The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the remand to Illinois state court of the City of Chicago’s climate deception lawsuit asserting state and local law claims against fossil fuel industry defendants. The Seventh Circuit agreed with the district court that the requirements for federal officer removal were not met. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari in <a href="https://www.climatecasechart.com/collections/board-of-county-commissioners-of-boulder-county-v-suncor-energy-u-s-a-inc-_be5980">Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc. v. Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County</a>, the Seventh Circuit stated that “[s]uits like this one have proliferated all over the country and many raise difficult and novel legal questions,” but that “this one does not.” Instead the Seventh Circuit characterized Chicago as having “defined its claims narrowly” to seek compensation only for harm resulting from the increase in fossil fuel consumption attributable to the defendants’ alleged misrepresentations regarding the effects of fossil fuel emissions on global warming. Based on this theory of liability, the court found that the work the defendants undertook “acting under” a federal officer was “too attenuated from Chicago’s claims to support removal at this time.” That work included providing fossil fuels to the military during and after World War II, operating the Elk Hills Reserve oil field in California on behalf of and alongside the Navy, supplying and managing the federal government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and receiving federal oil leases for the Outer Continental Shelf and onshore federal lands. The Seventh Circuit found that the connection between the war-related fossil fuel production and alleged false advertising decades later was “tenuous, remote, or peripheral” and that even more recent federal work was “simply too attenuated” to satisfy the federal officer removal statute’s requirement that conduct at issue be “relating to” acts performed under color of federal office. The Seventh Circuit noted that it was not writing “on a clean slate,” given that every circuit court of appeal to consider a similar question in climate deception suits had found that federal officer removal was unwarranted and the Supreme Court had cited two of these decisions favorably in its 2026 decision on federal officer removal, Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish.

Lawsuit alleging that fossil fuel industry defendants' deception regarding the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from their products resulted in harmful climate change impacts to Chicago.

City of Chicago v. BP p.l.c.

<p>This entry was provided by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Please see the terms of use for citation and licensing of third party data.</p>

Seventh Circuit Affirmed that Fossil Fuel Defendants Could Not Invoke Federal Officer Removal Statute to Move City of Chicago’s Climate Suit to Federal Court

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Seventh Circuit Affirmed that Fossil Fuel Defendants Could Not Invoke Federal Officer Removal Statute to Move City of Chicago’s Climate Suit to Federal Court

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Finance