News & Analysis
March 25, 2026
In a divided ruling, the Maryland Supreme Court this week broke from two other state supreme courts and sided with Big Oil companies in their arguments to escape lawsuits that local governments have brought to hold the companies accountable for their climate deception.
Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County all filed separate lawsuits against ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other Big Oil companies to hold them accountable for lying to the public about how their fossil fuel products cause climate change and to recover costs associated with sea level rise, flooding, and other local climate damages that the companies’ deception fueled.
A growing number of courts across the country — including the supreme courts of Hawai’i and Colorado — have rejected Big Oil’s arguments in similar climate deception lawsuits and ruled that those cases can proceed toward discovery and trial. A majority of the Maryland justices, however, ruled that Maryland communities’ claims were preempted by federal law because they “are seeking to regulate air emissions beyond their jurisdictional boundaries.”
But that reasoning is based on a “false premise” and “classic strawman” argument put forward by the fossil fuel defendants, two justices said in a fiery dissent. “BP and the other Defendants were not sued because of what they emitted,” Justice Peter Killough wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Shirley Watts. “They were sued over what they concealed.”
Justice Killough pointed to previous federal court rulings, including an “exhaustive” 2022 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, that concluded that Baltimore’s case “clearly seeks to challenge the promotion and sale of fossil-fuel products without warning and abetted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign.” Nowhere in their lawsuits do the three local governments seek to restrict or regulate emissions. If they had, Killough wrote, the cases would be preempted by the federal Clean Air Act. “But Plaintiffs filed no such suit, and no amount of table pounding changes this fact.” He continued:
“On the face of these complaints, the claims sound in deception. Defendants are alleged to have concealed what they knew. They misrepresented the science. They funded disinformation campaigns directed at Maryland consumers and regulators. The Clean Air Act has no provision addressing any of that conduct. The Majority’s conclusion that these cases are tantamount to emissions regulation is not a finding—it is a prediction about what discovery would show, dressed up as a legal conclusion and deployed to close the courthouse door before discovery could confirm or refute it. That is not how motions to dismiss work. And it is not how preemption analysis works.”
This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider Big Oil’s arguments to escape a similar climate deception lawsuit brought by the City and County of Boulder, Colorado, against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy. In that case, a majority of the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Boulder’s lawsuit was not preempted by federal law and should advance toward discovery and trial.
