Two of the Supreme Court’s stalwart conservative justices railed against the Court’s majority for not allowing Alabama and a coalition of Republican-led states to step in and attempt to block dozens of climate-change lawsuits filed by states led by Democrats against energy companies.

California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have filed over two dozen lawsuits against Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron and other oil companies seeking to hold them responsible for deceiving customers about the risks posed by fossil fuels. The particularities of the lawsuits vary, as each raises a set of allegations arising under the laws of the relevant state.

In general though, the lawsuits charge that the companies have known for decades that greenhouse gas emissions from use of fossil fuels would contribute to climate change, and that the companies failed to warn consumers and used deceptive marketing practices that maximized profit, tricked consumers, and harmed the environment.

California was the first to file one of these lawsuits in 2023. At the time, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the energy industry has been lying to citizens for over half a century. Newsom also said oil companies should be held accountable for “wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells.”

Alabama and 18 other Republican-run states sought to block the climate change lawsuits on the basis that California and the others were unconstitutionally attempting to dictate interstate energy policy beyond their own borders via the use of tort lawsuits. The states argue that this practice infringes on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate interstate emissions. The group requested to file a complaint directly with the Supreme Court as a dispute between states themselves, invoking the Court’s rarely-used original jurisdiction.

California and the other defendant states challenged the filing and argues that the arguments Alabama and the others were seeking to raise could be raised by the energy companies in the climate change lawsuits themselves. In its brief, the California group argued that “Alabama’s desire to protect those private defendants from liability is not the kind of sovereign concern that warrants an exercise of this court’s original jurisdiction.”