A Baltimore judge tossed a landmark climate change lawsuit against more than two dozen oil and gas companies in a sizable defeat for environmental activists and Democrats that have touted the case.
Baltimore Circuit Court judge Videtta Brown—who was appointed to the bench by former Gov. Martin O'Malley (D., Md.)—ruled late Wednesday that the city cannot regulate global emissions and swatted down the city's arguments that it merely sought climate-related damages from the defendants, not the abatement of their emissions. She further stated that the court does not accept the city's contention that it does not seek to "directly penalize emitters."
"Whether the complaint is characterized one way or another, the analysis and answer are the same—the Constitution's federal structure does not allow the application of state law to claims like those presented by Baltimore," Brown wrote in her opinion. "Global pollution-based complaints were never intended by Congress to be handled by individual states," she added.
In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, the Baltimore City Department of Law's chief of affirmative litigation division Sara Gross said the city respectfully disagreed with the opinion and would seek review from a higher court.
The ruling represents the latest setback for a broader left-wing effort to penalize oil companies for allegedly spreading disinformation about the role their products play in causing climate change. Over the past several years, Democratic-led states, cities, and counties—which are home to more than 25 percent of all American citizens—have filed more than a dozen similar lawsuits.
Overall, if plaintiffs were to get their way, oil companies could be forced to pay billions of dollars in climate damages, a potentially catastrophic blow to their ability to stay in business.
Baltimore filed its original complaint in 2018, making it one of the first ever cases of its kind. After it was announced, former Democratic mayor Catherine Pugh said Baltimore was on the "front lines of climate change because melting ice caps, more frequent heat waves, extreme storms, and other climate consequences caused by fossil fuel companies are threatening our city and imposing real costs on our taxpayers."
"These oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products would harm communities like ours, and we’re going to hold them accountable," then-Baltimore city solicitor Andre Davis added at the time. "Baltimore’s residents, workers, and businesses shouldn’t have to pay for the damage knowingly caused by these companies."
BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, CITGO, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil, and Hess were among the 26 entities listed as defendants in the filing.
"The Court’s well-reasoned opinion recognizes that climate policy cannot be advanced by the unconstitutional application of state law to regulate global emissions," Theodore Boutrous, who serves as counsel for Chevron, said in a written statement to the Free Beacon. "The meritless state tort cases now being orchestrated by a small group of plaintiffs’ lawyers only detract from legitimate progress toward a lower carbon global energy system."
The majority of the cases filed by Democratic prosecutors against the fossil fuel industry remain pending and are working their way through local courts, even as the oil industry has pushed for them to be litigated in federal courts.
In a ruling similar to the Baltimore court decision issued Wednesday, a Delaware state court in January delivered a setback to the State of Delaware's lawsuit against oil producers filed in 2020. That court found that alleged injuries stemming from out-of-state or global greenhouse gas emissions are preempted by the federal Clean Air Act.
Delaware, Baltimore, and most other jurisdictions pursuing the climate cases across the U.S. are being represented by the San Francisco-based law firm Sher Edling. The firm was founded to specifically spearhead these novel cases, but has received criticism for its dark money funding.
In 2022 alone, the most recent year with publicly available data, Sher Edling received grants worth a total of $2.5 million from the New Venture Fund, a pass-through fund managed by dark money behemoth Arabella Advisors, according to tax filings analyzed by the Free Beacon. That funding adds to the more than $8 million the firm received in prior years from dark money groups.
Although Sher Edling's individual donors remain unknown, past funding for the firm has flowed from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Sher Edling didn't respond to a request for comment.
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