The Supreme Court will hear a major climate change case involving a devastating Colorado wildfire
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LOUISVILLE, Colo. (AP) -- Less than an hour after the first warning that a wildfire was headed for her suburban street, Tawnya Somauroo's Colorado home was in ashes.
She has worked tirelessly for nearly five years to rebuild her house and help ensure her neighborhood can withstand the next blaze. But as climate change contributes to more frequent wildfires, she worries that the careful landscaping, metal fencing and flame-resistant siding are not enough.
"We lost our homes and they left us to figure out for ourselves how to make our neighborhoods safe again," Somauroo said. "At the end of the day, it comes out of our pockets, you know? And it does feel like maybe the oil and gas industry should have a part in this."
She lives in Boulder County, one of dozens of jurisdictions across the United States suing oil and gas companies to help pay for damage from disasters linked to climate change.
The case is part of a wave of climate change litigation across the country and the world, with billions of dollars at stake. On Monday, the first day of the Supreme Court's new term, the justices will hear the Boulder case that could decide the fate of others like it.
The city and county of Boulder first sued two oil companies in 2018, years before the fire. They argued that Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil had violated state law by deceiving the public about their contributions to climate change and sought unspecified damages to help cover the cost of worsening disasters.
The companies say that a flood of lawsuits in state courts is not the way to deal with the global issue.
"The problem is that climate change is caused by pretty much everybody living on earth," said Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the Manufacturers' Accountability Project, an industry group. "We need to figure out how to address that. We need to address it in a very meaningful way. This litigation doesn't do that."
The companies have the backing of the Trump administration. Federal government attorneys say the lawsuits are a backdoor way to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions and amount to an unconstitutional power grab.
"No one state can superimpose its own regulatory preferences on the rest -- least of all to address a global problem that exists almost entirely outside its borders and affects the world at large," they wrote.
The Clean Air Act, they say, allows the federal government, rather than states, to regulate emissions. The Republican administration has largely used that power to roll back environmental regulations.