Who pays if Supreme Court shields Big Oil on climate?
By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
When we talk about someone wanting to both eat their cake and still have it, we’re using a logical impossibility to highlight the cake-haver’s delusional mental state. When it comes to the fossil-fuel industry’s cake and its treatment by President Donald Trump’s administration and possibly the Supreme Court, almost anything is literally possible, logic be damned.
Earlier this week, at the urging of Trump’s Justice Department, the Supreme Court agreed to consider an appeal by Exxon Mobil Corp. and Suncor Energy Inc. to throw out a lawsuit brought by the city and county of Boulder, Colo., that seeks to recoup climate-change damage from the oil giants. It’s not clear whether the high court will ultimately take the case because it also asked the two sides to present arguments on whether the case is truly ready to be heard. Those are expected in the fall.
But the mere fact that the Supreme Court, which has passed on many similar cases before, has finally turned its gaze in Boulder’s direction is not reassuring to Boulder nor to the many other local and state governments taking legal action to help pay for the environmental chaos caused by global heating.
The Supreme Court’s attention creates the very real possibility that conservative justices will find a way to give fossil-fuel companies a legal defense against all such actions. Complicating matters is the fact that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has also declared that, contrary to its previous stance (not to mention earlier Supreme Court rulings and congressional declarations), it no longer considers greenhouse gases a dangerous pollutant needing regulation under the Clean Air Act of 1963.
https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/03/02/comment-who-pays-if-supreme-court-shields-big-oil-on-climate/
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