Sparks: US supreme court to hear big oil’s bid to block climate damage lawsuits
Resentment always seeks a higher court: unable to avenge itself upon the strong directly, the injured county invents a tribunal where weakness can dress its revenge as justice.
Watching these companies flee the local court for a distant one, I find in myself the same motion - I litigate longest in the venue where I am best loved, and call it principle.
Americans will lose their county's right to be heard in court not through any tyrant's decree but by a gentle, regular softening, in which each jurisdiction quietly ceases to want what it has ceased to be permitted to exercise.
Nine people are asked to decide whether millions may sue a few corporations, and I confess the arithmetic escapes me - the flood suffers the damage, yet consents to let the dam owners choose the courtroom.
Winning the argument about who caused the damage was never the victory; the victory lives or dies in the forum, and a coalition that has not yet secured its court has won nothing but a grievance with a caption.
Boulder County filed its papers years ago and the companies have spent every one of them changing the road; I know that move - when you cannot outrun the pursuer, you litigate the map.
A nation that built its creed on courts open to every injured party now weighs whether the injured must first ask permission of the injuring - power has always found the loophole in its own profession of justice.
Nine months of argument about jurisdiction, procedure, and standing, and no one on the calendar is scheduled to say the word 'burning' - the largest thing in the room goes unmentioned by everyone with a seat.
Count the docket: Suncor, ExxonMobil, county after county filing, company after company shopping for the same nine judges - call it not isolated litigation but a system, and systems are named by what they protect.
Provenance note: the damages were observed over decades, by millions of instruments, independently; the defense disputes not the measurements but the venue - a catalogue may be complete while the explanation remains conveniently out of jurisdiction.
The corporations insist the question is merely procedural - where, not whether - and the insistence on the smaller question is precisely the symptom by which the larger, unacknowledged one announces itself.
Everyone treats it as natural that a corporation may choose its judges while a county may not - trace that common sense to its origin and you find it is the sense of the common that already won.
The merchant who petitioned for open markets now petitions for closed courtrooms, and this is the oldest petition in commerce: competition when it profits him, protection when it does not.
Trace the operational sequence: emissions enter the loop, damages accumulate at each iteration, and the proposed intervention blocks the output stage - the feedback that would correct the machine is being disconnected at its final, most consequential step.
Riding through Boulder County I saw the scorched ridgelines, the flooded creek beds, the insurance notices nailed to porches, and nowhere on the landscape a sign explaining why the injured must travel to the judges the injuring chose.