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

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.