News & Analysis
October 7, 2025
Maryland communities deserve the opportunity to put Big Oil companies on trial and present the evidence of their climate lies to a jury, a lawyer for three local governments argued before the Maryland Supreme Court this week.
Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County have filed separate lawsuits to hold ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and other Big Oil companies accountable for lying to the public about their products’ role in climate change and to recover costs associated with sea level rise, flooding, and other local climate damages that the companies’ deception fueled.
Courts across the country have allowed similar lawsuits to advance toward trial, but after judges dismissed the Maryland lawsuits, the communities turned to the state supreme court to protect their right to put Big Oil companies on trial for deception.
In front of the Maryland Supreme Court on Monday, a lawyer for the Maryland communities argued that the cases seek to hold the companies accountable for deceptively marketing their dangerous products and failing to warn consumers about the associated harm for decades.
They do not seek to regulate emissions, as the oil companies have falsely claimed.
“[The Big Oil companies] have an obligation to give warnings commensurate with the risk,” Vic Sher, a lawyer representing Baltimore and other Maryland communities, said. “None of them have ever given any warnings. In fact, the essence of the complaint is that they actively sought to undermine the science, the scientists, and the knowledge about this to minimize the effects or say that it isn’t real or doesn’t need addressing or there is no immediacy to it.”
State supreme courts in Hawai’i and Colorado have sided with communities in similar cases over Big Oil’s climate deception, and a Minnesota court recently found that the decision to dismiss Baltimore’s case was “wrongly decided.”
Legal experts have urged the Maryland Supreme Court to reverse the lower court dismissal and allow the cases to move forward to trial.
In an opinion piece published in the Baltimore Sun before the arguments, former federal judge and Baltimore Solicitor Andre Davis explained why courts should reject Big Oil’s mischaracterization of the communities’ lawsuits:
A venerable legal principle is that “the plaintiff is the master of his complaint.” As a plaintiff in the suit against fossil fuel purveyors, Baltimore limited its claims to long cognizable claims for money damages and other relief under settled state law. Regrettably, the lower court in the case, beguiled by the deft arguments of the lawyers for the fossil fuel defendants, dismissed the city’s claims before a trial could occur. The fossil fuel companies want the courts to believe they are being sued for their greenhouse gas emissions. They are not. They are being sued for their deception, and for failing to warn consumers about the climate dangers associated with their products. Now, the Supreme Court of Maryland has an opportunity to weigh in and protect the rights of Marylanders to go to court and seek recovery for that conduct.
Bill Piermattei, managing director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland School of Law, wrote separately that the Maryland lawsuits against Big Oil rightfully seek to make polluters pay to clean up a mess they knowingly caused: “Governments are doing their jobs protecting their constituents and their tax dollars by seeking funds from responsible parties so they can harden infrastructure to meet a climate change future,” he wrote.
CCI Staff Attorney Shannon Marcoux similarly explained in the Daily Record that fossil fuel companies and the lower Maryland courts have relied on discredited case law.
“Maryland communities are rightly placing the blame and the bill for climate deception where it belongs – with the fossil fuel companies that knew that their products would cause these damages but lied in order to protect their bottom line,” she wrote. “Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County deserve to have their day in court to present that evidence to a jury.
