Big Oil Has Enlisted Alabama in Their Fight Against California

The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions each year but only agrees to hear a fraction of them. Sometimes this means the court overlooks important legal issues—the justices have avoided major cases on the Fourth Amendment in multiple recent terms, for example. More often than not, however, the court dispenses with a variety of petitions that aren’t worth its time or energy.

Alabama v. California falls into the latter category. A coalition of eighteen Republican state attorneys general is trying to block Democratic state attorneys general from suing oil and gas companies under their own state laws in their own state courts. The case is instructive not because it is a particularly strong lawsuit, but because it shows how conservatives will try to use the courts in the years to come.

The Supreme Court has two forms of jurisdiction over lawsuits. Nearly all cases heard by the justices fall under its appellate jurisdiction, meaning that the lawsuit was originally filed in a lower state or federal court. Nearly every Supreme Court case that you have ever heard of was first tried or considered by a lower court, then subsequently reviewed by the justices on appeal.

The high court also occasionally hears cases under its original jurisdiction, with the plaintiffs filing the lawsuit directly before the justices to hear it in the first, or original, instance. Original-jurisdiction cases are rare because the Constitution limits them to a narrow series of disputes. One of them—indeed, the only relevant one these days—is when two states sue each other.

This case did not truly begin with a dispute between two states, however. It instead arose because of a dispute between a half-dozen Democratic-led states and the oil industry. In September 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the Golden State would sue five major oil producers—BP, Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, and Shell—in California state courts for what the state described as “more than 50 years of deception, cover-up, and damage that have cost California taxpayers billions of dollars in health and environmental impacts.” State officials termed the lawsuit as “State of California v. Big Oil.”

“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us—covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet. It has been decades of damage and deception,” Newsom said in a statement when the lawsuit was announced. “Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells. California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill. California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable.”

The lawsuit is still ongoing after a San Francisco court rejected a motion to dismiss by the oil companies in October. It is one of multiple cases brought by Democratic state attorneys general against the industry in recent years, seeking financial damages and other penalties for the impacts of climate change. Similar state-level cases have been filed by attorneys general in Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and other states; Alabama is also trying to block their legal efforts.

In early 2024, the oil companies asked the Supreme Court to transfer the cases to federal court, but the justices turned them down without comment. Enter the Republican state attorneys general. Alabama and its allies filed a bill of complaint against California under the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction last May, directly asking the justices to intervene and block the lawsuits. Their legal theory is that California and other states want to “dictate the future of the American energy industry” by “imposing ruinous liability and coercive remedies on energy companies through state tort actions governed by state law in state court.”

Alabama frames this possibility in apocalyptic terms. “In essence, [California and its co-defendants] want a global carbon tax on the traditional energy industry,” the state claimed. “Citing fears of a climate catastrophe, they seek massive penalties, disgorgement, and injunctive relief against energy producers based on out-of-state conduct with out-of-state effects. On their view, a small gas station in rural Alabama could owe damages to the people of Minnesota simply for selling a gallon of gas.”

“If [the defendant states] are right about the substance and reach of state law, their actions imperil access to affordable energy everywhere and inculpate every state and indeed every person on the planet,” Alabama continued. “Consequently, [they] threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among states, but our basic way of life.”

To call this overstatement would be an understatement. Much of Alabama’s brief reads like a paean to oil and gas companies themselves. The “improved industrialization” made possible by oil-derived plastics, for example, “enabled unprecedented improvements in sanitation, public health, and medical treatments,” Alabama claimed. “America’s air is cleaner than a century ago thanks in part to the increased use of oil and natural gas” over coal and other biomass fuels, the state added, arguing that “a decline in air and water quality in some places after the industrial revolution was primarily due to the dramatic increase in overall population and energy consumption.”

California and its allies, for their part, compared the oil companies to other massive corporations that were brought to heel by state-level lawsuits for their wrongdoing, such as the tobacco companies in the 1990s and the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid epidemic this decade. “Each [lawsuit] responds to a decades-long campaign of misinformation and deception by the corporate defendants about the harmful effects of their products,” California said in its reply brief.

States generally cannot intervene in other states’ internal legal battles. Alabama and its allies tried to get around this obstacle by arguing that it had standing because it might collect less tax revenue from the oil industry if California’s lawsuit succeeds. For some of Alabama’s allies, the oil industry is a major part of the state economy. “By imposing new costs on sellers and producers of energy, [California and its allies] will do economic damage to the citizens of [Alabama and its allies] by depressing wages and employment in industries that depend upon affordable energy as well as by increasing prices for electricity and other consumer goods and services.”

This is a sweeping theory of standing, to say the least. The Supreme Court would likely hear a great many more original-jurisdiction lawsuits if states could sue other states because one of their internal decisions against a company could potentially increase prices or reduce tax revenue somewhere else. That argument also relies on a form of hypothetical and speculative causation that the justices often try to avoid in major cases.

In addition, this is also not how original jurisdiction typically works. In the modern era, these cases usually take one of two forms. The most common of them is water-rights disputes, like last year’s ruling in Texas v. New Mexico that dealt with groundwater pumping along the Rio Grande. The Supreme Court also occasionally hears disputes over state boundary lines: In 1998, for instance, the justices held that most of Ellis Island is part of New Jersey instead of New York. Original jurisdiction is usually reserved for matters that are central to a state’s sovereignty and cannot be heard or resolved elsewhere.

In recent years, however, Republican-led states have tried to use original jurisdiction to try to advance more ideological policy goals. Texas and a handful of allies unsuccessfully sued Pennsylvania and five other battleground states in 2020, hoping to get enough electoral votes for President Joe Biden invalidated that then-President Donald Trump would prevail instead. The state of Utah filed an extraordinary original-jurisdiction lawsuit last year against the federal government to try to seize federal lands within the state’s borders. The state’s congressional delegation even hinted that “war” would be justified if it did not acquire the lands in question.

Republican-led states and their business allies have also targeted California’s outsized role in the national economy, which allows it to informally set standards for the rest of the nation. The Supreme Court declined in December to hear Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency, a case in which the Buckeye State effectively challenged the Golden State’s ability to set vehicle-emissions standards for the rest of the country thanks to a carveout in federal law. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only justice to signal publicly that he voted to hear the case.

Industry-level efforts have faced similar levels of skepticism. A pork-industry trade group sued California in 2019 over its animal-welfare requirements for pork sold in the state even though almost no pork is produced in the state. The Supreme Court rejected their Commerce Clause claims in 2023 in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, holding that the Constitution did not bar the California law. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, pointedly suggested that the justices were not the proper venue for the industry’s grievances.

“So far, Congress has declined the producers’ sustained entreaties for new legislation,” he wrote. “And with that history in mind, it is hard not to wonder whether [they] have ventured here only because winning a majority of a handful of judges may seem easier than marshaling a majority of elected representatives across the street.”

That dynamic holds even more true for original-jurisdiction cases. Republican state attorneys general could theoretically avoid all the time, energy, and probable defeats that come with trying to persuade lower-court judges to adopt these legal theories. From their perspective, it’s like loading up a video game and skipping straight to the final boss. This strategy also reflects an apparent belief in right-wing legal circles that the court’s conservative supermajority may be favorable to these claims—a belief that, thus far, has yet to be borne out.

If the Supreme Court took up Alabama’s complaint, it would represent a fundamental shift in state sovereignty and basic American federalism. Republican-led states would likely pursue a wave of new lawsuits before the justices to change how Democratic-led states are governed and how they regulate various industries. The justices have shown no interest thus far in turning its original-jurisdiction docket into a forum for these types of partisan political disputes. That Republican state attorneys general keep trying speaks volumes about the balance of ideological power in the American judiciary today.