Climate accountability deserves its day in court

Opinion>Opinions - Energy and Environment The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Climate accountability deserves its day in court Comments: by Rob Verchick, opinion contributor - 06/25/26 12:00 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Rob Verchick, opinion contributor - 06/25/26 12:00 PM ET Comments: Link copied

Illustration / Courtney Jones; and Adobe Stock

From heat blasts in the Southwest to relentless floods in Michigan, extreme weather is already threatening to blow holes in city budgets across the U.S. On this heating planet, climate disasters cause an average of $150 billion in damage every year. Who is going to pay for all that?

According to several states and local governments, at least some of that damage should be paid by those whose wrongful acts contributed to the problem — which is to say, the fossil fuel industry, whose contribution to climate breakdown has been known to experts for generations.

To date, states and municipalities have brought more than 150 lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for damages caused by wildfires, droughts, coastal erosion, and other events scientists say were supercharged by the heat-trapping gases released from their products. Industry lawyers have spent decades in court shoveling procedural smoke to keep the facts from coming to light.

But this year, thanks to two big court decisions — one in Hawaii and one in Oregon — a cleansing breeze may be sweeping through. It’s possible that not even a looming case before the U.S. Supreme Court can stop it.

Let’s take a closer look.

Even before Hurricane Katrina, states and municipalities across the country have been trying to hold Big Oil accountable for some of the damage caused to them by carbon pollution. For the most part, their legal claims are based on state doctrines like negligence, nuisance, trespass and fraud.

The plaintiffs in these cases believe that fossil fuel companies are at least partly to blame for their situation, particularly in cases where (they say) those companies hid their own damning studies and deceived the public about the damage their products caused. To prove these claims, they need to reach a stage of litigation called pre-trial discovery. That’s the period in which parties in the dispute are made to truthfully exchange evidence about themselves and their activities. The fossil fuel industry has been fighting like mad to avoid this stage of litigation, mainly by creating procedural delays.

Consider a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court: Suncor v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The case involves tort claims brought eight years ago by a Colorado county against Suncor, a fossil fuel company. The county seeks damages caused by climate-related impacts, including explosive wildfires, which scientists have connected to global heating.

In those eight years, the underlying facts have still not been heard. Instead, the company launched a fruitless effort to have the state’s claims moved to a federal court. When that failed, Suncor argued that the Colorado court was “preempted” from taking the case because it would interfere with federal regulation of the nation’s global trade policy. The Colorado Supreme Court rejected that argument, and now the issue is before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In response, many state courts with similar cases have delayed their proceedings in hopes of gleaning some insight from the high court. But not all of them have hit pause.

In May, courts in Hawaii and Oregon each refused to let the Boulder case slow them down. They said further delay would be unfair to plaintiffs and that, depending on the outcome, the Supreme Court’s decision might not even apply to their cases.

This seems right. Judges should tread thoughtfully, but they need not tiptoe.

For years, lawyers working for the fossil fuel industry have done everything in their power to keep state courts from weighing the factual evidence in climate accountability cases. During just the past decade, our communities have lost roughly $1.5 trillion in damages from extreme weather and other climate disasters. But the winds are shifting.

At long last, advocates for climate accountability may soon get their day in court.

Rob Verchick is a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, a scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform, and author of the newsletter “Blue Tomorrow.”