During this month’s New York Climate Week (NYCW), the largest annual U.S.-based climate summit in the world, the activists made clear their strategy for combating American oil and gas companies: climate lawfare. This lawfare is now taking center stage in Boulder County’s lawsuit against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil, soon to be heard by the Supreme Court. Eight years after the original filing of Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, the left-wing’s dream of systematically taking down U.S. energy companies could become reality if climate lawfare efforts prevail in federal, state, and local courts across the country.
What makes the Suncor case different from conventional climate lawfare is that the plaintiff is a county, namely Colorado’s Boulder County. Only 40 total U.S. climate cases have ever been brought by state or local governments against energy firms; the majority are brought by non-government plaintiffs. Overall, there have been an estimated 2,078 U.S. climate-related cases between 1986 and 2025, accounting for roughly 58% of all climate change litigation worldwide in that time span.
Yet, there is little precedent for Suncor v. Boulder. It is the first of its kind: a so-called climate accountability case brought before the Supreme Court. If successful, this case would open the door to other accountability cases, which enable local governments to sue energy companies for their supposed role in contributing to natural disasters.
The legal demise of American energy infrastructure may seem far-fetched, but a campaign to indoctrinate American judges is laying the groundwork for it. Training sessions from radical organizations, such as the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), could compromise the neutrality of the judges who attended them. There are no records of judges in lower courts in the Suncor v. Boulder case undergoing climate training from CJP. However, CJP’s subtle influence on federal judges more broadly is now under congressional scrutiny. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating CJP over credible allegations that it is “predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs alleging … [harm from] fossil-fuel products,” according to the committee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH).
Not only in the American legal system is climate lawfare potentially affecting consequential rulings. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been subject to similar influence campaigns. At NYCW, I attended a UN General Assembly-endorsed event in which the organizers, the Future Generations Tribunal, discussed soliciting a new group of plaintiffs in anti-fossil fuel lawfare. The organization’s magnum opus was a 104-page report containing testimony from 18 global “witnesses” sent directly to the ICJ as evidence in the court’s deliberations on a climate change advisory opinion. Less than a year after the report’s submission, the ICJ issued a landmark opinion in 2025 stating that all nations must be held accountable for their greenhouse gas emissions.
At another NYCW event I attended, I heard about another insidious lawfare strategy. A handful of plaintiffs from The Youth Climate Case for Japan, who are suing ten thermal energy companies in Japan, boasted about their popularity in New York. They expressed their desire to recruit other potential plaintiffs, a lawfare domino effect.
The climate activists’ blueprint now faces its biggest test case, with high stakes. If their strategy is vindicated by a favorable Supreme Court ruling in Suncor v. Boulder County, climate radicals will pursue these tactics even more aggressively, on a nationwide scale. Never mind that elected officials largely support some degree of fossil fuel use: The self-appointed “voice of the people,” climate alarmists, prefer to take the power—literally—away from the American people.
Climate delusions combined with well-organized, well-funded lawfare campaigns are a dangerous concoction—one capable of corrupting justice. The American people must hold strong against the impending hurricane of climate lawfare. U.S. founding principles and future prosperity depend on it. Case closed.