Climate change is an exceptional phenomenon — exceptional above all in the urgency of the solutions it demands. One might favor, therefore, the courts stretching current jurisdictional doctrines to hear climate cases and bending constitutional and statutory rules as needed. Fossil fuel companies acknowledge that climate change is exceptional, but they think the solution is exactly the opposite.
A Supreme Court decision that these cases cannot proceed under state law would be contrary to existing It is also important to note why the oil companies want their cases to be governed by federal law. It is not some principled commitment to the power of the national government. In many other areas, fossil fuel companies and their allies have strongly resisted federal environmental policy.
True, climate change is an exceptional problem. But that is no reason for the fossil fuel industry to be accorded exceptionally favorable treatment by the Supreme Court.