In a case of first impression, a North Carolina court has dismissed a climate lawsuit brought by the town of Carrboro against a public utility company, finding that the matters raised in the claim were not justiciable or, in other words, inappropriate for determination by a court.
Carrboro is a North Carolina town with about 20,000 residents. In late 2024, it filed a civil lawsuit against Duke Energy Corporation, the owner of numerous electric utilities, and alleged in Carrboro’s claim to be “one of the largest electric, natural gas and energy companies on Earth”.
In the introduction to its complaint, Carrboro described the thrust of its case as targeting Duke Energy’s alleged “knowing deception campaign concerning the causes and dangers posed by the climate crisis.” In essence, Carrboro alleged that Duke Energy had misled the American public over several decades about matters relating to climate change, to slow the transition toward renewable energy sources. It sued Duke Energy in nuisance and negligence, seeking damages in relation to Carrboro’s alleged losses. For example, it sued for money spent to repair roads damaged by alleged climate-induced weather events, and the costs of providing stormwater protection infrastructure.
The case came before a North Carolina court earlier this year when Duke moved to dismiss the action for lack of “subject matter jurisdiction”. Duke argued, among other things, that Carrboro’s claim was “nonjusticiable” under the American “political question” doctrine. This doctrine rests on the separation of powers and holds that certain matters are to be dealt with by other branches of government instead of determination by a court.
In allowing the motions to dismiss, the North Carolina court applied a test that considered the statutory context of climate issues in North Carolina, the absence of judicially discernable adjudicative standards, and the necessity of making policy determinations to the adjudication of the dispute. Of interest, in considering the absence of adjudicative standards, the court found that the common law doctrines of nuisance and negligence invoked by Carrboro did not provide the court with a “manageable framework” to decide the climate-related issues raised.
Particularly, the court found that Carrboro’s case was not a traditional “environmental pollution” case; the court highlighted causation issues that were not present in lawsuits that connected “specifically identified polluters” to “individual victims”. Among other things, the court found that “climate change is non-linear” and “the result of the collective impact of acts by literally billions of unrelated emitters dispersed throughout the globe”. Similarly, 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 North Carolina court also found that the information available to global actors “concerning the potential dangers or benefits of fossil fuels and their link to climate change” was “impossible to quantify”, such that courts “lack the capacity to resolve these issues through traditional methods of judicial adjudication”.
The Carrboro lawsuit is of interest to those following climate litigation, particularly as relating to private actors, as it represents a novel framing of climate-related complaints within traditional private law doctrines. In the Canadian context, courts may apply a similar doctrine of justiciability, which is used to bar proceedings that are better suited for determination by other branches of government. However, in public law cases, we have seen Canadian courts gradually move toward a greater acceptance of the justiciability of climate-related claims, including because of more flexible views of causation. The Carrboro case teaches that, at least in the context of how the town’s claims were framed there, a court is likely to scrutinize how traditional private law doctrines may or may not be equipped to handle the complexities of climate-related litigation.
