On Oct. 5, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. In Suncor, the court will consider whether federal law and the Constitution’s structure bar state-law public nuisance claims seeking to impose liability for alleged local harms attributed to interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions. At stake is whether leftist activists are allowed to weaponize our legal system to bankrupt lawful industries in a last-ditch effort to tear down our capitalist system.
For a generation, left-wing activists have tried to sell the broader electorate on the fundamental reshaping of our economy and way of life. Luckily, it hasn’t worked. Democratic socialism has gained a foothold in some progressive jurisdictions, but the systemwide overhaul that anti-capitalist activists desire has never come to fruition, and for good reason: Voters have heard the pitch and rejected it in election after election.
Now, rather than merely continuing to pursue these unpopular policies in Congress or at the ballot box, the activist left is more heavily resorting to less democratic tactics. Suncor is part of a mounting campaign of leftists’ ideological lawfare. Close to three dozen climate change liability lawsuits are proliferating in state courts across America, filed by blue states and municipalities against the energy industry.
Plaintiffs, including Boulder, contend that their suits are merely about recovering damages from energy companies for their alleged contribution to global carbon emissions. They insist that local infrastructure damage resulting from weather events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires can be traced back to the conduct of specific companies. Boulder hopes a jury will let it pin more than a century of worldwide emissions from innumerable sources, including the plaintiffs, on a handful of energy companies.
If those behind Boulder’s suit can win through a courtroom the policy outcomes they could not win at the ballot box, voters lose their voice and Congress loses its authority over national policy.
Bankrupting Energy Companies
The plaintiffs’ theory of causation is legally baseless, but the threat these suits pose should not be ignored. If unchecked, this lawfare campaign seems almost purpose-built to bankrupt an industry that the left disfavors and to siphon its resources toward left-wing priorities. Adverse verdicts could extract tens of billions of dollars from the energy sector and effectively impose a national carbon tax on American consumers. Gas prices and utility bills would soar, left-wing activists and green advocates would cheer, and working families would bear the cost.
The activists pushing these lawsuits are unbothered by that outcome. In fact, a lawyer representing Boulder predicted that the bankruptcy of American energy companies is a likely result of the lawsuits.
Destroying Capitalism
The green movement behind this lawfare campaign believes the only way to build its green utopia is to destroy capitalism and reshape our way of life. In 2014, the Sierra Club published an article about climate activist Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which argued the only way to stop climate change is to overhaul our free-market system entirely. Other groups like System Change Not Climate Change believe social transformation and anti-capitalist revolution are necessary to “address immediate ecological concerns.” Extinction Rebellion, a group that calls for “civil disobedience” as a response to climate change, has described capitalism as the “engine” behind “the biggest death project in human history.” Taking that logic to its extreme, Public Citizen has advocated for charging energy companies with criminal homicide. And last year, the energy industry was hit with the first climate “wrongful death” lawsuit, which a judge in Washington state has since allowed to proceed.
Look under the hood and it becomes clear that this activist-driven campaign will not stop with the energy industry. Any sector, company, or product that can be even loosely tied to climate change will be targeted. In 2024, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a lawsuit over plastics. Automakers, manufacturers, cattle ranchers, and every other carbon-emitting industry should expect a flood of lawsuits if Boulder’s case is not stopped.
The Supreme Court should make clear that Boulder’s effort to force societal change through litigation is unlawful and end this lawfare campaign once and for all.
