Epoch Times By Matthew Vadum 4/10/2023
Energy companies are urging the Supreme Court to keep a Biden administration-backed environmentalist lawsuit accusing the industry of accelerating climate change in federal court where they may have an advantage.
The lawsuit is part of an effort to force action on the climate change issue through the courts, as opposed to having elected lawmakers make policy. Colorado municipalities argue that they have been harmed by a warming climate and that the companies’ products contribute to injuries they have suffered, including hotter springs and summers, a longer wildfire season, and altered precipitation patterns.
The case currently before the Supreme Court doesn’t deal with climate change as such; it is concerned with whether the Colorado lawsuits should proceed in federal court or the state court where they were originally filed. Lawyers consider the state court to be more amenable to the municipalities’ claims, while the oil companies seem to think it would be easier to have the claims dismissed by the federal courts.
Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc., two of its corporate affiliates, and Exxon Mobil Corp., asked the Supreme Court last week to accept their petition in Suncor Energy v. Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County, court file 21-1550. The Supreme Court may decide later this month whether it will hear the case.
Several Colorado municipalities filed what activists call “climate accountability” or “climate fraud” lawsuits against the oil companies, relying on the disputed theory of man-made global warming that holds that the production and consumption of so-called fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—is heating up the planet.
More:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/oil-companies-urge-supreme-court-not-to-allow-climate-change-lawsuit-to-proceed-in-state-courts_5183210.html
