Maryland Supreme Court Shuts Down Local Climate Tort Suits Against Big Oil

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of Maryland dismissed climate change lawsuits brought by Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County against some of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world.

The plaintiffs were not asking the court to regulate emissions. They were not challenging EPA permits. They were not trying to set environmental policy. They were alleging fraud. P. The fossil fuel companies knew their products were causing catastrophic harm, concealed that knowledge for decades, and profited while the planet burned.

The court said none of that matters. In a 5-2 decision, the majority ruled that state law cannot be used to impose liability for global greenhouse gas pollution, no matter how the claims are framed. Federal law displaces and preempts the local governments’ claims. End of story. Case dismissed.

This is an unfortunate ruling. But it is probably the right one under the law as it exists today.

The Court’s Ruling

In Mayor & City Council of Baltimore v. B.P. P.L.C., joined with the Anne Arundel County and Annapolis cases, the Supreme Court of Maryland held that local governments cannot use Maryland tort law to recover climate change damages from 26 oil and gas companies. The court did not say climate change is not real. It did not say fossil fuel companies acted admirably. It did not even say the allegations of deception were trivial. What it said, in essence, was this: whatever the moral case may be, the legal vehicle these local governments chose does not fit the road.

The majority, in an opinion by Justice Booth, treated the lawsuits as efforts to regulate the consequences of global greenhouse gas emissions, even though the plaintiffs framed them as Maryland tort claims for nuisance, trespass, and failure to warn based on alleged deception about the risks of fossil fuels. Once the court characterized the claims that way, the rest of the opinion followed almost mechanically.

Interstate and international pollution are matters of federal law. The Clean Air Act displaced that federal common law. So under the court’s reading of cases like American Electric Power v. Connecticut and International Paper v. Ouellette, Maryland law cannot be used to regulate emissions conduct beyond Maryland’s borders.

This is the kind of case where everyone wants to give their two cents.  Chief Judge Fader, in concurrence, made what is probably the most modest and judicially disciplined point in the whole set of opinions — once the court found the claims preempted, that should have ended the case.  That makes sense, right?  What is the need to decide whether Maryland common law nuisance or failure-to-warn doctrines should stretch to fit climate litigation?  The only good reason for it is that this kills any federal appeal because the court is saying that even if federal law did not block these claims, the plaintiffs still failed under Maryland tort law.  Public nuisance, the court said, has never really been a damages remedy for local governments in Maryland. Private nuisance requires harm different in kind from the public at large. Trespass requires a closer connection between the defendant and the invading force than worldwide emissions and stormwater. And a duty to warn here would become, in the court’s words, a duty to warn the entire human race. That is not tort law. That is social regulation in judicial robes.

There is a strong counterargument, and Justice Killough made it forcefully in dissent. He said, like the plaintiffs have been saying, these are really fraud and deceptive marketing cases, not emissions regulation cases. He accused the majority of accepting the oil companies’ framing of the suits and then dismissing them before discovery could test whether that framing was true. So if the duty alleged is a duty not to deceive, then maybe these cases belong in the familiar lane of state consumer and tort law, not in the more exotic airspace of federal displacement and climate preemption.

But here is the problem for the plaintiffs. The injuries they seek to recover for are still injuries caused by a global atmospheric phenomenon. Their theory of damages still depends on linking alleged deception to more fossil fuel consumption, then to more emissions, then to climate impacts, then to local harm. That chain is a long chain, unfortunately.

So yes, this one hurts if you think fossil fuel companies should answer in court for decades of alleged deception. But it also reads like a court trying, perhaps uneasily, to stay in its lane. The majority’s message is that if this kind of accountability is going to happen, it probably has to come from Congress, the EPA, or perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court, not from state courts applying ordinary tort law to extraordinary global harm.   Truth is, that is probably prudent and fair.

And that brings us to what happens next.

Bottom Line

The Maryland Supreme Court did not bless the fossil fuel industry. It did not say the allegations lack moral force. It said Maryland tort law is the wrong tool for this job.

That is disappointing to many who are sick of what Big Oil is doing.  The plaintiffs wanted to keep this going and put real pressure on oil companies. Instead, they got a jurisdictional one. And in mass tort and public nuisance law, that is often how the story goes. The law can see the fire and still tell you that you brought the wrong hose.

The case is Mayor & City Council of Baltimore v. BP PLC, No. SCM-PET-0052-2025, in the Supreme Court of Maryland.