The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday that it would not hear a case seeking to stop climate lawsuits in five Democratic-led states that are seeking financial damages from oil and gas companies for having obscured the connection between their products and global warming.
The rejected complaint, filed directly to the Supreme Court by a coalition of 19 red-state attorneys general, argued that the climate lawsuits in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island represented an illegal attempt to regulate the national energy system, something only the federal government can do.
Forcing companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron to pay for damages from wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and other climate-fueled disasters would affect people outside the blue states’ borders, the 19 attorneys general maintained. They said it would raise energy prices and “threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among states but our basic way of life.”
Legal experts said they were unsurprised that the Supreme ... Read more
