克拉伦斯·托马斯因最高法院近年最大气候案陷入舆论漩涡

Clarence Thomas is in the hot seat for Supreme Court’s biggest climate case in years

2026-10-03T10:30:46.537Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/03/politics/clarence-thomas-climate-change-suncor-boulder

As one of the Supreme Court’s most stalwart conservative and prolific justices, Clarence Thomas’ views on the biggest cases of the day — from guns to race to religion — are rarely in doubt.

Yet when it comes to perhaps the most significant climate change-related case to reach the high court in nearly two decades, environmentalists aren’t yet writing Thomas off, even though he has consistently sided against them.

That’s because Thomas has in recent years staked out positions that align with a Colorado city that is suing Exxon and a Canadian energy company Suncor for damages caused by climate change. The longest-serving current justice has long been skeptical of letting federal law trump state law in other areas, particularly when Congress has not clearly stated its intention to do so.

Lawyers fighting Exxon quoted Thomas and his conservative colleague, Justice Neil Gorsuch, six times in written arguments filed with the justices over the summer. And a series of experts have filed friend-of-the-court briefs debating how Thomas will square the climate case with an opinion he wrote just five months ago rejecting the idea that federal interests could block a lawsuit filed under state law by an Army specialist severely injured in Afghanistan.

“The justices to watch here are very much Justice Gorsuch and Justice Thomas,” Deepak Gupta, an appellate attorney, said at a recent event hosted by the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law Center. “I think they will find the lack of any textual hook for these arguments troubling.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in the case, Suncor Energy v. Boulder, which raises enormous questions about whether big oil can be held accountable by states and cities for planet-warming pollution. Because dozens of other local governments have filed similar suits against energy companies, the court’s decision could have long-term sweeping implications for the oil and gas industry.

Thomas, a former lawyer for the agrochemical industry who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, has in recent years opposed federal environmental regulation of wetlands, balked at government efforts to reduce power plant emissions and signed onto a Supreme Court decision that allowed San Francisco to pump more sewage into the Pacific Ocean. But the climate dispute turns on questions about whether state or federal law controls. And on that question, both Thomas and Gorsuch have often been skeptical of letting the feds take charge.

Environmentalists argue that if Thomas embraces a consistent approach, Boulder should win.

“Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have both written opinions that firmly reject the idea that federal law can shove state law out of the way based on hazy arguments about a law’s intentions or policy consequences,” said Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy at Earthjustice, an environmental group that submitted a brief in the case opposing Suncor and Exxon. “That’s what Suncor’s arguments boil down to in this case, so they should reject this move again here.”

President Donald Trump’s administration is siding with the oil companies in the dispute.

The Supreme Court agreed in February to decide the climate dispute after fossil fuel producers appealed a decision from Colorado’s highest court. The city and county seek billions of dollars in damages for fires and floods they say were caused by rising temperatures. Boulder alleges the oil companies not only contributed to those disasters but misled the public about their role in climate change.

“This litigation is not an attempt to solve climate change; it merely asks that petitioners bear their fair share of local costs incurred in part because of their tortious conduct,” Boulder told the justices.

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Exxon and Suncor counter that regulating climate pollution is inherently a federal issue in part because emissions can waft across state lines. They say that intrinsic understanding preempts — or supersedes — state law. And, they argue, allowing every city in the nation to sue oil companies for damages because of climate change would lead to a chaotic patchwork of approaches to greenhouse gas emissions meant to punish companies.

“The intended effect of these lawsuits is to impose an enormous ‘carbon tax,’ in the form of billions of dollars of damages, that could ‘bankrupt’ the energy industry,” the companies allege.

Boulder counters that neither the Constitution nor the federal law make clear that federal interests should preempt state tort claims. And for a conservative Supreme Court that regularly looks to the specific words in a statute or the Constitution to decide cases, that has often been a persuasive argument in other contexts.

It is also a point that Thomas and Gorsuch have frequently made.

Every position staked out at the oral arguments Monday will be watched especially closely because Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from the case, creating the possibility of a 4-4 split. Alito told Bloomberg News in an interview that he felt it was “prudent” to recuse, given his holdings in energy stocks, but not required. The companies Alito holds are not named parties in the dispute.

An even split, a rare outcome, would uphold the decision by Colorado’s Supreme Court that allowed Boulder’s lawsuit to proceed without setting a precedent.

The justices could also find a more limited way to resolve the case by deciding that it isn’t yet fully baked for Supreme Court review. That outcome would send the case back to state courts — likely with a return ticket to the Supreme Court within a few years.

Thomas wrestled with similar themes in an unrelated decision in April.

In that under-the-radar decision, the court sided with an Army specialist who was severely injured by a suicide bomber on Bagram Air Base and was attempting to sue a military contractor for failing to supervise the Afghan employee who carried out the attack. The contractor argued that the state tort claim was preempted by the idea that running a war is an inherently federal endeavor.

Just like in the climate case, the contractor – and the dissenting justices – warned against allowing individual states to “regulate” that federal conduct.

Writing for a 6-3 majority, Thomas shut down that argument.

“There is no federal preemption in vacuo, without a constitutional text or a federal statute to assert it,” the conservative justice wrote, quoting earlier opinions and pressing the Latin term for “in a vacuum” into service. The contractor, Thomas wrote, “has not identified any provision of law expressly preempting” the suit from the soldier, Winston Hencely.

Boulder cites the case four times in its latest brief, including in the second paragraph.

Another cornerstone majority opinion in the case — written by Gorsuch and joined by Thomas — dealt with Virginia’s ban on mining uranium. Minerals companies argued the ban was preempted by the federal Atomic Energy Act, but the Supreme Court rejected that pitch in a 2019 decision.

“Invoking some brooding federal interest or appealing to a judicial policy preference should never be enough to win preemption of a state law,” Gorsuch wrote. “A litigant must point specifically to ‘a constitutional text or a federal statute’ that does the displacing or conflicts with state law.”

John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN that the views expressed by Thomas and Gorsuch are “standard preemption doctrine,” because they speak to the idea that for federal law to win out it must be rooted in something.

“The question is how to divine whether the Framers or Congress wanted that preemption to be used over an issue area or in a specific case,” said Yoo, a former Thomas clerk who co-authored a brief in the case supporting Exxon’s position. One of those areas, he noted, has traditionally been understood to include foreign policy and national security.

“If they support Suncor over Boulder, I expect it would be both because they believe Congress, in the Clean Air Act, did not want states interfering with national-level pollution – such as greenhouse gases – and because of the significant effects of regulation of the energy industry on our national security and foreign policy,” Yoo said.