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….