The Supreme Court spent Monday morning on a lawsuit from Boulder, Colorado, against two energy companies. The city and the county want money for heat, lost snowpack, wildfires, and floods, which they blame on the sale of oil and gas and on what they call a campaign to mislead the public about it. Buried in the pile of friend-of-the-court papers is a brief from two of the country’s main gun-control groups. They do not claim a well in Boulder County. They claim a theory. If a city can sue a lawful industry in state court for the downstream harm of a legal product, the door they have been pounding on since 2005 swings open again.
The case on the table
Boulder filed in 2018. The defendants are Suncor and Exxon Mobil. The claims are the old common-law set: nuisance, conspiracy, unjust enrichment, and deception. The pitch is that the companies knew, sold the product anyway, and should pay for the local damage. A Colorado court let the case proceed. The companies asked the high court to stop it. Argument was Monday. A ruling is expected by late June.
They are not alone in the dock. More than sixty state and local governments have filed dozens of suits on the same idea. About two dozen are still alive. None has gone to trial. The chief justice told Boulder’s lawyer that if the city wins, a municipality in every state will file the next day. The companies’ lawyer put the number higher. Some ninety thousand municipalities, he said, would be in a position to set national energy policy by asking a jury for catastrophic damages.
The legal question is narrower than the weather. Does federal law, including the Clean Air Act and the Constitution’s limits on one state regulating the rest of the country, bar a city from using its own tort law to collect for greenhouse gases burned all over the world? Justice Alito sat out. His wife owns stock. The government filed on the companies’ side.
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— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) October 6, 2026
Why the gun groups are in the file
The two groups filed together. Their brief connects this case, in their own words, to their litigation against gun manufacturers for conduct they say is a public nuisance at common law. The third large gun-control group, the one funded by the New York billionaire, did not join. The two that did were not confused about the docket. They were briefing the precedent.
The history they are trying to reopen is not obscure. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, cities sued gun makers and dealers on the same nuisance theory Boulder is using now. The product was legal. The sale was legal. The harm was what a third party did with it, or the cost the city said it bore because the product existed. The point of the suits was not a single bad actor. It was to make the industry pay for the use of its goods, and to write the rules of the trade from a plaintiff’s table when the legislature would not.
Congress shut that down in 2005. The statute shields manufacturers and sellers of lawful firearms from suits over the criminal misuse of their products, with narrow exceptions for a knowing violation of the law, a defective product, and a breach of contract. The cities called it a special favor. The industry called it the end of a coordinated attempt to bankrupt a lawful trade in state court. For twenty years the gun groups have treated that statute as the obstacle, and they have looked for a crack: a state public-nuisance law written to get around it, a reading of the exceptions wide enough to drive a city lawsuit through, a Supreme Court willing to say the old common-law theory is still good.
What they think they will get
They are not after a share of Boulder’s judgment. They are after a sentence.
If the Court says a city may haul a national industry into state court for the remote, cumulative harm of a lawful product, sold legally, used as intended, the gun groups have their paragraph. Fossil fuels are lawful. Firearms are lawful. Both are sold across state lines. Both are blamed by the same cities for public costs the city did not incur as a customer. A holding that deception-plus-nuisance survives federal preemption in the oil cases is a holding those groups will cite the next morning in a gun case. They have already said so, in the brief.
If the Court goes the other way, and says one city’s tort law cannot regulate a national market in a lawful product, the oil companies get the shield the gun makers already have, and the gun groups lose the theory they have been trying to revive. That is why the oil industry has spent the last two years asking state legislatures for a liability bar copied from the 2005 gun statute. The two fights are the same fight. One industry got the statute. The other is waiting on the Court. The gun groups picked the side that keeps the lawsuit alive.
The fit is not perfect, and they know it. Congress wrote a specific shield for firearms and did not write one for oil. A win for Boulder does not repeal 2005. It gives the groups a Supreme Court description of public nuisance that they will carry into every state that has tried to punch a hole in the shield, and into the argument that the shield itself should be read as narrowly as a court can stand. A loss pins them to the statute they have failed to repeal.
Anti-Gunners Reveal Motive Behind Their Under-The-Radar Involvement In Supreme Court Climate Case https://t.co/j2vD9rB9hy via @dailycaller
— Peter Pesola (@VoluntaryOnly) October 6, 2026
The relationship is the strategy
Climate and the Second Amendment have nothing to do with each other. The lawsuit does. Both campaigns want a city, not a legislature, to decide what a lawful industry must pay for the acts of people who are not in the courtroom. Both depend on a judge agreeing that the sale of a legal product is a nuisance if the seller knew the product would be used in the world. The gun groups have been losing that argument in Congress for two decades. They have now filed it, under another name, in the first case the Supreme Court has taken on the oil suits.
Monday’s argument was about snowpack and jurisdiction. The brief in the stack was about the next case, the one with a manufacturer’s name on it and a crime committed by someone else. That is what they think they will get. A citation. And a theory that survived.