In a piece for National Review this month, authors Marc Wheat and Michell G. Bahnsen argued that an upcoming Supreme Court case “could do more damage to American household budgets — and our economy as a whole — than almost any piece of legislation ever passed by Congress.”
The case in question is Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, which is the leading case of more than 60 similar cases. These were filed against American oil and energy companies over alleged contributions to climate change.
The architects of this litigation campaign aren’t shy about what they’re doing. David Bookbinder, a former counsel of record in the Boulder case, described the strategy last year as “a rather convoluted way to achieve the goals of a carbon tax.” This is extremely telling, as proponents of a carbon tax have tried and failed repeatedly to move legislation through Congress. Now they’re trying to achieve through lawsuits what they couldn’t accomplish through legislatures.
The problem is that the costs of that end run won’t stay in Boulder but will land on everyone. The oil and natural gas industry contributes more than $2.1 trillion to U.S. GDP annually and supports more than 10 million jobs across the full supply chain, from wellhead through pipeline, refinery, and to the gas station. Oil and gas extraction workers earn a mean annual wage of $114,750, roughly double the national median. When litigation forces companies to set aside massive reserves and contend with reduced credit, they curtail investment in exploration and production, tightening domestic supply and leading to higher prices.
This will be another pressure point on affordability for middle America and a serious hardship on the poorest households. Low-income families already spend nearly 20 percent of their income on home energy and transportation fuel — a share more than three times what the average American household pays. A litigation-driven increase in energy prices functions as a regressive tax, severely harming the poor and middle classes as concerns about affordability continue to worsen.
Even starker are the national security implications. Only a few years ago, Europe was woefully dependent on Russian natural gas. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU leaned more heavily on American liquified natural gas exports to keep the lights on, a shift made possible by U.S. energy companies like Houston-based Cheniere Energy. The amount of liability that progressive Boulder proposes would force those companies to price massive litigation costs into every cargo barrel, making American exports less competitive overnight and handing a structural advantage to Russia, Qatar, and Iran, all of which would happily undercut us.
Read the full story in National Review.
