A 4-4 wouldn’t be a binding precedent and a similar legal challenge may be taken up again.
Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical Monday of Boulder County’s claims that the energy company Suncor caused the county concrete harm by contributing to global climate change in a case that could open the floodgates of climate lawfare across the country.
“If Boulder’s claims are allowed to go forward, some 90,000 municipalities across the country will have the ability to make national and international energy policy by asking juries to impose catastrophic damages on selected fossil fuel producers,” warned Kannon Shanmugam, a partner at the law firm Davis Polk and the attorney representing Suncor. “Put simply, that is not the constitutional scheme that the Founders adopted.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of President Donald Trump, noted that “a wall of precedent” upholds the idea that interstate pollution is a federal matter, rather than an issue regulated by state law regarding concrete harms. The other Republican-appointed justices appeared similarly skeptical of Boulder’s arguments, while Democrat-appointed justices seemed more willing to countenance them.
Meanwhile the lawyers pressing the case spend every day doing exactly what they condemn: burning fuel in their cars, heating their houses, and living on petroleum products from morning to night. They are not trying to stop the thing they are suing over. They are cashing in on it—a shakedown dressed up as principle, built for money, power, and control.
PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay
