Climate suit against fossil-fuel companies has state jurisdiction - The Daily Planet

Climate suit against fossil-fuel companies has state jurisdiction | News | telluridenews.com

A San Miguel County climate crisis lawsuit earned a favorable recommendation to advance in state court over a request from fossil-fuel companies to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Suncor and ExxonMobil are being sued by San Miguel County to pay for San Miguel County’s costs to combat the ongoing effects of the climate crisis. The lawsuit was filed in 2018 by San Miguel County, along with Boulder County and the City of Boulder, in an attempt to alleviate taxpayers from paying for the climate crisis.

On March 27, San Miguel County officials announced that the Office of the Solicitor General “recommended that the case proceed state court, rather than being heard by the Supreme Court of the United States,” as fossil-fuel companies Suncor and ExxonMobil had requested.

“Since the Colorado communities filed this case in 2018, ExxonMobil and Suncor have consistently sought to delay the litigation — moving the case from court to court and losing each step along the way,” EarthRights General Counsel Marco Simons said in a news release.

Simons said the Solicitor General’s recommendation “brings these communities one step closer to holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their misconduct and obtaining remedies for the serious climate harms Colorado residents are facing.”

However, the “Supreme Court will now decide whether to follow the Solicitor General’s recommendation and allow the Tenth Circuit’s decision to stand or grant the defendant’s appeal to a higher court,” the news release said.

San Miguel County alleges it has “experienced and will continue to experience harm because of climate change caused by fossil-fuel consumption and rising

levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and that its costs are in the millions of dollars.

Carbon dioxide emissions are not being reduced enough to outpace the rise from global industrial growth, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nation’s group that assesses changes in everything from mental health and wildfires to flood damages to cities and infrastructure.

The IPCC’s most recent report says, “By 2019, the largest growth in gross emissions occurred in CO2 from fossil fuels and industry” and goes on to explain: “Emissions reductions in CO2 from fossil fuels and industrial processes, due to improvements in energy intensity of GDP and carbon intensity of energy, have been less than emissions increases from rising global activity levels in industry, energy supply, transport, agriculture and buildings.”

Suncor and ExxonMobil asked the Supreme Court in June 2022 to review whether the state or the federal government has jurisdiction over San Miguel County’s case.

That was after the EPA denied Suncor’s request to be exempt from Clean Air Act regulations in 2019 at two of its refineries in Colorado. Suncor asked for a hardship exemption and argued the exemption was allowable under federal law because its two refineries are small, and at one refinery “the average aggregate daily crude oil throughput for 2018 would remain less than 75,000 barrels per day,” according to court documents.

San Miguel County’s news release on March 27 said, “The fossil fuel extraction companies each operate in Colorado, where wildfires, flooding, extreme heat and drought are linked to the greenhouse gas emissions that source from the burning of fossil fuels.”

In appealing the lawsuit brought on by San Miguel County, Suncor and ExxonMobile claim there is federal jurisdiction, and not state jurisdiction, partly because the fossil-fuel companies lease pieces of the continental shelf in the sea to extract their fossil fuels.

San Miguel County has not alleged any federal claims, court documents state, and in state law claim that the fossil-fuel companies are in violation of public nuisance, private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment and civil conspiracy laws, as well as in violation of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act.

“We are facing climate change each and every day,” San Miguel County Commissioner Kris Holstrom said. “Addressing current impacts as a small local government falls increasingly on our taxpayers at a time when costs keep rising. We believe fossil-fuel companies that have reaped huge financial benefits have a responsibility to pay for their contributions to climate change.”