Traditionally, public nuisance was legal housekeeping for concrete local problems everyone could see and smell — blocked roads, a tent city and drug den that threatened safety, factories dumping waste into a river. Valid public nuisance claims addressed specific conditions in a specific place, with a clear link between what the defendant did and what neighbors suffered.
Boulder and its allies want to turn that history on its head by treating global climate change itself as the public nuisance and roping in any company that contributes to climate change, starting with the companies that produce fossil fuels
