Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Judges Press County Suing Oil Giants To Explain How Companies Worsened Its Floods

Wikimedia Commons/Public/Joe Gratz

State appeals judges on Wednesday pressed a Pennsylvania county suing oil giants over climate change Wednesday to explain how the companies’ alleged deception worsened local floods.

Bucks County’s lawyer acknowledged that proving that link would be challenging as he urged the Commonwealth Court to revive the lawsuit that a county judge threw out in 2025. Judges also pushed back on the oil companies’ lawyer, and one asked whether the court should wait for the Supreme Court to rule on a similar Colorado case the justices heard Oct. 5.

The justices’ ruling in that case could decide whether similar suits by states and cities across the country can go forward.

“So causation will be a challenge in this case. Bucks doesn’t shy away from it, but that’s not any part of the preemption analysis,” Dan Flynn, arguing for the county, told the judges during the hearing.

Flynn said the companies knew for more than half a century what burning fossil fuels would do to the climate but “mounted a campaign of disinformation” instead. He argued that the climate can absorb some warming before weather turns more extreme.

“And our theory, which we intend to prove is that because of their deceptive conduct, that created an increased demand for fossil fuels, which pushed us over that threshold,” Flynn said. “And now Bucks and other counties have to respond.”

“But you have to get back to the damages issue, which is all that’s really pleaded,” one judge told Flynn. “It really goes back to the fossil fuel emissions. So that’s why the trial court said it’s preempted.”

Theodore Boutrous, a Gibson Dunn & Crutcher lawyer arguing for Chevron and the other oil companies, told the judges the county’s claims “at their root, at their core, are claims that these defendants caused global greenhouse gas emissions to be too high.”

“Bucks County is consuming and burning a lot of oil and gas. They’re participating in this activity, and then they’re suing, saying that this is like … the end of the world, and they need warnings,” Boutrous told the court.

In Bucks County v. BP America Inc., the county accuses Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66 and an oil industry trade group of covering up what they knew about their products’ role in warming the planet, WHYY reported. The county filed the suit in 2024, seeking help paying for bridge repairs, building retrofits and stormwater projects as flooding worsens.

Bucks County Court of Common Pleas Judge Stephen Corr dismissed the suit in May 2025, ruling that the federal Clean Air Act preempts its claims.

“The combustion of those fossil fuel products by the citizens of Bucks County, and the County itself, produced greenhouse gas emissions,” Corr wrote, according to WHYY. “If there were no emissions there would be no damages.”

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, a Republican, filed a brief in April supporting Corr’s decision, the Bucks Independence reported.

“We will let our filings speak for themselves,” the attorney general’s press office said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Bucks County did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. A spokesperson for Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, which represents Chevron, declined to comment on the record.

Boutrous said the Supreme Court has held in a “100-year string of cases” that “because air flows across state lines, no one state can apply its own law” to interstate air pollution.

A judge asked whether the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) February decision to scrap its 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding affects the case.

The agency’s announcement said the move eliminated the finding and every federal greenhouse gas standard for vehicles and engines issued after it.

“We don’t think it does, Your Honor, and we don’t think it does because the Clean Air Act never regulated the wrongful conduct for which we seek to hold defendants liable,” Flynn said.

Boutrous argued that Congress gave the EPA the power to decide whether and how to regulate greenhouse gases and that a future administration could choose to regulate them.

“That’s a catch and kill. Like they delegate the authority and then they kill the authority,” a judge responded.

“Well, they’re making a policy decision. I don’t necessarily agree with it,” Boutrous replied. He said the next administration might not agree with it either.

He said the county could petition the EPA or sue it in federal court, and he disagreed when a judge suggested that would be futile.

“Aren’t they just saying that someone selling a product shouldn’t lie about it?” a judge asked Boutrous.

“Well, that is what they’re saying,” he answered. He said the companies reject the claim that they lied.

Pressed on whether fossil fuels contribute to global warming, Boutrous said they do.

“We’re not disputing the science here. The question is: How do we address it? These tort claims are not the way to address it,” he said.

“Pennsylvania law, as good as it is, would rule the world under their theory,” Boutrous added.

After Boutrous pointed to the county’s own fuel use, a judge asked whether he was “making George Clooney’s private jet argument.”

“I’m not sure that’s where I was headed, Your Honor,” Boutrous said. He called tackling climate change “a collective enterprise” that requires international cooperation.

Flynn told the judge who asked about waiting for the Supreme Court that the court had already denied the companies’ request to pause the appeal. He argued that Boulder County’s suit differs because it also targets the companies’ production of fossil fuels.

“Bucks County does not allege that. The only wrongful conduct at issue is the campaign of deception,” Flynn said.

Boutrous told the court that the companies “did urge” a pause and that he still thinks waiting “might make sense,” calling the two cases “exactly the same.”

He also said courts in Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Maryland have rejected similar claims.

In rebuttal, Flynn said the county wants damages for harm from the companies’ past conduct and is not asking to limit emissions.

“Our case is not about regulating emissions. Our case is not seeking to solve climate change. … What our case is about is surviving climate change,” he said.

The judges did not say when they would rule.