New York v. Chevron Corp., which held that “municipalities may not utilize state tort law to hold multinational oil companies liable for the damages caused by global greenhouse gas emissions.” Citing this case in their petition, the energy companies argue that “regulation of interstate pollution is an inherently federal area necessarily governed by federal law, and Congress has not permitted, and indeed has preempted, resort to state law except for claims seeking relief for harms caused by in-state emissions.”
By describing this lawsuit as a “regulation,” the petition accurately depicts its filers’ intention of enacting climate laws outside the legislative process. As Kyle Kohli reports in Energy In Depth, based on public statements by city officials and an Earthrights attorney representing the plaintiffs, the plaintiffs intend to enact “fundamental systems change” through the lawsuit, not just receive compensation for alleged damages. This change involves reorienting our economic system towards “green” energy by making natural gas, oil, and coal more expensive to produce.
Regulations on greenhouse gas emissions have economic effects that reverberate across the country and abroad, violating the dormant commerce clause and the federal government’s prerogative in foreign affairs. Allowing states the leeway to unfairly punish producers for selling the products consumers demand would lead to higher energy prices and reduced grid reliability, regardless of voter preferences.
It would be prudent for the Supreme Court to review this suit and dispel the notion that reliable energy production causes local damages, thereby setting a precedent that thwarts climate lawfare throughout the country.
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Fueling the Conversation, a weekly column by IER President Tom Pyle, offers a principled take on energy events. Energy underpins all aspects of modern life, so policies that artificially limit production hurt everyday people paying to heat their homes and drive to work. “Green” groups push these policies for ideological reasons, but this column uses economic logic and hard facts to advocate for energy freedom.
