A Pennsylvania judge tossed a lawsuit that prosecutors in a Philadelphia-area county brought against six of the nation’s largest oil companies. The judge noted that his opinion adds to a “growing chorus of state and federal courts” ruling that such cases aren’t meant to be brought at the local level, while expressing concern about the county’s handling of the targeted lawsuit.
In a scathing rebuke of the lawsuit filed by Bucks County, Pa., in March 2024, Judge Stephen Corr of the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas dismissed the case with prejudice late on Friday and wrote that emissions caused by petroleum are regulated at the federal level, not the state level. Corr also expressed concerns with how Bucks County hired outside counsel and filed its complaint with minimal public feedback.
The judge noted that at oral argument, the county’s attorney “conceded that the advertising, production, transport, and sale of Defendants’ fossil fuel products in Bucks County did not cause any harm to the County.”
The dismissal is a significant blow to a broad nationwide effort that targets oil companies in state courts and seeks court injunctions forcing them to pay hundreds of millions—or billions, in Bucks County’s case—of dollars in environmental damages. After they filed their initial complaint in the case, Bucks County officials said they sought to “shift the financial burden of the climate crisis from the taxpayers of Bucks County to the companies responsible for creating the crisis.”
The defendants in the case were BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, ExxonMobil, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute. The county argued defendants intentionally deceived the public about climate change and, as a result, its residents “will continue to suffer the catastrophic impacts of climate change, including an emerging pattern of increasingly severe, damaging and at times deadly weather events.”
“It is unconscionable that while we were working hard to reduce our impact on the climate crisis, some of the biggest companies in the world were deliberately undercutting those efforts through their deceptive business practices,” Bob Harvie, the current chairman of the Board of Bucks County Commissioners, said at the time.
Judge Corr, however, ruled that such claims cannot be handled by state courts given the fact that carbon emissions are interstate by their nature. The Clean Air Act gives the federal government sole authority to regulate emissions and preempts the ability of states to do so.
Corr also noted that he is one of several judges to have come to such a conclusion in recent months.
“Today we join a growing chorus of state and federal courts across the United States, singing from the same hymnal, in concluding that the claims raised by Bucks County are not judiciable by any state court in Pennsylvania,” Corr wrote. “We conclude that our federal structure does not allow Pennsylvania law, or any State’s law, to address the claims raised in Bucks County’s complaint.”
Judges in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and New York have recently ruled against state and local prosecutors in similar cases brought against oil companies.
In July 2024, for example, Baltimore Circuit Court judge Videtta Brown ruled that global pollution-based complaints were never intended by Congress to be handled by individual states. And earlier this year, New Jersey Superior Court judge Douglas Hurd dismissed a suit filed by the state’s attorney general, finding that “only federal law can govern plaintiffs’ interstate and international emissions claims.”
Overall, prosecutors in Democratic-led states like California, Minnesota, and Rhode Island as well as more than a dozen cities and counties, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, have filed similar cases against the oil industry. The cases date back to 2017 and have been filed in states and jurisdictions that are cumulatively home to more than 25 percent of Americans.
Critics have argued that, not only are state courts unable to to take up such cases, but that the lawsuits are a form of lawfare designed to bankrupt the oil industry as a backdoor means to push a mass green energy transition.
“As Judge Corr declared, his decision joins the ‘growing chorus of state and federal courts across the United States, singing from the same hymnal,’ concluding the ‘our federal structure does not allow Pennsylvania law, or any State’s law, to address’ climate change lawsuits,” said Theodore Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Chevron Corporation, said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
“The court also got it right when it expressed ‘concern about the manner in which the commissioners went about hiring counsel and filing this lawsuit,’ and found that ‘the conduct of the commissioners violated the spirit of’ Pennsylvania’s open government act,” he continued.
While it wasn’t the reason for the dismissal, Corr wrote that Bucks County violated the spirit of the state’s Sunshine Act, which is designed to ensure public participation in government actions and to prevent secretive deliberations, when it filed its complaint last year. Months before the complaint, the county included the potential for such litigation as one of 17 agenda items in a public meeting in January 2024.
“Indeed, at the meeting on January 17, 2024, no member of the public commented on any item within the ‘consent agenda.’ In fact, not one of the three commissioners, nor the county solicitor, mentioned the item at the meeting, and there was no indication that they intended to file a lawsuit within the next few weeks,” Corr wrote in his order on Friday.
“That is troubling to this court, as the commissioners. and the county solicitor, would, upon filing of the complaint, call a press conference and refer to their actions as ‘historic’ and ‘momentous,'” he added.
Bucks County did not respond to a request for comment.
Read the full article here
