Activists Target State Courts with Climate Change Lawsuits
Across the nation, some left-wing activists are leveraging local lawsuits to transform state courts into platforms for pushing their agendas. Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court may have the chance to address this coordinated legal strategy, particularly in the case of Suncor Energy vs. Boulder County.
At first glance, Boulder’s lawsuit appears to be yet another climate change case targeting the energy sector. However, it actually reinterprets a legal concept known as “public nuisance,” effectively turning it into a means for enforcing state policies and impacting how life is lived in America.
This kind of campaign poses risks to ordinary consumers. Recently, as Arizona’s former attorney general, I took a closer look at this matter through an amici brief in the case.
Historically, claims of public nuisance have been used to resolve tangible community issues—things everyone can notice, like unsafe makeshift camps or factories polluting waterways. A legitimate public nuisance claim focuses on particular problems in specific places, linking a defendant’s actions to the harm caused to local residents.
Boulder and its supporters aim to invert this historical use by framing global climate change as a public nuisance, aiming to target any corporation involved in it, especially those associated with fossil fuels. The purported damage is nebulous—affecting many places and timeframes—making it a challenging argument to pin down.
This initiative raises more than just local concerns; it seeks to reshape U.S. energy and industrial policies via a single county court, completely bypassing voters and elected officials who should traditionally be involved in such decisions.
In the last decade, a network of organizations, advocacy groups, and legal firms have invested in creating a public nuisance machine. The goal is to accomplish in court what they haven’t managed to achieve legislatively. After earlier climate-related theories faltered in federal courts, these groups shifted strategies to state law, filing continuous lawsuits and sometimes compensating local attorneys in their quest.
The cities of Boulder, Honolulu, and Baltimore exemplify this trend. They follow a similar playbook—organizing, creating ‘litigation demons,’ losing in one jurisdiction, moving to another, and persisting until a court hands down a significant ruling or settlement that prompts nationwide changes.
The implications for sovereignty and the separation of powers are profound. If Boulder can label global climate change a “nuisance,” it could, in theory, influence energy production and sales in states as far away as Texas and West Virginia.
And climate change is just one issue at stake. Public nuisance claims could easily extend to other topics, like gun control or environmental regulations that don’t align with certain ideologies.
The Supreme Court has encountered this movement before and has cautioned against it. Courts have had to remind regulators that they cannot simply extend “blanket powers” through narrowly defined statutes to alter entire sectors, just as attempts by governmental bodies to reinterpret specific provisions for sweeping policies have been pushed back.
Now, the court faces a significant decision. The only way to prevent this public nuisance theory from spreading further is for it to assert that clear limits exist and that one state cannot impose its policy preferences on all others through court judgments.
Disputes over energy, products, and the economy should be handled by legislatures and, ultimately, through the democratic process, not by a select few state courts acting as de facto regulators.
The Supreme Court now holds a critical opportunity in Suncor to curtail this latest wave of climate litigation, forestall similar lawsuits regarding various products disliked by activist factions, and restore the public nuisance concept to its intended use: addressing local issues rather than serving as a backdoor for activists to exert influence over national policy from local courts.
