American energy companies asked the U.S. Supreme Court last week to overturn a ruling that allowed Honolulu’s climate lawsuit against the industry to move forward. This is the first time the Supreme Court has had the opportunity to tackle the merits of the cases head-on, marking a milestone in the litigation campaign.

Energy companies have twice previously sought SCOTUS’s review of legal issues in these lawsuits. While past petitions were related to the jurisdictional question of where the cases belong (state vs. federal court), Wednesday’s petition for certiorari asks the Court to determine whether federal law prevents these cases to be heard in the first place.

The defendants are challenging a Hawaii Supreme Court decision affirming a trial court’s denial of motions to dismiss Honolulu’s lawsuit in October, allowing the case to proceed to trial. The companies argue the federal Clean Air Act preempts state law and ask the Supreme Court to “review and clarify” if state law can be used to impose repercussions for damages from the global issue of climate change. The petition argues this point:

“This case presents the Court with its only foreseeable opportunity in the near future to decide a dispositive question that is arising in every climate-change case: whether federal law precludes state-law claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate.”

It’s important that the Court decides whether or not cases like Honolulu’s are even “viable” before taxpayers have to front the cost for discovery and pretrial proceedings in dozens of cases. “The stakes in this case could not be higher” or more timely, wrote the petitioners:

“Those cases present a serious threat to one of the Nation’s most vital industries. As the federal government previously stated in a similar climate-change case, ‘federal law and policy has long declared that fossil fuels are strategically important domestic resources that should be developed to reduce the growing dependence of the United States on politically and economically unstable sources of foreign oil imports.’”

If the Court does not intervene, the companies warned, the litigation campaign could result in cases proceeding “under the laws of all 50 states—a blueprint for chaos.”

Last year, George Mason University Law professor Donald Kochan highlighted the same point, pointing out that “inconsistent or conflicting verdicts” in state courts around the country “risk chaos in global energy markets.” Market instability, massive fines, and a patchwork of liability that hinders innovation would all make it near-impossible for oil and natural gas business to develop resources, driving up consumers’ energy costs.

But that may be, in fact, the goal of the activists pushing the litigation campaign after all. In 2022, an advisor to Sher Edling, the private law firm representing Honolulu and dozens more plaintiffs in climate suits, spelled it out clearly: “If these cases all go to their logical extreme, [the oil companies] all go bankrupt… They should.”

Bottom line: The stakes are high. As POLITICO reports, if SCOTUS takes up the petition and finds that “federal law bars state-level claims related to interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions. That would significantly weaken — if not outright end — all similar litigation.”