BREAKING: Supreme Court rejects Republican states' bid to kill Democrat climate change accountability cases

A group of 19 Republican attorneys general had asked the high court to block Democratic states like California from suing oil companies for climate change damages.

Photo courtesy Mark Fischer.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a rare complaint filed by 19 Republican-led states seeking to quash several blue state lawsuits seeking climate change-related damages from Big Oil.

The decision is the latest time the Supreme Court has refused to weigh in on lawsuits filed by states and local governments against major energy companies like Exxon and ConocoPhillips, which they claim deceived the public about the harms of fossil fuels.

The state court lawsuits — filed by states like California as well as counties and cities across the country — raise a range of arguments including that the fossil fuel companies have created a public nuisance and violated consumer protection and environmental laws.

The 19 Republican states led by Alabama, Florida and West Virginia had specifically asked the Supreme Court to block California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Minnesota and Rhode Island from pursuing their lawsuits, arguing they are essentially attempting to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Those concerns are reserved for the federal government under federal laws like the Clean Air Act, the states and energy companies have argued.

The decision not to take up the case attracted a dissent from Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. They did not weigh into the merits of the case, and instead said that the court doesn’t have discretion to turn away the case since it is a dispute between states — which would give the high court, and no other court, original jurisdiction.

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement that the red state lawsuit was a “desperate sideshow” that was “just another attempt to bail out Big Oil from standing trial for their climate lies. The justices were right to deny it.”

While none of the broader climate deception cases have yet had a trial date set, several have survived motions to dismiss and are headed that direction. Cases filed by Massachusetts and Honolulu are the furthest along, and the Supreme Court denied an effort to stop the Honolulu case from getting a trial date in January.

This is a developing story and will be updated with comments from the parties later today…