Things That Belong to It Alone: What the Church Asks of a Court Deciding Who Answers for Climate Damage

On Monday, the Supreme Court opened its new term by asking who should pay for the wildfires, heat and drought that Boulder, Colorado, blames on two oil companies. Most of the two-hour oral argument turned on a narrower question: whether a city or county may bring forth that claim in their own state’s courts at all. That narrower question has a long Catholic answer. The Church calls it subsidiarity, and it demands as much of Washington as it does of Boulder, Colorado.

The News Story

The Supreme Court opened its 2026-27 term on Monday, October 5, with nearly two hours of argument in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case that could decide whether state and local governments may sue oil companies in state court for the local costs of climate change. Justice Samuel Alito recused himself on September 28, after calls to step aside over his holdings in oil-company stock, leaving 8 justices on the bench. It is worth noting that Justice Alito’s disclosures list no shares in either defendant.¹

The city and county of Boulder sued ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy in 2018. They allege the companies knew for decades that their products were warming the planet, misled the public about it, and should help pay for the heat, drought, and wildfire damage Boulder now has to deal with. The 2021 Marshall Fire, the most destructive in Colorado history, caused an estimated $2 billion in damage, and scientists have said climate change was a factor in the fire. After the companies failed to move the suit to federal court, in May 2025 the Colorado Supreme Court let it proceed by a 5-2 vote. ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy appealed that decision.²

Kannon Shanmugam, arguing for the companies, called the suit “an unprecedented effort to use state law to regulate global conduct.” He warned that if it goes forward, “some 90,000 municipalities across the country will have the ability to make national and international energy policy by asking juries to impose catastrophic damages on selected fossil fuel producers.” The Trump administration backed the companies. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris told the Court that “interstate air pollution is an inherently federal area, and Congress hasn’t authorized this suit in the Clean Air Act.”³

Kevin Russell, for Boulder, said states have provided tort remedies for injuries inside their borders “since the founding,” even when the conduct causing them happened elsewhere. He argued that the claims rest on deception and production, which the Clean Air Act does not govern, and said the companies could keep producing as much fuel as the market will bear so long as consumers are properly informed of their potential effects.⁴

The bench appeared divided. Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited four precedents he said make interstate air and water pollution a federal matter, and asked whether a “six-person state jury in Boulder” was any better placed than federal judges to regulate greenhouse gases. Chief Justice John Roberts asked what would happen once “a municipality in every single state” copied Boulder’s pleadings, yet also said he was “not quite sure” what set this case apart from other state suits over out-of-state conduct. Justice Elena Kagan likened it to the tobacco and opioid litigation, calling it “chapter three.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, widely described as a possible deciding vote, pressed Shanmugam on the Clean Air Act’s saving clause, noting that its operative word is “preserve,” which suggests it protects state claims that already existed. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether the Court should take up the case at this early stage at all.⁵

Outlets read the hearing differently. Colorado Newsline reported that the conservative majority “appeared broadly sympathetic” to the companies, while the Daily Caller and others described a split bench. A 4-4 tie would leave the Colorado ruling in place and send Boulder’s case toward trial. Dozens of similar suits are pending nationwide; the companies put the number near 60. Twenty-six states filed a brief supporting the companies, and nineteen state attorneys general backed Boulder. A decision is expected before the term ends in the summer of 2027.⁶

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Answer No One Wanted to Hear

Late in Monday’s argument, Justice Neil Gorsuch put a question to the Trump administration’s lawyer that went straight to the heart of the matter. The Environmental Protection Agency, he noted, has disclaimed the power to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles and “more recently from stationary sources too.” Did that mean, he asked, that “because of the Clean Air Act and Congress not addressing this issue, nobody can sue at all”? Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris answered: “Again, I think that’s correct.”⁷

Hold on to that exchange, because the rest of the hearing circled two concerns, and both were fair. Chief Justice John Roberts asked what happens when “a municipality in every single state” copies Boulder’s complaint. Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked whether a “six-person state jury in Boulder and other juries throughout the country” should be setting the terms of climate policy. On the other side, Boulder’s lawyer reminded the Court that states have provided remedies for injuries inside their borders since the founding of the nation.⁸ Under the thicket of jurisdictional questions, eight justices were arguing about one thing: which level of government answers for a harm that starts everywhere and lands somewhere.

The Church has spent 95 years refining a principle for exactly that question. It’s called subsidiarity, and it cuts in two directions at once.

A Principle With Two Edges

Pope Pius XI gave it its classic form in 1931. “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community,” he wrote, “so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.”⁹

Plenty of people stop reading there, and they miss half the principle. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church draws the other half out of the word itself. Higher societies, it teaches, “must adopt attitudes of help” toward lower ones, and it puts the Latin in parentheses: subsidium.¹⁰ In a Roman army the subsidia were the reserve lines, held back to come forward when the front line was pressed. The Catechism holds both edges together. A higher community must leave a lower one its proper functions, and it “should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”¹¹

St. Paul had the picture long before any pope: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Corinthians 12:21). Each member does what it can do: what it was designed to do. No member is swallowed, and no member is left on its own.

What Belongs to Washington

Start with the companies’ side, because on the facts of this case it carries real weight and it deserves serious consideration. Kannon Shanmugam told the justices that 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions occur outside the United States.¹² Boulder’s harms are local. Their causes are scattered across every tailpipe and furnace on the planet.

St. Thomas Aquinas asked who has the right to make law, and his answer turns on whose good is at stake. To order anything to the common good “belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the viceregent of the whole people,” because “the directing of anything to the end concerns him to whom the end belongs.”¹³ The atmosphere belongs to everybody, Boulder included, and so its ordering belongs first to the authorities whose charge covers everybody.

Pius XI said the same thing from the other side. Leaving lesser matters to lesser bodies frees the State to “do all those things that belong to it alone because it alone can do them: directing, watching, urging, restraining, as occasion requires and necessity demands.”¹⁴ A pollutant that crosses every border is about as clear a case as exists of something only a large authority can adequately address. Pope Benedict XVI carried the logic past national lines. Globalization, he wrote, “requires authority, insofar as it poses the problem of a global common good that needs to be pursued,” and that authority must be “organized in a subsidiary and stratified way.”¹⁵

So Kavanaugh’s worry has a Catholic shape. Fifty sets of state juries, each assigning its own share of a planet’s emissions to a handful of defendants, would be an odd way to direct a global good. Roberts was right to ask how it would work practically speaking. Subsidiarity assigns a task to the level that can actually carry it out in support of the common good, and getting to the courthouse first should not be a deciding factor.

What Belongs to Boulder

Subsidiarity also protects Boulder, and the protection is real. The Compendium says the principle “protects people from abuses by higher-level social authority and calls on these same authorities to help individuals and intermediate groups to fulfill their duties,” because “every person, family and intermediate group has something original to offer to the community.”¹⁶

What Boulder has to offer is close knowledge of its own losses. Kevin Russell told the Court the suit asks the companies to bear their share of local costs, and that its central claim concerns deception and production, which the Clean Air Act was never written to govern. Justice Elena Kagan pointed out that state courts already heard that kind of claim against tobacco companies and opioid makers; she called this “chapter three.”¹⁷ Whether a seller misled the public about its product is a question local juries answer every week.

The Catechism roots this in the way God himself governs. He “entrusts to every creature the functions it is capable of performing, according to the capacities of its own nature,” and “this mode of governance ought to be followed in social life.”¹⁸ Justice Amy Coney Barrett found the same instinct in the statute. The Clean Air Act’s saving clause uses the word “preserve,” she noted, and a saving clause saves something that already exists.¹⁹

The Gap Between Them

Now go back to Gorsuch’s question. If the federal government holds this field, and the federal government has also chosen to leave it largely empty, the administration’s answer leaves no one responsible at any level. The Associated Press reported last week that the EPA repealed its limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas power plants last month.²⁰

Subsidiarity has a name for a higher authority that claims a task and then sets it down: absorption, and the Church considers this wrong. Pius XI reserved certain work to the State so it could do that work “more freely, powerfully, and effectively.” The reservation exists for the sake of the doing. A State that says only it may direct a matter, and then declines to direct it, keeps the reservation and drops the duty. It’s a reserve line that never comes forward, and it is ultimately a dereliction of the duty that the state has in such a matter to promote the common good.

The Compendium is direct and to the point when it discusses this duty. “Responsibility for the environment should also find adequate expression on a juridical level,” it teaches, and it asks the international community to “draw up uniform rules” so that states can control activities that damage the environment.²¹ It also warns that when a higher body steps in for a lower one, the substitution “must not continue any longer than is absolutely necessary.”²² Monday’s hearing showed the reverse arrangement: the higher body stepping back while asking the Court to keep the lower one out.

I can’t tell eight justices how to read the Clean Air Act, and the Church claims no competence to settle that either. Kavanaugh’s “wall of precedent” is real, and the companies may well win.²³ But a Catholic can say what follows from either ruling. If the Court closes these suits or sends them to federal court, Congress inherits a duty it cannot shrug off, because the reason for taking the matter out of Boulder’s hands is that Washington can handle it better and, more importantly, it should handle it. If Boulder wins, the national rule Roberts worried about will still be missing. Either way, subsidiarity points up the ladder. The bodies that alone can direct a global good owe the country an actual policy.

What I’d Watch

Watch the jurisdiction question. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson both suggested the Court may have stepped in too early, and a dismissal on that ground would send the case back to Colorado for trial. Watch Justice Barrett, whose vote may ultimately decide it. Finally, watch Congress. Both sides told the Court that this is ultimately Congress’s call to make, yet they have failed to make it.

As always, we begin with prayer. Pray for the families of Boulder County still rebuilding after the Marshall Fire. Pray for the eight justices weighing this case, and for Justice Alito, who stepped aside. And pray for our lawmakers in Washington, that they take up the work that belongs to them alone.

---

This story turns on subsidiarity: each level of society does the work it can, and the higher levels owe the lower ones real help, never absorption and never abandonment.

One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.

Get it by email

---

Notes

1. ↑ Melissa Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles with energy companies’ bid to block major climate-change lawsuit,” CBS News, October 5, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Supreme Court weighs blockbuster climate fight with billions at stake,” Fox News, October 5, 2026, foxnews.com; Lindsay Whitehurst and Brittany Peterson, “The Supreme Court will hear a major climate change case involving a devastating Colorado wildfire,” Associated Press via 95.5 WSB, October 3, 2026, wsbradio.com.
2. ↑ Whitehurst and Peterson, “Supreme Court will hear”; Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles”; Simon August, “Supreme Court Split On Making Oil Companies Pay For Climate Change, Oral Arguments Suggest,” Daily Caller, October 5, 2026, dailycaller.com; Chase Woodruff, “U.S. Supreme Court justices appear skeptical of allowing Boulder climate lawsuit to proceed,” Colorado Newsline, October 5, 2026, coloradonewsline.com.
3. ↑ Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles”; August, “Supreme Court Split”; Woodruff, “Justices appear skeptical.”
4. ↑ Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles”; Woodruff, “Justices appear skeptical”; August, “Supreme Court Split.”
5. ↑ Fox News, “Supreme Court weighs blockbuster climate fight”; Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles”; August, “Supreme Court Split”; Woodruff, “Justices appear skeptical.”
6. ↑ Woodruff, “Justices appear skeptical”; August, “Supreme Court Split”; Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles”; Fox News, “Supreme Court weighs blockbuster climate fight.”
7. ↑ August, “Supreme Court Split.”
8. ↑ Woodruff, “Justices appear skeptical”; August, “Supreme Court Split”; Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles.”
9. ↑ Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno: On Reconstruction of the Social Order (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 1931), no. 79, vatican.va.
10. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 186, vatican.va.
11. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1883, vatican.va.
12. ↑ August, “Supreme Court Split.”
13. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90, a. 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
14. ↑ Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 80.
15. ↑ Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate: On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, June 29, 2009), no. 57, vatican.va.
16. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 187.
17. ↑ Quinn, “Supreme Court wrestles”; Woodruff, “Justices appear skeptical.”
18. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1884.
19. ↑ August, “Supreme Court Split.”
20. ↑ Whitehurst and Peterson, “Supreme Court will hear.”
21. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 468.
22. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 188.
23. ↑ August, “Supreme Court Split.”

Books Cited

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)