Baltimore Judge Tosses Climate Case, Hands Win to Big Oil

In a first of its kind decision, a Maryland judge on Wednesday tossed Baltimore City’s climate suit against major oil giants on the grounds that it is not the role of the state courts to address a global issue like climate change.

Originally filed in 2018, the lawsuit is one of more than a dozen similar cases against powerful oil companies including Chevron, Exxon and BP that are winding through courts across the nation. 

Jurisdictions all over the U.S. are experiencing the impacts of climate change and are using legal means to extract compensation from oil giants that, they argue, profited from selling products they knew caused environmental harm and brought about calamities such as global warming and extreme weather. 

Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Videtta A. Brown sided with the oil companies, explaining that the gas emissions that damaged Baltimore fall under the federal Clean Air Act. 

“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.” 

Sara Gross, chief of the Affirmative Litigation Division in the Baltimore City Department of Law, said her office disagreed with Brown’s decision and will seek a higher court’s review.

The city, in its case, argued that oil and gas companies were liable for damages because they falsely marketed their products and concealed the harms associated with burning fossil fuels, but were not seeking to regulate gas emissions. 

“This decision is the oil companies’ dream. This is what they would love to happen to all those cases,” said Robert Percival, a professor and director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

Percival said Brown argued that even though Baltimore City was seeking damages for consumer fraud and disinformation, it actually sought to regulate emissions. 

“These cases were state law actions for consumer fraud because of the oil companies’ lying about the impact of their products and engaging in a disinformation campaign,” Percival said, adding that he believed the judge was wrong in ruling that a state action for damages would have the effect of regulating emissions, which is the purview of the Clean Air Act.  

“The Clean Air Act has no provision for damages and nothing that would allow plaintiffs to recover for consumer fraud,” Percival said, noting that even the Supreme Court had previously refused to rule that the Clean Air Act preempted state common law as illustrated by the 2011 ruling in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut. 

Alyssa Johl, the vice president and general counsel for the Center for Climate Integrity, a D.C.-based environmental organization, said the decision was at odds with how other courts have ruled in similar cases, including a Maryland state court that allowed climate deception lawsuits that the city of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County separately brought against fossil fuel companies to proceed to trial. 

“Judges across the country have agreed that cases like Baltimore’s are intended to hold bad actors accountable for fraud and deception; they in no way seek to regulate emissions,” Johl wrote in an email. 

The decision is a big win for the energy giants who have consistently tried to avoid arguing the cases in state courts and even approached the Supreme Court to rule that the cases belonged in federal courts. But the Supreme Court declined to consider the plea and remanded the cases back to state courts.

“The oil companies thought that the only way to get these cases dismissed was to have them moved to federal court. But the courts have uniformly rejected that, saying these cases belong in state courts,” Percival said. 

“Federal law doesn’t provide any damages action, so that’s why it’s kind of the oil companies’ dream. Their objective is to avoid a trial that would reveal what they really knew about their products causing climate change for decades. They’re constantly trying to get the U.S. Supreme Court to just completely overstep itself and wipe out all state climate litigation.”

Michael Gerrard, a professor of professional practice at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, called the decision a “setback for similar cases.” In January, a Delaware court ruled that the state’s claims against oil companies can proceed, but damages will be limited to emissions within the state of Delaware.

Delaware’s lawsuit alleged that the fossil fuel industry concealed the harms of their products, which in turn harmed the state. 

“There are cases going in both directions on this. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a similar ruling in a case called City of New York v. Chevron. Courts in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Colorado ruled the opposite and said that the cases could move forward. This is mostly a matter of state law, with no uniform national outcome, unless the U.S. Supreme Court steps in and shuts all the cases down,” Gerrard said. 

Percival disagreed with that assertion, saying “the courts have uniformly allowed the cases to go forward, and this is the first purely state law case that was completely dismissed.” 

When the case was filed in 2018, Baltimore City Solicitor Andre Davis said that “[t]hese oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products would harm communities like ours, and we’re going to hold them accountable. Baltimore’s residents, workers, and businesses shouldn’t have to pay for the damage knowingly caused by these companies.”

The 13th suit of its kind to be filed at the time, the complaint sought to hold 26 oil and gas companies accountable for damages associated with sea level rise and changes to the environment that were responsible for prompting weather extremes such as hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and extreme precipitation events caused by the companies’ products.