Maryland Supreme Court Affirms Dismissal of State Climate Change Suits Against Energy Companies
On March 24, 2026, the Maryland Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the country to affirm a complete dismissal of a climate change public nuisance lawsuit against energy companies for extracting, processing, selling, and promoting fossil fuels. The appeal stemmed from three lawsuits filed by the City of Baltimore, the City of Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County. All three complaints alleged that major energy companies intentionally deceived the public and failed to warn consumers of the effects of burning fossil fuels. The lawsuits brought claims under state law for public nuisance, private nuisance, failure to warn, negligent failure to warn, trespass, design-defect, and violations of the Maryland Consumer Protection Act. Following a lengthy jurisdictional battle, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that the cases should proceed in state court.
Each Maryland trial court granted the defendants' motions to dismiss in full. Led by the Baltimore City Circuit Court, the trial courts held that the plaintiffs' claims were preempted by federal common law and the Clean Air Act, and alternatively that plaintiffs had failed to state plausible claims under Maryland law. The plaintiffs appealed claims other than design-defect and Maryland Consumer Protection Act claims, and the appeals were consolidated before the Maryland Supreme Court.
In a 76-page opinion, the Maryland Supreme Court affirmed the decisions of the trial courts, agreeing that the lawsuits were preempted by federal common law and the federal Clean Air Act. Despite plaintiffs' attempts to cast their lawsuit as one that focused on the defendants' allegedly "deceptive and misleading commercial conduct," not the production or sale of fossil fuels, the court concluded the cases involved global harms due to global conduct, and would necessarily implicate both national and international concerns, "tantamount to regulation of interstate or international pollution." In doing so, the court concurred with the Second Circuit's opinion in City of New York v. Chevron Corp., 993 F.3d 81 (2d Cir. 2021), which rejected similar arguments that commercial deception claims only implicated local concerns, holding instead that "[g]lobal warming presents a uniquely international problem of national concern. It is therefore not well-suited to the application of state law." Similarly here, the Maryland Supreme Court came to the "inescapable conclusion" that the plaintiffs were "seeking to apply Maryland law to regulate conduct that occurs outside their jurisdictional borders," directly conflicting with the Clean Air Act, which "contemplates no role for states reaching out and applying their law in other states." The court expressly noted its disagreement on this point with the Supreme Courts of Hawaii and Colorado, which permitted similar claims to proceed past the pleading stage. While the Hawaii and Colorado courts both deferred to plaintiffs' own framing of the limits of their claims in briefing, the Maryland Supreme Court did not, explaining that "[a]lthough we are required to view the local governments' allegations in the light most favorable to them, we are not required to defer to their characterization of the nature of their claims."
As an independent basis for dismissal, the Maryland Supreme Court also agreed with the trial courts that the plaintiffs' claims failed as a matter of Maryland state law. Citing to a lengthy decision on Maryland public nuisance law issued by the court on the same day, Express Scripts, Inc. v. Anne Arundel County, 353 A.3d 1084 (Md. 2026), the court held that the public nuisance claim failed for multiple reasons, including that Maryland law only recognizes public nuisance as a public action instead of a tort, and that the regulation of global greenhouse gas effects clearly fell far outside local government responsibility. The plaintiffs' private nuisance claims failed because they did not allege an injury different from that suffered by the public. The court determined the plaintiffs' trespass claims—namely that flood water caused by climate change constituted a trespass by the defendants onto the plaintiffs' property—were too attenuated because the defendants did not exercise the requisite control over flood or storm waters. On the failure to warn claims, the court held the defendants did not owe a duty to "warn the entire human race of the effects of climate change." Justice Gould's concurrence went further in explaining why tort law is not an appropriate avenue to address harms stemming from climate change:
No single extraction decision, no single sale of fuel, and no single consumer transaction creates a foreseeable risk of harm to any identifiable person. The harm alleged here could arise only from the aggregate effect of fossil-fuel consumption across the globe and across generations. Where the risk of harm exists at that level of aggregation, the legal tool designed to address it must likewise operate at an aggregate level. Tort law is not up to the task.
As the Maryland Supreme Court's opinion noted, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from energy companies in the climate change lawsuit that the Colorado Supreme Court allowed to proceed, Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The Supreme Court's appeal will include a jurisdictional issue added by the Court, so it is not guaranteed that the Court will reach the merits of the claims or the preemption issues raised by the defendants. However, the Maryland Supreme Court's decision that plaintiffs' claims failed as a matter of state tort law effectively ends the cases irrespective of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Suncor, and provides an avenue for other state supreme courts to fully and finally decide these cases on state law grounds.
