Too Big for Any State, Too Inconvenient for Washington: Big Oil Goes to the Supreme Court

Tomorrow morning, at 10 a.m. Eastern, the Supreme Court opens its new term with a case that sounds like a dry question about legal jurisdiction. It isn't. It's the oil industry asking the highest court in the country to rule that nobody gets to hold it financially responsible for climate damage in the one place where the damage actually lands: a town, a county, a county's taxpayers.

The case is Suncor Energy v. Commissioners of Boulder County. The headline version is "Big Oil tries to kill climate lawsuits." That's accurate. It's also the surface of the story.

What Boulder Is Actually Asking For

Boulder, Colorado sued ExxonMobil and Suncor in April 2018. The city and county say the companies knowingly contributed to the warming of the planet and deceived the public about it, and they want damages to help pay for what that costs a place like Boulder: wildfires, floods, and other climate-driven disasters. Boulder's own framing is simple. Its climate director put it this way when the Court agreed to take the case: the financial burden of adapting should not fall solely on local taxpayers.

The case has been through the wringer. Two federal courts refused the companies' attempts to move it out of state court, and the Supreme Court declined to step in back in 2023. Then in May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that Boulder's claims can go forward under state law. The oil companies appealed. On February 23 of this year, the justices agreed to hear it.

The Argument

The companies' argument isn't "we didn't do it." It's "wrong court, wrong law." Climate change, they say, is a national and global problem, so it can only be handled by the federal government. ExxonMobil's line, when the Court took the case: climate policy shouldn't be set through fragmented state-court actions. The Trump Justice Department has filed on their side, and it has warned in substance that if Boulder wins, any locality could sue anyone anywhere over global warming. The Court has also been asked a threshold question: whether it should even be hearing this before there's been a trial. In January 2025 it declined to take up Honolulu's version of this fight, which was also still at a pre-trial stage.

Roughly sixty state and local governments have brought similar cases, according to Reuters and other reporting. A ruling here could decide what happens to all of them.

The Part That Gets Skipped

Here's what almost never gets said in the same breath as the oil companies' argument. If climate is a federal matter, you'd expect the federal side to be doing something about it. And you'd expect the courts to give people somewhere to go.

The courts already closed the federal door once. In 2011, in American Electric Power v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court held that the Clean Air Act displaced federal-common-law nuisance claims over greenhouse gases, because Congress had handed that job to the EPA. A decade later the Second Circuit threw out New York City's version of this same lawsuit.

So the "federal only" argument rests on the idea that federal law has the field covered. Then, in February of this year, the EPA finalized a repeal of its 2009 endangerment finding, the determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health. That finding was the legal foundation for nearly all federal climate regulation under the Clean Air Act, and its repeal wipes out the greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks. The EPA called the old finding regulatory overreach. Health and environmental groups have sued over the repeal in the D.C. Circuit.

And the federal government hasn't just stepped back. In April 2025 the President signed an order directing the Justice Department to stop state laws that burden domestic energy production, and on April 30 and May 1 the DOJ sued Hawaii, Michigan, New York, and Vermont over their climate actions.

Lay that out in a row. The states can't act, we're told, because climate is federal. The federal courts have said the statute covers it. And the federal agency that holds the statute is repealing the finding that made it work, while the federal government sues the states that try anyway.

Every door points at another door.

The Detail That Changes the Story

One more thing. Boulder's claims are built around deception, what the companies knew and what they told the public, not only emissions. And what they knew is not a rumor. A 2023 study in Science by Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes went through 32 internal Exxon documents from 1977 to 2002 and 72 peer-reviewed papers co-authored by company scientists. It found that between 63 and 83 percent of Exxon's own projections accurately predicted the warming that followed, at roughly 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. Exxon's spokesperson responded that people who say "Exxon knew" are wrong in their conclusions. That's their position, and it belongs in the story. It's also the thing a trial would actually test, which is exactly why the fight is about whether there will be one.

And there's a wrinkle in who gets to decide. On September 28, Justice Samuel Alito, who holds stock in several oil companies, though not in Exxon or Suncor according to his disclosures, announced through the clerk that he will not participate. With eight justices hearing the case, a 4-4 tie would leave Colorado's ruling in place without setting a national rule. The Court could also decide it shouldn't have taken the case at all. Nobody knows which way it goes.

Why This Still Belongs in the Conversation

None of this proves the companies are liable. That's what a trial is for. And it doesn't mean every one of these suits is well-built. Courts exist to sort that out.

What deserves attention is the structure. Whether by design or by drift, the effect is the same: responsibility gets passed between jurisdictions until it lands nowhere. Too big for a county. Too local for the feds. Too early for a trial. We all know the shape of that move, and not only from corporations. It's the same move every one of us makes when we say "it's systemic, what can one person do?" It isn't the same weight, not even close, but it's the same reflex: point at the bigger thing so the smaller thing in your own hands never has to be looked at.

Notice the pattern. Interrupt it. Starting with the one in your own hands.

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Sources: SCOTUSblog, "Court announces cases it will hear in October" (Aug 2026); Constitution Center, "Supreme Court to start new term with major environmental case" (2026); Colorado Public Radio, "Supreme Court to hear Boulder's climate damages lawsuit" (Feb 23, 2026) and "Colorado Supreme Court allows Boulder climate lawsuit" (May 12, 2025); City of Boulder, "Argument audio to be live-streamed"; PBS NewsHour/AP, "Supreme Court agrees to hear arguments from oil and gas companies trying to block climate change lawsuits"; ABC News/AP and Inside Climate News, Justice Alito's recusal (Sept 28, 2026); Union of Concerned Scientists statement on the recusal; Axios, "Exxon's climate research accurately projected global warming" (Jan 12, 2023), on Supran, Rahmstorf and Oreskes, Science (2023); Hunton Andrews Kurth, "DOJ files suit against Hawaii, Michigan, New York and Vermont" (2025); Associated Press via the Anchorage Daily News, "Public health, green groups sue EPA over repeal of rule supporting climate protections" (Feb 18, 2026); Georgetown Environmental Law Review, on the Court's January 13, 2025 denial of review in the Honolulu cases; legal background: American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, 564 U.S. 410 (2011); City of New York v. Chevron Corp., 993 F.3d 81 (2d Cir. 2021).