News & Analysis
December 17, 2020
As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear a narrow procedural issue in Baltimore’s lawsuit seeking to hold major oil and gas companies accountable for climate damages they knowingly caused, the city is urging the high court to reject the companies’ efforts to “smuggl[e] additional questions” into the arguments.
In briefs filed last month, the fossil fuel companies — including BP, Chevron, Exxon, and Shell — asked the justices to bypass the procedural question the court agreed to review and instead issue a sweeping order that Baltimore’s lawsuit “and others like it” be heard in federal rather than state court.
The companies have fought tooth and nail to remove the growing number of climate damages and fraud lawsuits brought against them to federal court, but lower courts across the country have consistently rejected the industry’s arguments and kept Baltimore’s and similar cases in state court, where they were originally filed.
In a response brief filed yesterday, Baltimore called out Big Oil’s bait and switch. Because the justices granted Big Oil’s petition to review a technical question related to the proper scope of issues considered by the lower court when it decided Baltimore’s case should remain in state court, that is all they should consider, the city argued:
The petition raised a single Question Presented, and petitioners represented that “as it comes to the Court, this case presents only that question.” The Court “strongly disapprove[s of] the practice of smuggling additional questions into a case after [it] grant[s] certiorari,” and should reject petitioners’ effort to do so.
The city also accused the oil companies of “mischaracteriz[ing]” Baltimore’s lawsuit in their arguments. Baltimore’s lawsuit, the city reminded the high court, is about Big Oil’s “decades-long campaigns to promote fossil-fuel products while wrongfully concealing the destructive impacts on public infrastructure they knew would result from using those products as directed.”
The justices are scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case on Tuesday, January 19. Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from considering whether the court should take on the case, and court observers are watching to see if the newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, who has ties to defendant Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute, which as filed its own brief in support of the companies, will recuse herself as well.
