On October 5th, the US Supreme Court will hear a case that could determine the legal fate of one in four Americans who live in places that are figthing to make polluters pay for climate chaos.
Next Monday the Supreme Court will hear Suncor v Boulder, a climate deception lawsuit that Boulder, Colorado filed against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy. Trump and his allies hope that the Supreme court will protect the oil industry from all liability —The same way they protected Trump from prosecution after the failed coup on January 6, 2021.
We’re standing up to make sure that, no matter how the court rules, everyone knows that Americans are united in demanding justice from fossil fueled fascists. Join us:
- If you’re in or near DC, click here to visit ThePeoplevBigOil.org and join us on Monday morning at the Court. Or, if you’re in Colorado click here to join 350 Colorado and friends for a rally in downtown Boulder.
- If you can’t get to Boulder or DC, click here to sign our petition to Make Polluters Pay, share the posts below, and follow the hashtag #PeoplevBigOil for updates from the courthouse next week.
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- Or, just forward this post to a friend!
The Suncor V Boulder case has had a long and winding road to the supremes, so we won’t try and do it justice here. See this post from our friends at Fossil Free Media for a more fulsome account. But the short version is that in 2018, Boulder sued ExxonMobil and Suncor, arguing that the companies spent decades selling fossil fuels while knowing the damage they were doing to the climate, and lied to the public along the way.
Boulder’s case doesn’t require Big Oil to stop drilling or cut emissions. It simply wants them to help pay for a share of the local climate damages already happening. Colorado was hit hard by the 2021 Marshall Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses and caused more than $2 billion in damage. Exxon and Suncor have spent years trying to dismiss this and other climate accountability cases. But in 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5 to 2 that the case could proceed. In February, 2026 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
Starting last spring, advocates and court watchers started calling for Justice Alito to recuse himself from the case because he owns individual stock and investments in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. Both of those oil companies have warned shareholders (including Alito) that climate accountability lawsuits (like Boulder’s) pose a risk to their stock value — in other words Alito could personally lose money depending on his ruling, the defenition of a conflict of interest.
And in what we hope is a trend we won that argument last week when Alito agreed to recuse himself from the case. But that’s no guarantee of how the other 8 justices will rule. And this is bigger than Boulder and bigger than one Justice. More than one in four Americans now live in a community that is suing or litigating to Make Polluters Pay for climate chaos. Some of those lawsuits, including California’s, have asked judges to stay or pause judgement until the Supreme Court rules.
Sign & share the petition to make polluters pay and make a plan to join us October 5 for The People v Big Oil. There’s no live stream from inside the court, but we’ll be watching and posting on social media using the hashtag #PeoplevBigOil.