After Supreme Court decision, calls for climate accountability surge

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared a path for climate accountability lawsuits against Big Oil companies to proceed in state courts, the growing momentum of these cases is undeniable. 

The high court’s ruling — which denied fossil fuel industry requests to review lower court rulings in climate accountability cases — has already triggered calls across the country for more communities to seize this moment and file their own lawsuits to make polluters pay. As one recent headline predicted, “The Supreme Court just unleashed a flood of lawsuits against Big Oil.”

In Chicago, Alderman Matt Martin is calling for the nation’s third largest city to build on its legacy of bold climate action by bringing a lawsuit against the fossil fuel companies that “poured fuel on the fire and stymied climate action through a decadeslong disinformation campaign.” Martin wrote in the Chicago Tribune that “History, justice and the law are all on our side. The only question is whether Chicago” — which recently elected a new mayor — “has the political will to take action.” 

In Wisconsin, community leaders are calling on Attorney General Josh Kaul to become the eighth attorney general to take oil giants to court for climate deception. If Kaul decides to bring a lawsuit, Wisconsin would join Minnesota as the second Midwest state seeking to hold polluters accountable for lying to consumers about the harm caused by their fossil fuel products.

The opportunity created by the Supreme Court’s decision may also reinvigorate existing calls for other cities, counties, and states to join the fight against Big Oil.

In Oregon, Washington, Maine, and elsewhere, elected officials and other prominent voices have encouraged local leaders to go to court to make polluters pay their fair share of climate damages.

“Right now, communities, homeowners, and taxpayers will have to pay for critically important measures to reduce the immeasurably greater cost of devastating fires and other climate harms,” Oregon Senator Jeff Golden wrote in 2021. “Shouldn’t the corporations that knowingly caused these monumentally expensive disasters and cynically stymied the clean energy policies that could have averted them—while racking up, in some cases, the largest corporate profits the world had ever seen—foot at least some of the bill?”