Environmental Ideologues at Rocky Mountain Institute get lots of your money. Colorado Supreme Court (unsurprisingly) lets a climate lawsuit proceed against Colorado fossil fuel companies.

Environmental Ideologues at Rocky Mountain Institute get lots of your money.

The supposedly nonpartisan (and free-market to boot!) environmentalist think tank Rocky Mountain Institute sure has a thing for leveraging Democrat political connections to get their hands on that sweet sweet state money.

They turn this funding into pure NGO magic, helping sell the government's top-down and decidedly NOT free market energy mandates.

More in my op ed below.

https://completecolorado.com/2025/04/30/environmental-ideologues-enjoying-the-colorado-taxpayer-dime/

---

Colorado Supreme Court (unsurprisingly) lets a climate lawsuit proceed against Colorado fossil fuel companies.

The Colorado Supreme Court recently ruled (in a split decision) that Boulder's lawsuit against Suncor and Exxon Mobil could proceed in front of a Boulder jury in a Boulder court.

There are, as you might imagine, multiple perspectives on this lawsuit and lots of detail. I can't go through all of that in its entirety, but I did pile up a lot of resources for you below for further reading.

The first link is a Colorado Politics article on the decision. This is a good one because it includes some detail on the two dissenting opinions.

The second link is a blog post in the Energy In Depth newsletter (published by a petroleum trade group). This is a good one if you want some counterpoint to the climate change narrative and the narrative of the purpose of such lawsuits.

The third link is to a Colorado Public Radio article on the topic. Besides offering the lefty media take on it, you'll find some comment from Boulder's attorney in this one.

Lastly, for those more interested in some of the legal manuevering involved in the lawsuit, the fourth link is to Georgetown Environmental Law Review article on the lawsuit and the US Supreme Court's refusal to stop cases like these from proceeding (for now).

I am not a lawyer, but by my own reading of things I think what we have going on here is Boulder selling hamburger but giving out chicken.

The lawsuit here is a claim by Boulder that they suffered damage due to climate change locally from the defendants. Quoting the Colorado Politics article with link intact:

"In the plaintiffs' telling, ExxonMobil and Suncor knew for decades that the burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would change the planet's climate. Yet, the companies misrepresented or concealed their internal findings from the public. As a result, Boulder County and the city of Boulder have had to spend money to address droughts, wildfires and other manifestations of extreme weather."

So the claim is that Boulder was harmed by the actions of these companies here in Colorado and thus they're suing here in Colorado, the same way you would if a fleet of tanker trucks from Exxon Mobil were to suddenly dump toxic waste all over Boulder while passing through it.

That analogy, at least as I understand it and if have it correctly rendered, doesn't hold water, however. There are multiple reasons, the atmosphere not being localized, the problem not being confined simply to two companies being only two.

I think what you're seeing here is the same thing we have all seen for decades, but with a novel twist. When you cannot get the environmental policy you want in the normal political process, you turn to the courts.

But rather than taking this to Federal court, the strategy here is to claim local harm and take it to state court, presumably where you have much tighter control of the people (judge and/or jury) who will hear the arguments. I mean, there's a reason we're in Boulder doing this and not, say, Carbon County WY (yes, it's real, go look it up).

And enough of the Colorado State Supreme Court decided to play along with the fiction of purely local harm and backdoor regulation of the oil and gas industry to enable this lawsuit to proceed.

A not at all surprising arrogation of power by the state court, the same one that thought it had power to decide who you can vote for.

There's one last thing to mention. In the CPR article it mentions that the US Supreme Court, quoting with link intact, "...affirmed the decision [the decison to let a similar case in Hawaii proceed in Hawaii state court] earlier this year, clearing a path for similar lawsuits across the country to move forward."

This is (not surprisngly given the CPR article was written by their environmental advocate Sam Brasch) something of an overstatement.

There are more details in the Georgetown article linked last below, but the upshot here is that it's much more likely that the Supreme Court's REFUSAL TO STOP (NOT an affirmation) the Hawaii lawsuit has more to do with them wanting the lower court processs to play itself out rather than their agreeing with this.

As it is in a couple of the references below, I think this will (after years of costly legal battles we'll pay for in energy prices and taxes) end up in the highest court in the land.

https://www.coloradopolitics.com/courts/colorado-supreme-court-green-lights-lawsuit-over-climate-change/article_d24716cf-b4ae-4820-b01b-68fda9bede1f.html

https://eidclimate.org/boulders-climate-suit-staggers-forward-after-divided-court-ruling/

https://www.cpr.org/2025/05/12/colorado-supreme-court-allows-boulder-climate-lawsuit-suncor-exxon/

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/environmental-law-review/blog/supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-challenge-to-climate-tort-suits-brought-in-state-court-for-now/