The Supreme Court hears a case in which the Colorado locality seeks to make energy more expensive. Americans want to build again. We had become all too good at stopping things—pipelines, power plants, transmission lines, the occasional bridge. As one activist recently confessed, “It is easier to mobilize communities to block something than it is to build something.”
Lately, however, a broad consensus has emerged in favor of making it easier to build, and governors from both parties have pressed Congress to clear the way for critical energy infrastructure projects. An “abundance movement” has formed around the idea that the country needs more, not less, energy. After a decade of flat demand, American electricity use—driven by artificial intelligence and a revival of domestic manufacturing—is setting records. By the end of the decade, data centers might draw 12% of the nation’s power.
Enter Boulder County, Colo. , which has gone to court to make energy production more costly. Claiming that decades of producing and selling fossil fuels should make energy companies liable for the wildfires, floods and droughts of a warming planet, the county sued Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil in state court under Colorado’s nuisance law. The Supreme Court will hear the case, Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, on Monday. A damages award the size Boulder seeks would operate as a massive retroactive tax on production, imposed not by Congress or any elected official but by whichever local jury a plaintiff can persuade.
This isn’t a quarrel about whether the climate is changing. It is about who will decide how much energy we produce and what it will cost. The drive to build is, at bottom, an effort to haul energy out of the litigation thicket. With rare and fragile agreement, America has decided to build again. It would be a strange moment for the high court to let one county make that harder.
Source: Wall Street Journal US Business · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing