The Supreme Court heard arguments this month in Suncor v. Boulder, a case that marks the fossil fuel industry’s latest bid to dodge accountability for its outsized contribution to climate change.

The City and County of Boulder, Colorado, sued Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil in 2018 for deceiving the public about their products’ role in causing climate change, seeking financial compensation for the costs of adaptation. Fossil fuel companies and their trade associations are desperately trying to halt this case and similar ones filed by dozens of states, counties, cities and tribal nations by pushing for legal immunity in Congress and state legislatures and appealing to the Supreme Court.

Coloradans are already suffering from worsening heatwaves, wildfires, and other climate effects tied to the companies’ climate deception, and the scientific evidence supporting Boulder is robust. Research led by experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists showed that nearly 40 percent of burned forest areas in western North America, including Colorado, can be attributed to the emissions of the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, including Suncor and ExxonMobil. This is just one example of the growing body of evidence that ties emissions from Big Oil to the harms facing communities.

Holding corporations accountable in court is nothing new. In the 1990s, cases against Big Tobacco forced the industry to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare costs, stop marketing targeted at kids, shut down its lobbying and junk science arms, and release millions of pages of internal industry documents.

I worked on holding Big Tobacco accountable then, and I’m working to hold Big Oil accountable now. In my role with UCS, I’ve exposed the fossil fuel industry’s past and continuing climate disinformation campaigns — most recently in a friend-of-the-court brief we co-authored with other experts supporting Boulder County and City. In that brief, we documented ExxonMobil’s and Suncor Energy’s use of the same deceptive strategies used by the tobacco and lead paint industries: concealing their knowledge of their products’ dangers while spreading disinformation about the science to create doubt.

This history goes back to 1959 when renowned physicist Edward Teller told a gathering of oil and gas executives convened by the American Petroleum Institute that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be “sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge … all the coastal cities.” Major oil and gas companies continued to hear similar warnings from their own scientists throughout the following decades.

Instead of changing their business model to pursue less harmful forms of energy, they doubled down on fossil fuels and worked to spread confusion and doubt about climate science. In an infamous 1998 memo outlining its “action plan,” the American Petroleum Institute defined “victory” as creating public uncertainty around climate science. To do this, the industry’s playbook included misleading advertisements and public relations campaigns, funding counterfeit science, lobbying politicians, and attacking the credibility of individual researchers, mirroring the strategies used by tobacco and opioid companies.

In recent years, new evidence has emerged highlighting how ExxonMobil and Suncor participated in this deception campaign. In 2021, an ExxonMobil lobbyist was caught on camera saying, “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. … Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. … You know, we were looking out for our investments, our shareholders.”

Court filings in a Massachusetts climate accountability lawsuit have also brought to light new documents exposing Exxon’s early knowledge of climate dangers and recent greenwashing efforts. Meanwhile, newly public internal documents reveal Suncor helped lead a fossil fuel industry group that worked to spread “uncertainties” about established climate science.

These companies knew the dangers, and they lied about them. The U.S. legal system has many precedents for holding corporations liable for this type of deceptive misconduct. In our friend-of-the-court brief, UCS and other experts highlighted successful public interest litigation against the tobacco and lead-paint industries. The claims in those cases were strikingly similar to those made by Boulder, no doubt because the fossil fuel industry borrows its tactics from the tobacco industry’s playbook.

The people of Boulder deserve their day in court. Allowing fossil fuel companies to skirt laws that protect everyday people from corporate misconduct would harm not only climate lawsuits, but corporate accountability more broadly. The Supreme Court should make it clear that no industry is above the law.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Kathy Mulvey is program director for the fossil fuel accountability team at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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