News & Analysis
May 20, 2025
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, says it will appeal a judge’s ruling to dismiss the county’s climate deception lawsuit against Big Oil companies, ensuring that the local government’s fight to make polluters pay for the harms their climate lies have caused is far from over.
Last year, the state’s fourth-most populous county, outside Philadelphia, sued ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and the American Petroleum Institute to make them pay for deceiving the public about the climate harms of their fossil fuel products. The lawsuit was filed less than a year after seven people, including two young children, were killed in Bucks County during deadly flash floods. A 2023 CCI study found that Bucks County faced $955 million to protect residents and infrastructure from a range of climate threats by 2040.
Across the country, a growing number of courts have ruled that similar climate accountability lawsuits can proceed toward discovery and trial. But on Friday, state court Judge Stephen Corr sided with Big Oil – ruling that federal law preempted the county’s claims and dismissing the case. Bucks County says it plans to appeal the decision, as have other states and communities whose climate deception lawsuits have faced similar setbacks.
“Although the Court concluded that the County’s claims were preempted by federal law, many courts have reached the opposite conclusion,” a county spokesperson told WHYY.
CCI Managing Attorney Corey Riday-White said the court’s analysis of the case was “flawed” because it wrongly concluded the county was seeking to address the defendants’ emissions, rather than their decades-long deception. Many other courts, including the supreme courts of Colorado and Hawai`i, have ruled that similar lawsuits aren’t preempted by federal law.
"The county would be on firm ground to win an appeal and continue fighting to make these companies pay for the harm their deception has caused to the people of Bucks County,” Riday-White said. “Big Oil companies have lied about their dangerous products for decades, and many other courts across the country, including two state supreme courts, have agreed that federal law does not block communities from seeking to recover damages for this deception. A simple reading of the complaint makes clear that Bucks County does not ask the court to regulate emissions; it asks only that corporations face consequences when they knowingly sell a harmful product and lie about its dangers."
Photo credit: The Office of Governor Tom Wolf via Flickr
