WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 (mtf.news) — Former Attorney General Bill Barr warned Wednesday Barr that a wave of state and local climate lawsuits seeking potentially crippling damages from American energy producers would raise costs for households, freeze capital spending and hand market share to state-owned rivals in China and Russia if the Supreme Court allows the cases to proceed.
“A lot of this is voodoo economics and voodoo analysis of trying to extract the responsibility of one company from this very complex phenomenon,” Barr said at a forum in Washington hosted by mtf.news. “They’re going to [be] making decisions like, well, who contributes more to global warming? The Brazilian deforestation programs, or Suncor and their production of oil and gas… or the China, hundreds and hundreds of their coal plants burning dirty coal.”
The Supreme Court will hear Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County on Oct. 5. The case asks whether federal law bars state-law claims seeking damages for injuries allegedly caused by interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions.
Former Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio who co-leads Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, said the litigation threat falls hardest on the communities Democrats say they want to lift up. Energy, he said, “is the economic backbone of the United States.” The Department of Energy says the country needs about 5,000 miles of new transmission lines; only 6% of that was built in 2024, he said.
“You can’t run a modern-day economy with that level of bureaucratic stagnation,” Ryan said.
One state cannot set climate policy for the nation
Barr said “several dozen” jurisdictions have brought “an avalanche of cases” under state tort and consumer-protection law, seeking damages tied not just to local emissions but to worldwide production and sale of fossil fuels. Puerto Rico, he said, is seeking $100 billion over a single hurricane. One study published in Nature put potential liability as high as $28 trillion.
The objective, Barr said, is to raise the cost of fossil fuels “so that it’s prohibitively expensive and drive it out of the marketplace,” and ultimately “force the companies into bankruptcy.” A first victory “will become a template and will trigger more and more of these cases.”
“The body politic has not decided to destroy our fossil fuel industry,” Barr said. “It is still the foundation of prosperity in the world, and we need it now. And for them to try to be destroying it when they can’t get that through the political process and use the courts is what’s at stake here.”
He identified three constitutional problems: one state cannot bind others on a transboundary phenomenon; a state generally cannot apply its own law to activity that occurred elsewhere; and climate policy is preempted by the federal government’s foreign-affairs power.
Michael Johannessen12 min read“This tax, this carbon tax that they’re proposing, only applies to private companies because by definition you cannot sue a state entity,” Barr said. “The Chinese oil and gas industry won’t be paying this tax if it came about. The Russian won’t. The handicap will be the Western oil and gas industry.”
On causation, he returned to the same theme. “To what extent can you really trace a hurricane in Puerto Rico to something I did? It’s as I say, it’s voodoo. It’s garbage, and they just throw this mud on the wall.”
Jennifer Hernandez, a partner at Holland & Knight and a board member of the Breakthrough Institute, said “if ever there was a major federal question, if ever there was a major question doctrine, this is it,” Hernandez said. “It’s a tort system that pays no attention at all to civil rights.”
She described the modern environmental-advocacy funding model as “rich people’s cliques. Think middle school.”
Barr said the discovery process itself is part of the strategy. “The process is the punishment,” he said. Companies facing suits nationwide cannot “allocate your capital and decide on sensible energy investments when you have this kind of litigation hanging over you.”
Energy costs, grid capacity and national security
Ryan framed the case as an affordability and industrial-capacity problem, not a debate over whether climate change is real. Poorer neighborhoods in California, New York and Boston, he said, “are the very communities that are getting blocked affordable energy.” Natural gas, not regulation, drove the largest U.S. CO2 reduction from 2005 to 2019 when it displaced coal, he said.
“We need permitting reform,” Ryan said. “If Congress doesn’t say we’re going to agree on pipelines and we’re going to agree on transmission lines… you can’t sue forever.” In a lightning-round prediction at the close of the program, he said: “That’s interstate, so federal must rule.”
Leslie A. Beavers, a retired Air Force brigadier general and former acting Department of Defense chief information officer, said foreign adversaries benefit from the domestic fight. Asked what Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin make of the litigation, she said: “I think they like it because that gives them the opportunity to leapfrog forward.”
“The more we fight internally, and the more we throw reason out the door… the more we give the rest of the world the opportunity to take over and to dictate to us how we are going to have to live,” Beavers said. She later predicted “federal law prevailing.”
Phil Goldberg, who works with the National Association of Manufacturers’ Manufacturers Accountability Project, said the manufacturing community is “all in” on using energy more efficiently. The issue, he said, is “trying to decide climate policy in state courts on a case-by-case basis, rather than have a uniform federal response.” Twenty-six states have filed briefs arguing Colorado cannot dictate the law inside their borders, he said.
The Supreme Court granted review in February and added a second question: whether it has statutory and Article III jurisdiction to hear the case. A decision is expected by the end of the term in June 2027.
