US supreme court to hear big oil’s bid to block climate damage lawsuits

The oil companies go before the highest court and ask it to silence the lower courts. This is the whole argument, stripped of its Latin: not that they owe nothing, but that no tribunal may hear the claim. I have read this petition before, in older bindings. Every power that fears judgment first seeks to choose its judge.

Let us apply the proper test. The companies say: climate is a federal matter, a matter for nations and parliaments, and a county court cannot weigh the atmosphere. There is a surface plausibility here - some questions do exceed a village’s jurisdiction. But watch the sleight. They do not argue that another competent court will hear the case. They argue that no court will. This is not a plea about which law applies; it is a plea that no law applies to them. A defendant who asks to be judged by no one is not making a legal argument. He is making a confession about what the verdict would be.

The distinction they blur is between the question “who caused?” and the question “who may ask who caused?” The first belongs to evidence, to the slow weighing of harms in a courtroom where documents are compelled and witnesses sworn. The second belongs to the architecture of courts themselves. The companies wish to answer the second question in a way that forecloses the first, before a single fact is examined. That is the disorder: procedure deployed not to find truth but to make truth unreachable.

And I note who speaks to whom. To the public, the companies offer images - the lamp, the engine, the warmth of the hall. To the court, they offer technicalities of preemption. Both are addressed to their audience, but only one of them is an argument, and it is the one that says: you may not look.

If the court grants the plea, it will not have ruled that they are innocent. It will have ruled that innocence and guilt alike shall never be determined. That is a strange kind of justice, and I do not find it in any commentary I trust.

6 October 2026

The highest bench in that republic across the sea opens its term this morning, and what does it hear first? Not a question of liberty, not a dispute over the constitution itself, but the plea of the oil magnates - Suncor, ExxonMobil - begging to be spared the judgment of the counties they have flooded and scorched. Boulder County dares to sue for its damaged lands, and the corporations reply: not in your courts, not in your state, not anywhere.

Let me play the advocate for these companies before I prosecute them. They will say: climate is a matter for nations, not counties; that a patchwork of local judgments would chaos make of a global question; that the proper forum is the legislature, where the people’s representatives may weigh such things. There is a surface of reason to this. I grant it freely.

But mark what the argument conceals. The legislature they commend us to is the very legislature their gold has purchased. They flee to the forum they have already corrupted, and call the flight respect for institutions. The county that watched its summers burn and its winters starve is told it has no standing to speak - while the men who lit the fire hold standing everywhere their money travels. This is not procedure. This is the purchase of immunity, dressed in the robe of jurisdiction.

And the court, that tribunal which was built to stand above faction - how long will it pretend that hearing this plea first is neutrality? To give the strongest ear to the powerful seeking escape from accountability is itself a judgment. The Republic does not ask whether the suit is inconvenient to industry. It asks whether the injured may be heard. If the answer is no, the pillars have cracked a little more.

Verdict pending. But I know which way the wind of money blows.

6 October 2026

The Supreme Court opened its term today by hearing ExxonMobil and Suncor argue that no court, anywhere, should be permitted to hear what Boulder County has to say about its climate damages. The companies’ claim is that such questions belong to one court alone - theirs, effectively - and that a county in Colorado is not the proper place for a ledger to be opened.

Consider what the ledger contains. Boulder County spent money adapting to heat and fire and flood: wider culverts, revised building codes, emergency funds. Those expenditures are facts, entered in the books by clerks who never thought of themselves as parties to a great constitutional question. The county’s position is simple: someone profited from the product that produced the warming; the county paid to defend itself against the warming; let an ordinary jury compare the two columns. The companies’ position is also simple: do not let that jury sit.

I have spent my life watching what institutions do rather than what they say. The companies say they accept accountability. What they do is spend years and fortunes ensuring that accountability is never located - not in state court, not in federal court, not anywhere a family or a county can afford to stand. A defendant who seeks the one forum that has never awarded such damages, and no other, is not confused about jurisdiction. He is shopping.

The principle at stake is old and plain: where a harm is felt, there the account may be demanded. The mill that fouls the stream answers to the village downstream, not to a tribunal of its own choosing in a distant capital. If that principle cannot survive translation into plain language - if it requires nine months of procedure before a culvert can be discussed - then something has been built into the law that was not in the harm.

The county’s clerks kept their books honestly. The question is whether anyone will be allowed to read them aloud.