Don’t pollute courts with climate lawfare
And then there’s climate lawfare.
Lawsuits against alleged polluters gained momentum from 2017 to 2018 in cities and counties in California and New York City, some targeting companies like BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell, accusing them of deceptive practices, not unlike the cases we’re talking about today.
You may recall the County of Bucks got into the fight with Big Oil in 2024, as did the Democratic National Committee, which included legal action against corporate giants on its agenda during its 2024 national convention in Chicago. Its leaders said it was the right cause for progressive Democrats but it proved to be a dilemma for someone like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is walking a tightrope and thinking about a presidential bid.
On March 25, 2024, Bucks County filed its lawsuit against seven giants of the energy industry. Democratic Commissioners Diane Ellis-Marseglia, Bob Harvie, and Republican Gene DiGirolamo stepped up to the mic in Doylestown and announced Bucks is suing BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell, Phillips 6, and the American Petroleum Institute, claiming they led decades-long campaigns to cover up the environmental risks their products pose.
Bucks also accused the companies of deceiving the public about the role fossil fuels play in worsening climate change. And if successful, the damages would cost “Big Oil” the price of repairing storm damage, the cost of bolstering or replacing bridges, and funding stormwater management.
This is what one conservative critic called the “climate litigation game.”
Bucks County claimed the fossil fuel companies’ practices affected flooding, allegedly worsened by rising tidal waters in the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, for which the plaintiff wanted damages.
But the lawsuit was dismissed a year after it was filed 2025 in the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas. Not deterred, the county appealed to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania where it is pending.
In the last two weeks, Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday (R), filed an amicusbrief in Commonwealth Court supporting Bucks County Judge Stephen Corr’s dismissal of the lawsuit. Sunday noted that federal law supersedes conflicting state and county law, and that it is the federal government’s responsibility, not the county’s, to address global emissions and the problems they cause.
Sunday also explained that Bucks’ climate lawsuit hurts Pennsylvania, the second largest natural gas producer in the U.S. after Texas, and the third largest coal-producing state after Wyoming and West Virginia. And because the energy sector employs hundreds of thousands of workers in Pennsylvania, it is integral to the commonwealth’s economy.
And there’s the political side to this. In the 2024 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, the official platform included pledges to combat the climate crisis, reduce pollution and advance clean energy. In one section on “Making Polluters Pay,” the platform says Democrats will “keep standing up to Big Oil, as the clean energy boom breaks the industry hold on energy markets.”
The “climate cases” against the energy industry from states, cities, and counties have accelerated. Meanwhile, Shapiro wants the world to see him as taking a more moderate approach to the state’s oil and gas industry, trying to balance environmental regulation with the state’s economic interests.
Progressives, not content just to target fossil fuel companies, have saved some of their aggression for AI data centers. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are calling for a pause on data centers based on environmental and safety concerns and the potential of rising electricity costs. And closer to home, where a proposed data center in West Rockhill, Bucks County, isn’t on the drawing board, 100 people attended a recent meeting to express environmental concerns about them.
Recently, as in the Bucks County lawsuit against the energy companies, many have taken the position that the polluters should pay for their alleged deceptive practices. But that sounds a lot like the “climate litigation game,” a phrase coined by someone on the opposite side of this debate.
Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who also referred to the sudden increase in climate lawsuits as “perverse,” claims the basis of these lawsuits is inconsistent with the evidence on climate phenomena. Instead, they are more of an attack on our democratic institutions.
Zycher is saying the plaintiffs in these climate cases attempt to get something done through litigation that they cannot achieve in Congress. More fundamentally, he says their effort is an assault on the Constitution. In his view, the so-called climate litigation game is a pollution of our constitutional principles.
Pat Wandling is a veteran journalist, formerly of The Bucks County Courier, and was a mainstay on WBCB for over 20 years.
