The Supreme Court is staying out of heated legal fights over the oil industry’s responsibility to pay up for climate change, ownership of public lands in Utah, environmental review of a major offshore wind project and EPA’s crackdown on smog-forming pollution.
In a long list of orders issued Monday, the justices declined to reconsider a 2023 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling that advanced claims from Honolulu officials that fossil fuel producers knowingly lied to the public about the danger of their products and should help foot the bill for flooding, wildfires and other climate impacts.
The high court’s decision to stay out of the Hawaii case could have sweeping effects: Nearly 40 U.S. cities, states and counties have brought similar litigation in state courts against Exxon Mobil, Chevron and other major oil companies. Industry lawyers have warned that the cases will continue to multiply without Supreme Court intervention.
If successful, the climate liability cases could cost oil companies billions of dollars. The litigation emulates successful fights against tobacco and opioid manufacturers.
Ben Sullivan, executive director and chief resilience officer for the city and county of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, applauded the Supreme Court’s order.
Sullivan said the justices’ move “upholds our right to enforce Hawaiʻi laws in Hawaiʻi courts, ensuring the protection of Hawaiʻi taxpayers and communities from the immense costs and consequences of the climate crisis caused by the defendants’ misconduct.”
The oil industry vowed to keep pushing back against the climate liability lawsuits.
“Chevron will continue to defend against meritless state law climate litigation, which clashes with basic constitutional principles, undermines sound energy policy, and is factually meritless,” said Theodore Boutrous, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who represents Chevron.
Most of the lawsuits have been filed with state judges, but lawyers for the oil industry have pressed to move cases to federal court, where companies believe they are more likely to prevail. The Supreme Court’s Monday order paves the way for dozens of cases nationwide to move forward in state court after years of procedural delay.
The justices stepped into the climate liability fray in 2021, when they instructed lower courts to consider a wider range of arguments from the oil industry in its quest to move the cases to the federal bench. Following that ruling, nearly a dozen federal appellate judges sent the cases back to state courts where they were originally filed.
The Supreme Court has since declined to get involved again.
Justice Samuel Alito, who has consistently recused himself in the climate liability cases, did not take part in deliberations in Sunoco v. Honolulu, the court said in its Monday order. According to his 2022 financial disclosure report, Alito holds stock in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, which are among the defendants in the Honolulu case.
Republican state attorneys general have filed their own plea for the Supreme Court to quash the climate liability lawsuits. Their request, which invokes the court’s exclusive jurisdiction in litigation between states, is still pending.
Utah public lands
The justices also will not hear a legal complaint filed last year by the state of Utah that could have given the state control over roughly half the federal lands within its boundaries.
The high court had been asked to determine whether the Bureau of Land Management is legally authorized to indefinitely control 18.5 million acres in Utah that have not been authorized for a specific use, such as a national monument.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox announced in August that the state had filed the legal complaint directly to the Supreme Court.
Utah argued that the U.S. Constitution did not grant the federal government the right to hold these “unappropriated” lands indefinitely.
If the high court agreed with the state, this standard could have been applied to an estimated 144 million acres across the West and an additional 66 million acres in Alaska, potentially gutting BLM.
Cox, newly elected Attorney General Derek Brown, House Speaker Mike Schultz and Senate President Stuart Adams, all Republicans, issued a joint statement Monday saying they are “disappointed” in the high court’s ruling but vowing to continue to fight.
“The Court’s order does not say anything about the merits of Utah’s important constitutional arguments or prevent Utah from filing its suit in federal district court,” the statement said.
Legal scholars had expected the court would reject Utah’s legal petition, noting years of prior case law has ruled the Property Clause, outlined in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, grants Congress, not individual states, the right to decide ownership and use of the federal estate.
The Department of Justice advanced that point in a legal brief filed with the court in November, countering that Utah’s lawsuit “plainly lacks merit” and was not worthy of being heard by the nation’s highest court.
More than a dozen other states sided with Utah, filing amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to hear the case and side with Utah.
But conservation groups condemned the lawsuit.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance filed a lawsuit last month in state district court asserting that Cox and then-Attorney General Sean Reyes (R) violated the state Constitution by filing the lawsuit.
“We’re grateful the Supreme Court swiftly rejected the state of Utah’s misguided land grab lawsuit,” said Steve Bloch, SUWA’s legal director.
But Chris Hill, chief executive officer for the Conservation Lands Foundation, called the court’s decision a “reprieve” and said they “fully expect” Utah to continue efforts to take control of federal lands.
So did New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Heinrich, who called Utah’s lawsuit an “un-American land grab,” said in a statement that opponents must remain vigilant “to ensure that our public lands remain accessible and protected for future generations. Our public lands are not for sale. Full stop.”
Vineyard Wind
The Supreme Court on Monday also rejected a case that had the potential to deal a blow to a major offshore wind project off the coast of Massachusetts.
The justices said they would not consider claims from the group Nantucket Residents Against Turbines thatfederal agencies failed to consider how the cumulative effects of East Coast offshore wind projects, including Vineyard Wind 1, would affect the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
The high court’s move comes asPresident-elect Donald Trump has pledged to pursue “a policy where no windmills are being built.”
Vineyard Wind is the first of about 30 offshore wind projects planned along the Eastern Seaboard. It is located 15 miles offshore from Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and 35 miles from mainland Massachusetts.
Nantucket Residents Against Turbines has argued that the Biden administration should have done more to consider the fuller picture of offshore wind development because fewer than 340 of the North Atlantic right whale remain. Planned offshore projects would affect the length of the marine mammals’ migratory route and year-round habitat.
The Biden administration had urged the Supreme Court to reject the petition, arguing that the wind projects’ challengers had not raised the issue before two lower courts in their lawsuit over the NOAA Fisheries and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management analysis.
Lower courts have rejected a number of claims against the agencies’ reviews.
‘Good neighbor’
The justices also declined to review a decision by a lower bench that allowed the Biden administration to revisit EPA’s “good neighbor” rule that the Supreme Court halted last summer.
Ohio and other states had argued that a federal appeals court in Washington unlawfully allowed the agency to supplement the record on its rule governing air pollution that wafts across state lines — without allowing comment from affected parties.
EPA’s plan was designed to require 23 states to slash smog-forming pollution from power plants and other sources that inhibit downwind states from complying with air quality standards.
The Supreme Court last year admonished the agency for failing to explain how its rule could still function after lower courts froze its implementation in more than half of the states originally covered.
On remand, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit allowed EPA to speak to the severability of the program. The agency responded in December — but not before Ohio and other challengers filed their plea with the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration is expected to overhaul the good neighbor plan, which could moot litigation over the rule.
Clean Water Act citizen suits
Amid Monday’s swath of rejections, the justices kept their options open in a legal battle over the power of citizen lawsuits under the Clean Water Act.
The high court asked the solicitor general’s office to offer its opinion on the fight. A response is not expected until after the Trump administration takes over.
In the case, the Port of Tacoma in Washington state has asked the justices to find that a federal appeals court in California got it wrong when it allowed a conservation group to file a federal lawsuit over conditions in a state-issued water permit — even conditions authorized by state law that go beyond the federal Clean Water Act — as long as some portion of the approval falls under federal permitting standards.
The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals effectively allows private citizens to challenge in federal court regulation of activities that Congress explicitly exempted from the Clean Water Act’s scope.
The Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, the Port of Tacoma’s challenger in the case, has argued that there is no disagreement between the federal appeals courts on the matter — a key consideration for the justices in deciding which cases to add to their limited docket — and that the question in the case is not important enough to warrant the Supreme Court’s attention.
The solicitor general’s view on pending petitions has historically held special weight with the high court.
