How Climate ‘Lawfare’ Will Impact Your Utility Bill

A years-long legal battle over climate change, fossil fuels and the reach of state law is now before the Supreme Court, and outside groups are piling into the fight.

At least 20 new friend-of-the-court briefs were filed in August in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case stemming from a 2018 lawsuit brought by Boulder County and the City of Boulder against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil.

The Colorado governments seek damages under state tort law, alleging the companies contributed to climate-related harms. The energy companies counter that individual states cannot impose liability for alleged harms resulting from interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions because such matters are governed by federal law.

That distinction could determine what happens not only to the Boulder litigation but to similar climate-liability lawsuits elsewhere.

O.H. Skinner, executive director of Alliance For Consumers, described the litigation to the Daily Caller News Foundation as an effort to obtain through the courts policies that advocates have not necessarily secured through legislatures.

“[The Left’s] goal is going to use courtrooms [and] lawfare to unlock their policy dreams,” Skinner said.

Groups supporting the Boulder dispute the energy companies' central legal argument.

WHEN Justice, a nonprofit focused on accountability, argued in its amicus brief that the Constitution does not contain a special prohibition preventing state-law claims involving interstate pollution.

“Sherlock Holmes famously calls attention to the dog that does not bark; the absence of a thing that should be there is often the most probative piece of evidence,” its brief states.

Our Children's Trust also entered the case, filing a brief on behalf of eight people between the ages of 8 and 22 who live in Boulder County. The organization alleges they “are being directly harmed by air pollution from fossil fuels and climate disruptions.”

The case arrives after climate plaintiffs suffered setbacks in other courts.

In Lighthiser v. Trump, 22 young plaintiffs challenged three Trump administration energy executive orders on constitutional grounds. A federal judge dismissed the case for lack of standing, and the Ninth Circuit unanimously affirmed that decision in June 2026.

Meanwhile, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of climate-related tort cases brought by Baltimore, Annapolis and Anne Arundel County against numerous oil and gas companies. The court concluded Maryland tort law could not be used to impose liability for alleged harms stemming from global greenhouse-gas emissions.

David Blackmon, an energy public policy analyst critical of the litigation, told the DCNF that he does not expect the number of amicus filings to alter the fundamental legal questions confronting the justices.

“The brief Boulder’s lawfare attorneys submitted in late July recycles arguments which have been repeatedly rejected in various state and federal courts,” Blackmon said.

Boulder's supporters have their own prominent legal voices.

Yale Law School professor Harold Hongju Koh argued that the energy companies' preemption position is inconsistent with arguments previously made in other climate litigation.

“In earlier cases, some of the same companies told the Court that the Clean Air Act cut off federal lawsuits against their emissions,” Koh said. “Now to escape Boulder’s suit, they argue that those emissions are ‘inherently federal,’ so that state lawsuits should be cut off too.”

“This bait-and-switch should not allow them to escape accountability for the harm they have caused every Coloradan,” he added.

Another amicus brief was filed on behalf of a coalition of Democratic-led states and cities, with Columbia's Michael Burger appearing as counsel. Burger is executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and also counsel at Sher Edling, a law firm involved in more than two dozen climate-liability cases against energy companies.

Burger did not respond to the DCNF's request for comment.

The dispute also intersects with an ongoing controversy surrounding the National Academies of Sciences' Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Material involving so-called “attribution science” — research intended to connect particular climate effects to emissions or other causes — became the subject of criticism surrounding the manual's fourth edition.

The National Academies subsequently announced a process review involving the disputed chapter, which was removed from the Federal Judicial Center's website.

For critics such as Skinner, the legal expenses themselves are an important part of the story. He argued that climate litigation can impose substantial costs on energy companies regardless of whether plaintiffs ultimately collect damages.

“The money is not the point of these lawsuits,” Skinner told the DCNF. “The money is a means of crippling the energy industry that they don’t like and funding all the things that they do like.”

Blackmon similarly said defending the cases can cost companies “tens of millions of dollars.”

Supporters of Boulder's case frame the dispute differently: as a question of whether Colorado and its local governments can invoke traditional state-law remedies for alleged injuries within the state.