A South Carolina State Court judge in City of Charleston v. Brabham Oil Company, Inc., et al., dismissed on Aug. 6 an action against nearly two dozen oil and gas companies. The suit, initially filed in 2020, alleged the defendants contributed to harmful climate change and deceived people about the dangers of their fossil fuel products.
In granting the energy companies’ motion to dismiss the City of Charleston case, the state court judge concluded that state tort and consumer deception laws could not be relied upon by Charleston to hold the defendants liable for climate change. In reaching his decision, the judge relied upon various rulings dismissing similar suits, including litigation brought by New York City, Baltimore and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
While Charleston asserted that its suit was about deception, the trial judge was not persuaded and found that Charleston’s claims were premised on greenhouse gas emissions and their effects. Significantly, the state court reasoned that U.S. Supreme Court precedent has long made clear that states cannot use their own laws to resolve disputes involving interstate and international emissions or to impose policy preferences or economic sanctions on their neighbors. The judge additionally found Charleston’s suit to be preempted by federal law and the regulatory systems put in place under the Clean Air Act and further concluded Charleston’s claims were “fundamentally deficient” as a matter of state law, in part that they ran afoul of the so-called political question doctrine and were barred under the statute of limitations.
The City of Charleston was given until September 5 to appeal the decision but decided against any further judicial review of the adverse ruling.
In view of Charleston’s decision to waive its right to appeal the state court ruling, in a related federal court filing on September 12, the energy companies filed a notice with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that they were dismissing their appeal of a 2023 ruling that concluded Charleston’s lawsuit belonged in state, and not federal, court.
City of Charleston v. Brabham Oil Company, Inc., et al. joins a long list of climate change lawsuit dismissals by state and federal courts holding that states and local governments cannot pursue climate change litigation under state laws because of federal preemption and U.S. Supreme Court precedent.