Town of Carrboro v. Duke Energy Corp.

A North Carolina Superior Court dismissed the Town of Carrboro’s climate lawsuit against the public utility company Duke Energy Corporation (Duke Energy). The court described Carrboro’s suit as alleging that Duke Energy “misled the American public for decades about the effects of fossil fuel consumption on the environment” and that “as a result, the public transition to alternative forms of energy was delayed,” which materially contributed to climate change harms suffered by the Town. The court concluded that Carrboro had standing to bring the action but found that the Town’s claims were nonjusticiable under the North Carolina Supreme Court’s three-factor test for the political question doctrine. First, the court found that energy policy was “textually committed” to branches of government other than the judiciary and that issues regarding fossil fuel-related emissions were delegated to the Utilities Commission and to the Department of Environmental Quality. Second, the court found courts “lack the capacity to resolve … through traditional methods of judicial adjudication” the “multitude of unanswerable questions raised by Carrboro’s claims and theory of recovery,” including questions regarding “the unknowable issue of precisely how much influence Duke Energy’s alleged acts of deception had on energy choices made by individual members of the American public.” The court also found that Carrboro “ignores the impacts of fossil fuel-related emissions by billions of persons in other countries throughout the world.” The court wrote that “[t]he very nature of carbon emissions existing as gases that are diffused throughout the atmosphere across the globe makes any attempt to attribute a specific source of emissions to a specific climate change-related impact a futile endeavor.” The court also found persuasive the application of the political question doctrine in three climate cases in other jurisdictions: <a href="https://www.climatecasechart.com/collections/native-village-of-kivalina-v-exxonmobil-corp-_413ab5">Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp.</a>, <a href="https://www.climatecasechart.com/document/california-v-general-motors-corp_9085">California v. General Motors Corp.</a>, and <a href="https://www.climatecasechart.com/collections/city-of-charleston-v-brabham-oil-co-_a07653">City of Charleston v. Brabham Oil Co.</a> Although the court dismissed the case under the political question doctrine, the court also concluded that it was likely that “some portion” of Carrboro’s claims were preempted by federal law.