Baltimore judge throws out climate case, handing victory to Big Oil

In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a Maryland judge on Wednesday threw out Baltimore City’s climate action lawsuit against the big oil giants on the grounds that it is not the role of state courts to address a global issue like climate change.

Originally filed in 2018, the lawsuit is one of more than a dozen similar cases against oil giants including Chevron, Exxon and BP that are making their way through courts across the country.

Jurisdictions across the US are experiencing the impacts of climate change and are using legal remedies to extract compensation from oil giants who, they argue, profited from selling products they knew caused environmental harm and brought about such disasters. such as global warming and extreme weather.

Baltimore County District Court Judge Videtta A. Brown sided with the oil companies, explaining that the gas emissions that harmed Baltimore fall under the federal Clean Air Act.

“Whether the complaint is characterized one way or the other, the analysis and answer are the same — the federal structure of the Constitution does not permit application of state law to claims such as those presented by Baltimore,” Brown wrote in her opinion. “Global complaints based on pollution were never intended by Congress to be handled by individual states.”

Sara Gross, chief of the Affirmative Action Division at the Baltimore City Department of Justice, said her office disagreed with Brown’s decision and will seek a higher court review.

The city, in its case, argued that the oil and gas companies were liable for damages because they falsely marketed their products and hid the harms associated with burning fossil fuels, but were not seeking to regulate gas emissions.

“This decision is the dream of oil companies. That’s what they would like to happen with all those cases,” said Robert Percival, a professor and director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

Percival said Brown argued that even though Baltimore City was seeking damages for defrauding and misinforming consumers, it actually sought to regulate emissions.

“These cases were state consumer fraud law actions due to the oil companies lying about the impact of their products and engaging in a misinformation campaign,” Percival said, adding that he believed the judge erred in ruling that a state lawsuit for damages. it would have the effect of regulating emissions, which is the purview of the Clean Air Act.

“The Clean Air Act has no damages provision and nothing that would allow plaintiffs to recover for consumer fraud,” Percival said, noting that even the Supreme Court had previously declined to rule that the Clean Air Act Clean Air preempted state common law, as illustrated by the 2011 decision in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut.

Alyssa Johl, vice president and general counsel for the Center for Climate Integrity, a D.C.-based environmental organization, said the decision was at odds with how other courts have ruled in similar cases, including a Maryland state court that allowed climate fraud lawsuits that the city of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County brought separately against fossil fuel companies to proceed to trial.

“Judges across the country have agreed that cases like Baltimore’s are meant to hold bad actors accountable for fraud and deceit; they in no way seek to regulate emissions,” Johl wrote in an email.

The decision is a major victory for the energy giants, which have repeatedly tried to avoid arguing the cases in state courts and even turned to the Supreme Court to rule that the cases belonged in federal courts. But the Supreme Court refused to consider the plea and sent the cases back to the state courts.

“The oil companies thought the only way to get these cases to rest was to take them to federal court. But the courts have uniformly rejected that, saying those matters belong in state courts,” Percival said.

“The federal law does not provide for any measure of compensation, therefore it is a kind of dream of the oil companies. Their objective is to avoid a trial that would reveal what they really knew about their climate change products for decades. They are constantly trying to get the US Supreme Court to completely overrule itself and wipe out all state climate litigation.”

Michael Gerrard, a professor of professional practice at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, called the decision a “setback for similar cases.” In January, a Delaware court ruled that the state’s claims against the oil companies could continue, but damages would be limited to emissions within the state of Delaware.

The Delaware lawsuit alleged that the fossil fuel industry hid the harms of their products, which in turn harmed the state.

“There are cases that go both ways on this. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a similar ruling in a case called City of New York v. Chevron. Courts in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Colorado ruled otherwise and said the cases could move forward. This is primarily a matter of state law, with no uniform national outcome unless the U.S. Supreme Court steps in and closes all cases,” Gerrard said.

Percival disagreed with that contention, saying that “courts have uniformly allowed cases to go forward, and this is the first case of purely state law that was completely struck down.”

When the case was brought up in 2018, Baltimore City Attorney Andre Davis said that “[t]These oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products would harm communities like ours, and we will hold them accountable. Baltimore residents, workers and businesses should not have to pay for the harm these companies knowingly cause.”

The 13th lawsuit of its kind to be filed at the time, the complaint sought to hold 26 oil and gas companies liable for damages related to sea-level rise and changes in the environment that were responsible for fueling extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts, heat. surges and extreme rainfall events caused by the companies’ products.