From CFACT

By Craig Rucker

Environmental groups and climate-obsessed local governments are waging aggressive climate lawfare across America — using lawsuits to bypass Congress, the U.N.’s stalled global schemes, Trump administration policies, and Supreme Court rulings. They are determined to impose their anti-fossil-fuel agenda on the rest of us and hammer our living standards.

More than 20 states, counties, and cities cling to the alarmist claim that manmade climate change poses an “existential threat” requiring the rapid elimination of fossil fuels.

Egged on by groups such as EarthRights International, Youth Climate Strike, Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, and the Environmental Law Institute (which pushes one-sided “education” on judges), they’re suing a handful of major oil companies, alleging these firms “disrupted” the climate and caused billions in supposed weather and warming damages.

Their real goal? “System-level changes” to our energy, economy, and society, through an indirect carbon tax that drives up fossil fuel prices until most families can’t afford them, not just locally but nationwide.

A prime example: After being contacted by EarthRights International, Boulder County and the city of Boulder joined another Colorado county to sue Canada-based Suncor Energy and U.S.-based ExxonMobil. They claim these companies degraded property, health, and safety by fueling climate change with higher temperatures, more droughts and wildfires, shrinking snowpacks, reduced water supplies, harm to farming, and damage to skiing industries.

They’re demanding billions in compensation for alleged past and future “damages.” Officials and attorneys openly acknowledge the endgame is transforming America’s energy system and imposing sky-high costs on fossil fuels everywhere.

In May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that this lawsuit can proceed in state court. However, these companies operate and sell products nationwide and globally, the asserted impacts aren’t confined to Colorado, and the lawsuit’s ambitions would slam families across the United States and beyond.

This case belongs in federal court, where judges would evaluate the claims through broader national and international perspectives on science, economics and human welfare, not on easily manipulated local venues and media narratives.

Other power-hungry jurisdictions — California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Baltimore, Honolulu, and more — pursue similar courtroom assaults, backed by the same networks. They dodge the core questions.

If federal agencies are not permitted to regulate matters “of vast economic and political significance” without explicit congressional authorization — as recent Supreme Court rulings have made clear — how can local governments and state courts impose de facto national energy and economic policy?

How can they twist unclear science, nonexistent statutes, or vague language into “reasonable” interpretations that massively expand their power and inflate private-sector costs nationwide, contrary to recent Supreme Court decisions? How can this lawfare coalition — colluding with eco-activists and friendly courts — force nationwide outcomes on fossil fuels, climate. and emissions when Congress has refused or failed to act for decades?

How can they override the needs and wishes of millions of citizens whose heating, air conditioning, jobs, nutrition, health, and living standards would be degraded by this destructive push?

These realities explain why developing nations such as China and India, which need fossil fuels to lift billions from poverty, disease, and despair, stood firm at the recent United Nations climate conference in Belém, Brazil (COP30), which ended with little more than rhetoric. Oil, natural gas, and coal still provide 80 percent of global primary energy. China and India build new coal-fired power plants monthly; China emits one-third of global greenhouse gases, more than all developed nations combined.

These countries recognize that the real harm comes from banning affordable energy, relying on unreliable renewables, and blocking essential petrochemical products — not from alleged manmade climate change.

That’s why President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, revoked costly regulations rooted in overhyped “climate crisis” claims, and boosted American oil and gas production to record levels.

The Supreme Court said clearly that federal bureaucrats cannot issue major rules without clear congressional approval and cannot make “reasonable interpretations” of ambiguous laws that balloon regulatory powers or costs.

Yet, these local lawfare efforts try to end-run all that. That’s precisely why the Supreme Court announced in February that it will hear appeals from Suncor and ExxonMobil, which seek to terminate the Colorado case and similar local climate actions.

A decisive ruling to halt this lawfare overreach can’t come soon enough.

This article originally appeared at DC Journal