News & Analysis
July 12, 2022
Fossil fuel corporations keep relentlessly petitioning courts to help them escape accountability for the costs of the industry’s decades-long climate deception. Last week, yet another federal appeals court told the companies no thanks, but we’re good — you still have to face state court.
Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other oil majors had already twice asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to move Rhode Island’s climate liability case — which seeks to recover the costs of climate disasters, from rapidly rising seas to devastating floods and more severe storms — out of state court, where it was originally filed. Twice the oil companies were unanimously rejected by a three-judge panel, following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that required the judges to consider additional arguments from Big Oil’s lawyers.
Still, the mega-polluters, appearing not to get the message, returned to the First Circuit with an en banc appeal that asked every judge on the circuit to hear their arguments just one more time — only to be rejected flat-out.
The First Circuit is just one of many appellate courts to have received and denied requests from Big Oil to save them from facing trial in state court. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that climate accountability lawsuits in Honolulu and Maui can proceed in state court — the fifth appellate court ruling against Big Oil since the Supreme Court decision last year. The Fourth Circuit, in Baltimore’s case, and the Ninth Circuit, in cases filed by six California cities and counties, also twice affirmed lower court rulings against the companies. Instead of accepting those losses, the Big Oil companies then asked the full appeals courts to reconsider. In both cases, they refused.
[Note: After the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Tenth Circuit ruled twice to keep Boulder’s climate liability lawsuit in state court, defendants Exxon and Suncor directly petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse those rulings. Each of these rulings occurred after federal district courts swatted down Big Oil’s requests to move the cases to federal court, time and again.]
At this point, judges are increasingly expressing frustration that Big Oil is wasting their time. “This is our second pass at a climate-change case that requires us to explore the mind-numbing complexities of federal removal jurisdiction,” wrote Judge Rogieree Thompson in the First Circuit’s ruling in May. “Leaning hard on our sibling circuits’ analyses in comparable climate-change cases… we once more affirm the judge’s remand order.”
Oil companies seem unabashed in their continued attempts to avoid and delay trial — even if that means falling time and again on deaf ears in the hopes that some court might rule another way. But that hasn’t happened yet — and if every ruling up until now is any indication, the time has come for these polluters to face the music.
