Supreme Court denies Exxon request to get rid of citizen lawsuits
The oil major’s bid was one of several fossil fuel industry efforts to get a Supreme Court shield from accountability.
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request from ExxonMobil to overturn a historic ruling allowing ordinary people and citizen groups to sue industrial polluters, upholding what legal experts say is a crucial mechanism to deter companies from continuously breaking environmental laws.
The decision concludes more than a decade of litigation over toxic pollution from Exxon’s petrochemical complex in Baytown, Texas. In 2010, environmental groups sued Exxon on behalf of residents living near the facility for years of reported violations of its Clean Air Act permits, including pollution of cancer-causing chemicals. A federal judge hit the company with a nearly $20 million penalty, later reduced to $14 million — the largest ever imposed on a company in a citizen-led public interest lawsuit to enforce the Clean Air Act.
Exxon did everything it could to battle the ruling. When its appeals failed, the oil giant asked the high court to reconsider whether citizens had standing to sue polluters for environmental harms in the first place.
“At trial, Exxon’s neighbors bravely testified to the harms they suffered from the company’s illegal pollution, painting an ugly picture of what it’s like to live in Exxon’s shadow,” said Josh Kratka, managing attorney at the National Environmental Law Center, one of the plaintiffs’ lead attorneys. “The Supreme Court saw through Exxon’s claim that its neighbors shouldn’t have the right to hold the company accountable for compliance with the Clean Air Act.”
Exxon will now have to pay the fine and make changes to its operations at the facility, where nearby residents continue to live with the consequences of its ongoing pollution.
“With EPA in full-scale retreat from enforcing environmental laws, citizen suits like this have become even more critical to protecting vulnerable communities exposed to hazardous emissions from the petrochemical industry,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School.
Exxon’s request implored the Supreme Court to reassess a 25-year old precedent set by Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, which held that citizens can sue companies for violating federal laws — including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and about a dozen other environmental protection statutes — when state and federal regulators fail to enforce those laws. Environment Texas and the Sierra Club, the groups suing on behalf of Baytown residents, have pointed to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s repeated failures to pursue air pollution actions against Exxon and other polluters in the state.
The 2000 ruling in Laidlaw is essential to deter future violations of those laws, Parenteau said. Without it, polluters are “just going to say, ‘okay, catch us if you can, because the worst that can happen to us if you catch us is we have to come into compliance.’ That's different than saying the risk of getting caught is paying enormous penalties,” he said.
In December, a federal appeals court issued a decision upholding the $14 million penalty, though members of the 17-judge panel were starkly divided over some principles underlying the lawsuit — including “traceability,” or in this case, whether the pollution at Exxon’s facility could be traced to the injuries alleged by nearby residents. Exxon raised that issue in its petition to the Supreme Court, arguing that the justices should rewrite the precedent established by Laidlaw, which provides legal standing to people who can demonstrate “reasonable concern” that they have and will suffer personal harm as a result of a company’s ongoing environmental violations.
Backed by a coalition of Republican attorneys general, the oil giant asked the court to apply a stricter standard for people to prove their individual health impacts were caused by a company’s air pollution. That would be “almost impossible” for plaintiffs to do, said Victor Flatt, associate director of the Burke Center for Environmental Law at Case Western University and an energy fellow at the University of Houston.
According to Flatt, the ruling against Exxon is “incredibly important” in the history of environmental law not just because of the massive penalty levied against the company — but also because it was won against a “very recalcitrant defendant.”
Exxon “will fight tooth and nail and stop at nothing,” and was “proposing very novel legal theories seeking to overturn settled precedent and trying to create doubt where there really shouldn’t be,” said Flatt.
Big Oil’s mixed record at SCOTUS
Exxon’s quest to overturn Laidlaw was just one of several attempts by fossil fuel majors to get the Supreme Court to protect them from accountability efforts, which saw mixed results this term.
In June, the court agreed to hear an appeal from ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other oil companies to move lawsuits filed by Louisiana parishes seeking hundreds of millions in damages for coastal destruction out of state court, further delaying the cases after more than a decade of litigation. The oil companies’ request came after a landmark $744 million jury verdict against Chevron in one case brought by Plaquemines Parish — the first of dozens of those lawsuits to go to trial after being sent back to Louisiana state court by the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
“Virtually every federal court has rejected Chevron's attempt to avoid liability for knowingly and intentionally violating state law,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement last month. “I'll fight Chevron in state or federal court — either way, they will not win.”
The Plaquemines verdict “set a precedent that will encourage many more lawsuits by coastal Louisiana parishes devastated by the impacts of oil and gas,” said Parenteau, of Vermont Law School. The companies’ effort to move them to federal court was a “tactical move,” he said: “anything we can do to delay these cases and make them more expensive to bring, that benefits us as oil companies.”
The same tactic has been tried without success against state and local governments’ lawsuits arguing Exxon and other oil majors deceived the public about their products’ impact on the climate and should pay for resulting damages. The industry has also argued that the cases are preempted by federal law under the Clean Air Act, even though the lawsuits don’t seek to impose or enforce regulations on the oil companies.
In January, the Supreme Court declined to intervene in a lawsuit brought against oil companies by the city and county of Honolulu on those grounds, putting that and other climate accountability lawsuits on track toward trial. That was the fourth time since 2023 that the justices rejected an appeal from oil companies in the cases. But even with unfavorable rulings from the nation’s highest court, the fossil fuel industry is pursuing other paths to circumvent accountability.
Oil companies are now reportedly asking Congress to pass a law immunizing them from climate lawsuits entirely, just like legislators did for the gun industry two decades ago.
In a recent letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi urging the Trump administration to get behind an immunity shield for oil companies “similar to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005,” the law providing legal immunity to the gun industry, 16 Republican state attorneys general mourned that “Unfortunately, the United States Supreme Court has declined up to this point to tackle these modern-day climate lawsuits and anti-energy state laws head on.”
“We expect that only legislative and executive actions can provide real answers to these continuing problems,” they wrote.