A federal judge has ruled against President Donald Trump in his attempt to keep the State of Michigan from suing the energy industry over climate change.
Considering Michigan hasn’t actually sued anyone yet, Judge Jane Beckering found Jan. 24 that her court has no jurisdiction. Several things would have to happen for the federal government to claim an injury, and none of them have.
“The Court concludes… that this chain of possibilities is too speculative and attenuated to establish an injury fairly traceable to the Michigan defendants,” Beckering wrote. “The federal government has failed to carry its burden on subject-matter jurisdiction for the independently sufficient reasons that its alleged injuries are ‘conjectural or hypothetical.’”
It was the argument state Attorney General Dana Nessel raised in June when she filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which was one of two the federal government filed after Trump issued an executive order forbidding any further climate litigation. Dozens of cases have already been filed, and the energy industry has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop them as inappropriate attempts to regulate emissions.
Nessel called the lawsuits against Michigan a “cynical attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate my office not abandoning our responsibility to hold powerful corporations accountable for putting profits ahead of the health, safety and energy affordability of Michiganders.”
The lawsuits make state-law claims like consumer protection and public nuisance to argue consumers would have used less fossil fuels had Big Oil been forthcoming about their harms to the environment.
Nessel has sued BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell and the American Petroleum in federal court over antitrust allegations but has not made state-law claims.
State court judges are the ones handling the climate cases, and defendants have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to end them once and for all. They want their appeal of a Colorado Supreme Court decision that allowed Boulder’s case to move forward to be heard.
State and federal judges in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York, California, Maryland, New Jersey and Puerto Rico have thrown out climate cases seeking money from oil companies to pay for the effects of global warming, seeing them as an improper attempt to regulate emissions. That is the job of regulators and not judges, they say.
Bucks County, Pa., judge Stephen Corr noted that the county’s complaint used the word “emissions” more than 100 times, while “deceptive” and “deception” were used only 39 times combined. He threw out the case as an attempt to regulate the international emissions market masked in consumer protection.
Judge Videtta Brown, in Baltimore’s case, said the litigation goes beyond the limits of Maryland law, or whatever states other cases are filed in.
“This Court holds that the U.S. Constitution’s federal structure does not allow the application of state court claims like those presented in the instant cases,” Judge Steven Platt wrote in tossing Annapolis’ case.
“The States such as Plaintiffs here… can participate in the efforts to limit emissions collaboratively, but not in the form of litigation… If states and municipalities [or] even private parties are dissatisfied with the federal rulemaking or the outcome of cases, they may seek federal court review.”
