A Preposterous Legal Assault Against Fossil Fuels

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

 

Aaron Brockett is the woke mayor of Boulder, Colo.

 

He has made so-called social justice a priority in his public career. As the website of the city of Boulder notes, proudly, “As part of the city’s commitment to advancing racial equity, Mayor Brockett has attended the Advancing Racial Equity: Role of Government and Bias and Microaggression Trainings.”

 

Who would expect anything else? Famously countercultural Boulder deserves — nay, one assumes, demands — a silly person as its mayor.

 

What makes no sense is that Mayor Brockett, as the titular leader of a city of 100,000 in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, wants to have the power to remake national, even global, energy policy.

 

Of all the people one would want to bestow with such influence, Brockett is very far down the list. Maintaining bike paths? Maybe. Determining U.S. energy policy? Definitely not. Yet a lawsuit against oil companies undertaken by the City of Boulder could hand the small jurisdiction outsize power over American energy.

 

The suit, and others like it, is preposterous on its face and represents a threat to our economic well-being and constitutional order.

 

The Colorado Supreme Court has allowed the suit to go forward, despite the fact that it is a clear attempt to supersede federal environmental regulations, and the U.S. Supreme Court is now considering whether to grant cert in the case and take up the novel and consequential issues it presents.

 

The Court should consider it its duty to hear the case and bring legal and constitutional sanity to a scammy abuse of the legal system.

 

The City and County of Boulder have sued, specifically, ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy for their contributions to climate change. Boulder has asserted claims for public and private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy.

 

There has been a spate of such suits alleging that climate change is a public nuisance, traditionally defined as “an unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public.” Obviously, this is a framework that doesn’t fit climate change.

 

There is no such thing as a vague, global nuisance. It is supposed to be a specific, localized phenomenon. If someone cuts down a tree and blocks a public road, or if the fumes from a sriracha factory irritate the eyes and throats of nearby residents (a real thing that happened), that’s a public nuisance.

 

In real nuisance cases, the court orders a particular, easily applied abatement. If a homeless encampment on a sidewalk is a nuisance to local businesses, a judge orders the city to remove the encampment. Problem solved.

 

Here the alleged nuisance is not specific to Boulder and has very little to do with Boulder. Neither ExxonMobil nor Suncor Energy is based in Boulder. And there is no such thing as eliminating greenhouse gas emissions only in Boulder, Colo.

 

Since climate change is a global phenomenon, emissions would have to end everywhere — not just in Colorado but in, say, Texas and Norway, among many other places.

 

Needless to say, that’s not going to happen. Whatever a court might force ExxonMobil to do, China and other players will continue to massively contribute to emissions. The multinational corporation could close down forever, and global warming would continue apace.

 

By the way, since the City and County of Boulder and their residents have willingly used fossil fuels for decades, and still do so to this day, Boulder itself has contributed to its own nuisance!

 

The alleged harm involved is absurdly sweeping. As the Colorado Supreme Court summarized, Boulder maintains that the fossil fuel activities of the defendants “have interfered with and will continue to threaten and interfere with public rights in Boulder’s communities. These rights include the right to use and enjoy public property, spaces, parks, and ecosystems; the right to public health, safety, emergency management, comfort, and well-being; and the right to safe and unobstructed travel, transportation, commerce, and exchange.”

 

Moreover, Boulder claims that actions of the defendants “have caused invasions of its property in the form of floodwaters, fires, hail, rain, snow, wind, and invasive species, all of which have caused substantial damage to Boulder’s real property.”

 

This all makes it sound like Boulder is a climate-change hellscape.

 

In reality, over the last 20 years, the population of the county and city increased (although the city has declined a bit recently), and property values have gone through the roof. If there’s a problem hurting Boulder, it’s not that the city has been degraded by climate change but that its housing is too expensive for people to afford.

 

The notion that there’s been terrible damage done to Boulder via climate-change-driven natural disasters, meanwhile, relies on a simplistic, catastrophist understanding of the state of the science regarding such events.

 

At the end of the day, the climate suits are shakedowns. The plaintiffs want the oil companies to cough up billions of dollars to the government and nonprofits to fund the green agenda and become, in effect, quasi-public entities.

 

If these suits succeed, no longer will the left need to worry about overcoming the filibuster, or winning over the equivalent of Joe Manchin in the Senate, or public persuasion at all. They will get what they want from the courts.

 

Perhaps the biggest travesty is that the oil and gas companies didn’t think they were doing anything wrong in the course of selling a legal product in accord with all relevant laws and regulations — a product that consumers like Boulder have willingly bought and used to their great benefit.

 

And now various jurisdictions want to exact enormous penalties on oil companies for fulfilling a market demand, indeed meeting a basic human necessity.

 

In the most egregious instance of this phenomenon, parishes in Louisiana have sued energy producers for activities dating back to World War II that were undertaken to fulfill federal contacts and support the U.S. military.

 

A lot of the climate suits have been tossed; Boulder’s still stands.

 

It shouldn’t. Boulder doesn’t have the right to, in effect, trump the laws of states that take a different attitude toward fossil fuels, or to preempt federal law governing the activities of the likes of ExxonMobil.

 

As a reward for all his exertions on behalf of equity, Aaron Brockett gets to preside over the Boulder City Council, not set the nation’s climate policy as de facto energy czar.