Sam "Conoco" Alito & Clarence "RV" Thomas Only Dissenters As SCOTUS Rejected Wackdoodle Red State Climate Lawsuit
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Forcing companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron to pay for damages from wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and other climate-fueled disasters would affect people outside the blue states’ borders, the 19 attorneys general maintained. They said it would raise energy prices and “threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among states but our basic way of life.” Legal experts said they were unsurprised that the Supreme Court did not take up the case. “It was a political stunt,” said Pat Parenteau, an emeritus law professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. “There was never any legal basis for the court to grant this petition.”
Although the Supreme Court is the only court with jurisdiction to hear lawsuits between states, it typically hears only one or two such cases each year — and the ones it takes up usually relate to instances of interstate pollution or shared resources, such as water from rivers. This case was “brought on the legal theory that somehow anything that might adversely affect the fossil fuel industry harms red states,” as Robert Percival, director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, put it.
When the complaint was announced last fall, law professors described it as a “Hail Mary pass,” an effort to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority and its willingness to take on cases that Percival described to E&E News as “wackier and wackier.” Percival compared it to an unsuccessful attempt led by Texas after the 2020 presidential election to stop blue states from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. In that case and in the more recent climate one, the Republican-led states lacked standing, meaning they couldn’t prove they’d been harmed by the policies in question. “It was clear they didn’t have a leg to stand on,” Percival told Grist.
Seven of the court’s nine justices agreed not to hear the case. Clarence Thomas, one of the court’s most conservative justices and the subject of multiple corruption scandals, wrote a dissent arguing that the red states’ lawsuit “alleges serious constitutional violations.” Justice Samuel Alito, whose recent financial disclosures show that he or his wife own stock in the oil and gas companies ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 — both named in the Democrat-led states’ climate lawsuits — joined Thomas in the dissent.
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https://grist.org/regulation/supreme-court-declines-to-interfere-state-level-climate-lawsuits/
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