INDIANAPOLIS — California has no right to use its own state courts to impose climate change policy on Indiana and the rest of the nation, Attorney General Todd Rokita argues in an 18-state brief filed March 11 in the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Hoosiers should not be ruled by the Left Coast,” Attorney General Rokita said today.

The brief involves a lawsuit by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland that seeks to hold several major fossil fuel companies liable for the costs of global climate change. Attorney General Rokita asks the Supreme Court to overturn a federal appeals court’s decision allowing the cities to keep their lawsuit in state court.

The cities claim in their lawsuit that the companies have broken the “common law” of “public nuisance” by producing and selling fossil fuels.

Attorney General Rokita explains in his brief that federal law gives the defendants a right to have such a common-law public-nuisance claim heard by a federal court, not a state court.

By handing a case of such national scope to California courts, he writes, the federal appeals court “thereby excludes other States from the climate-change policymaking process and threatens to undermine the cooperative federalism model our country has long used to address environmental problems.”