The Supreme Court will hear this fall a case that will determine whether States can sue fossil fuel companies for damages related to global climate change.
The state and local government officials argued that fossil fuel companies are liable under nuisance laws.
As Just the News put it, though,
Typically, state nuisance laws are used in disputes with neighbors where an individual may be conducting activities that lower the value of another individual’s property. Legal experts said state nuisance laws are inappropriate to address damages from climate change.
Michael Williams, West Virginia’s Solicitor General, had this, also:
Questions that touch on global energy markets and interstate commerce and foreign policy, those are decisions that really belong in the hands of Congress or at the very least at the federal level[.]
Phil Goldberg, Manufacturers’ Accountability Project Special Counsel, on the broad variety of separate lawsuits currently in the lower courts:
This is throwing a bunch of legal spaghetti up on the wall and seeing what sticks. All these different kinds of the combinations and permutations undermine the idea that there is any kind of legal theory or finding behind these allegations that they may have.
Indeed. The climate funding industry supporters don’t have any serious case in progress or in the offing.
That brings me to related questions: what about all the plaintiffs and law firms behind these “climate” suits? Shouldn’t they be sued under those same nuisance laws for being themselves nuisances with these foolish lawsuits?
Aren’t they also vulnerable under a variety of SLAPP—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—lawsuits? After all, plaintiffs don’t actually expect to win these cases; they’re just suing to intimidate their targets with high and growing costs of defending themselves or to wear them down and force the defendants to change or outright abandon their positions. Plaintiffs here, with the complicity of lawyers, simply repeatedly sue and sue and sue until their goals are achieved.