Oil Companies Ask Supreme Court For Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

For generations fossil fuel companies have known that their products were responsible for climate change as well as life-threatening smog, but they continued to lie about it to the public, just like the tobacco companies before them. And just like tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies have been fighting tooth-and-nail to avoid being held accountable in court. On Oct. 6, those efforts reached the Supreme Court in the first case of its fall 2026 session.

In Suncor v. Boulder, Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil are seeking to block Boulder, Colorado’s lawsuit against them, falsely arguing that it’s a form of regulation, and thus prohibited by a thicket of legal arguments.

“This case involves an unprecedented effort to use state law to regulate global conduct,” Kannon Shanmugam began the fossil fuel companies arguments.

But state law allowing lawsuits for injuries across state lines is hardly unprecedented, Boulder’s attorney, Kevin Russell, argued.

“Since the founding, states have had the power to provide tort remedies for injuries occurring within their borders even when the conduct causing those injuries occurred elsewhere,” Russell began.
“When somebody in New York defames a citizen of Boulder on national television or somebody in California releases a computer virus on the Internet or a biological virus into the world and it causes mass damage in Colorado, it has never been thought that only federal law can provide a remedy.”

The same sorts of arguments were made in Colorado state court, and on May 12, 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that federal law didn’t block Boulder and its surrounding county from suing the energy companies for violating state law by misleading the public about fossil fuel’s climate harms. On Aug. 8, 2025, the companies appealed to the Supreme Court, where the conservative 6-3 majority—which has rolled back a broad range of environmental regulations—offered a much more friendly hearing.

“What is unsettling is that now we are seeing a court case go to Supreme Court that has shown throughout the past 10 years they are willing to reverse engineer precedent and doctrine in order to get an outcome that they want,” Aaron McCall, EnviroVoters Federal Advocacy Coordinator told Random Lengths. “They want an outcome and then they will create something to justify coming to the outcome,” he said, citing a number of examples where the Supreme Court has severely rolled back the legal capacity to limit environmental damage.

However, in a rare act of conscience, under intense scrutiny, Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from this case, due to his extensive fossil fuel company investments and unusually intense public scrutiny. As a result, just a single conservative defection would result in a 4-4 deadlock, leaving the state court ruling intact. While trying to foretell final rulings from oral arguments is a hazardous game, there was reason to hope the fossil fuel companies wouldn’t succeed.

“There were no questions that were off-base, McCall said, or where “they were showing their hand,” he said, so, “it’s just too early to say [which] way it’s going to land.”

The stakes are high, advocates on both sides agree. Hundreds of similar lawsuits have already been filed.

“Today’s oral arguments in Suncor v. Boulder were the latest act in Big Oil’s desperate attempt to preempt state tort lawsuits and prevent evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s campaign of deception from being heard in court,” said Kathy Mulvey, Fossil Fuel Accountability program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “This last-ditch effort before the Supreme Court is part of a coordinated, well-resourced push to shut down fossil fuel accountability efforts across the country,” she said. “So far, Big Oil has not achieved its top federal lobbying priority—a bill to grant the industry sweeping immunity from climate laws and lawsuits such as Boulder’s.”

This issue is clear-cut, according to Matthew Tejada, Senior Vice President for Environmental Health at NRDC. “Coal, oil and gas companies have made trillions of dollars in profits from the sale of fuels that are driving the climate crisis. They have knowingly misled the public for decades,” he said. “The fossil fuel industry has a responsibility to help pay for the damage its products have caused.”

In fact, McCall pointed out, “The House Oversight Democrats did a[n] investigation back in 2021 where they found that the fossil fuel industry was aware of all of these impacts to the environment back in the 80s.” There’s additional evidence that fossil fuel executives were aware even earlier—in the 1960s, when the federal government first warned of the danger of climate change.

The deception involved is key to the underlying case, even if it went almost unnoticed in oral arguments. It’s also key to why the climate crisis has gotten so bad—the cost of inaction is being seen and felt every day.

“Communities deserve to have their day in court,” Mulvey said. “The Supreme Court should let this case be heard on its merits in Colorado and Congress must not stand in the way by gifting Big Oil a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Beyond that, McCall said, “What is very important” in Congress next year “is having real discussions about Supreme Court justice reform.”