A South Carolina judge has dismissed a climate change lawsuit brought by the City of Charleston against two dozen oil and gas companies.
Judge Roger Young of the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas granted the companies’ joint motion to dismiss on Wednesday, siding with the argument that climate change litigation is a federal matter – not something for state courts to decide.
“The U.S. Constitution makes certain matters the exclusive domain of federal law for good reason,” Young wrote. “If all fifty states, let alone the tens of thousands of political subdivisions therein, were permitted to apply their own laws to such federal issues as interstate and international emissions, the result would be conflicting state standards that would be impossible for energy companies to navigate – what the U.S. Supreme Court called a ‘chaotic confrontation between sovereign states.’”
Young added that the courts are not the appropriate venue for crafting climate policy.
“This Court thus joins the ‘growing chorus of state and federal courts across the United States, singing from the same hymnal, in concluding that the claims raised by [climate-change plaintiffs] are not judiciable by any state court’ and that ‘our federal structure does not allow . . . any State’s law [to address these types of climate-change] claims.’”
At a hearing in May, Charleston attorney Matt Edling argued the oil companies had misled the public about the dangers of fossil fuels.
“You saw that it could be a calamitous problem, have benefit from it economically to extraordinary disadvantage of cities like Charleston,” Edling said.
He added that the companies “made herculean efforts to convince the world that it wasn’t a problem.”
Attorneys for the oil companies responded that the city of Charleston continues to use fossil fuels and said some companies have made big investments in renewable energy.
“That theory obviously makes no sense,” Merritt Abney, an attorney for BP, said in May.
Abney called the city’s claims about consumer deception over branding efforts unfounded.
In the ruling, Young also criticized the legal scope of Charleston’s complaint.
“Under Plaintiff’s theory, virtually anyone could be a plaintiff – and a defendant – in what would effectively amount to a perpetual series of lawsuits that reset after every storm,” he wrote.
The decision comes after similar lawsuits were dismissed in New York City, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, and California. However, unresolved cases remain in Hawaii, Minnesota, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere.
Legal experts praised the South Carolina court’s decision.
“The South Carolina Court of Common Pleas opinion dismissing the City of Charleston’s meritless climate change deception lawsuit represents a victory for the rule of law and the proper allocation of authority within our system of government,” Donald Kochan, executive director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, said.
“It recognized that state courts have no business creating new standards for emissions when the federal Congress has reserved for itself authority to regulate in that area. And, in doing so, it stood guard against the assault on the constitutionally designed separation of powers that these cases represent when attempting to turn the courts into engineers of climate change policy,” Kochan added.
Christopher Mills, a constitutional law expert and principal at Spero Law in Charleston, said the dismissal was expected.
“Judge Young followed the clear consensus of courts across the nation, which have agreed that state tort law is not the right avenue to address the complex issue of global climate change,” Mills said. “It would be a shame if the City continued to lend its name to this meritless quest by West Coast trial lawyers to deprive Americans of vital energy resources.”
Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, also welcomed the decision.
“The dismissal of the City of Charleston’s climate lawsuit is a victory for common sense and the rule of law,” he said. “This case was part of a coordinated, ESG-driven campaign to shake down energy companies and impose climate policy through litigation rather than legislation. The judge was right to throw it out.”
