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As fossil fuel giants face mounting lawsuits for allegedly deceiving the public about the harm they knew their products would cause to the climate, Republican lawmakers just borrowed a tactic from gun lobbyists’ playbook, proposing sweeping federal immunity for oil and gas companies and limiting compensation for communities struggling with the local costs of climate disasters.

The effort could also block all state-level regulations of greenhouse gases, a sweeping deregulatory effort that some legal experts said was unconstitutional.

The GOP lawmakers behind the plan together received more than $9.5 million from the oil and gas industry over their careers. Their legislation would deliver one of the fossil fuel lobby’s top policy priorities and kill climate lawsuits before they can reach trial.

The new bill, the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, introduced last week by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), would shield some of the world’s largest oil companies from laws and lawsuits that could make them pay billions of dollars in climate damages, nearly half a century after Exxon scientists first predicted the dangers of burning fossil fuels.

The legislation comes a little more than a year after oil and gas lobbyists first reportedly pressured Congress to grant their industry legal immunity. Gaining that legal shield has become an industry priority before the midterm elections.

In January, the American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil and gas trade association, listed protecting oil companies from climate superfund laws and lawsuits as a top policy target in its 2026 agenda. The trade group has been directly lobbying Congress on the issue since at least last year.

In recent years, dozens of state, local, and tribal governments have brought lawsuits against major oil companies, including Exxon, Shell, Chevron, and BP. The suits point to growing evidence that the companies deceived the public about the “potentially catastrophic events” their products would cause and argue that they should help pay for the damages. Some states have also introduced climate superfund bills that would require oil companies to contribute to the costs of climate adaptation and recovery, akin to the federal Superfund program that makes polluters pay to clean up their environmental pollution. Vermont and New York have passed such bills into law.

The Stop Climate Shakedowns Act would make those efforts moot by dismissing pending climate accountability lawsuits, voiding climate superfund laws, and preventing any new laws or lawsuits from imposing climate liability on fossil fuel companies in the future.

According to a press release from Hageman, the legislation would protect fossil fuel operations from “leftist legal crusades” that she claims threaten energy affordability.

“Energy security is national security, and we will not self-sabotage our critical industries with a cascade of costly lawsuits and extreme penalties that jeopardize American drilling,” she said.

The other major industry to secure sweeping legal immunity from Congress was gun manufacturers, which two decades ago largely stripped gun violence victims of their ability to access the courts, thanks to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Legal protections for the oil industry would similarly leave little recourse for communities competing for dwindling resources amid spiraling climate costs, say some legal experts and advocates.

The federal legislation comes as a growing number of Republican lawmakers are advancing state bills to block climate liability for fossil fuel companies and other greenhouse-gas polluters. Utah was the first state to pass its bill into law in March, followed by Tennessee and Oklahoma. Another bill in Iowa is awaiting the governor’s signature. Similar legislation was introduced in Louisiana, although its sponsor has since said the bill would need to be revised for clarity.

While it is unlikely that the federal liability shield would garner the 60 Senate votes needed to pass, a similar provision could be added to must-pass legislation in the future. The effort signals the fossil fuel industry’s increasing desperation to keep the lawsuits it is facing out of trial, said Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law and senior fellow for climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

“If there is no basis for the claims, why is immunity necessary?” he said.

“A Blank Check For Oil Companies To Lie”

State and local officials have brought climate lawsuits under state common law and consumer fraud statutes, modeling them after cases that forced tobacco and opioid companies to pay billions of dollars and change their advertising practices.

If the federal immunity legislation passes, said Richard Wallsgrove, an associate professor and director of the environmental law clinic at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, it would be a “slap in the face for people who are suffering from climate change, to say that they don’t even get a day in court.”

A lawsuit brought last year by Hawai‘i Attorney General Anne Lopez, for example, aims to recover the costs of local climate-fueled disasters across the state, which last month experienced massive flooding that required hundreds of rescues and cost at least $1 billion in damages. Hawai‘i’s case also seeks to make the oil and gas companies disgorge any profits they made through deceptive conduct in violation of state consumer protection law and cease any deceptive conduct going forward.

Maui, which in 2023 suffered one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history, and Honolulu have their own lawsuits against the oil companies — those suits are now moving toward trial.

Those cases against oil companies would be dismissed if Hageman and Cruz’s bill were to pass. The federal bill prohibits any “relief for alleged past or future harm resulting directly or indirectly from climate change, including because of marketing, alleged misrepresentation, alleged failure to warn, or any other speech.” It claims that efforts to impose such liability would “threaten to destabilize entire industries that are lawfully engaging in commerce in the United States.”

Yet “our entire economic system depends on us holding companies accountable if they deceive consumers,” said Wallsgrove. Many of the lawsuits argue that oil companies’ deception about their products not only delayed action to address the climate crisis, but skewed the energy market in favor of fossil fuels.

Even if it can be proven in a court of law that oil companies deceived consumers and the public in violation of “laws that apply to every other industry, [the bill] would say oil companies get off scot-free,” Wallsgrove said. “It’s a blank check for oil companies to lie as much as they want.”

Some climate accountability lawsuits rely more heavily on climate attribution science, which can link extreme weather events like floods, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and heat waves to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions from specific companies. That field is growing, but the new federal bill claims it “lack[s] scientific credibility.”

Such language attempts to “legislate scientific findings out of existence,” said Delta Merner, lead scientist and associate director of the climate accountability campaign at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that supports the state climate lawsuits.

Regardless of the industry’s efforts, “Hawai‘i and other states and localities across the country will continue to pursue legal avenues to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their deceptive marketing in misrepresenting the extent of the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate-related harms, and we remain committed to using every legal tool available to protect our communities and environment,” Hawai‘i’s Department of the Attorney General wrote in an emailed statement.

The Oil Money Behind The Bill

The lawmakers backing immunity for oil and gas companies have received significant donations from the industry. Hageman’s bill was cosponsored by Reps. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Barry Moore (R-Ala.), and Mike Collins (R-Ga.). Together with Hageman, these congressmen received at least $1.8 million in total campaign donations from the oil and gas industry over their careers.

Cruz’s companion bill in the Senate was cosponsored by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ariz), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Ted Budd (R-N.C.). Along with Cruz, who was the top beneficiary of oil and gas industry campaign donations between 2023 and 2024, the senators have received more than $7.6 million throughout their careers.

In a statement on Monday, Cruz railed against “radical environmental groups” for “using meritless lawsuits to bankrupt our energy industry, kill good paying jobs, and drive up the cost of electricity and gasoline for hardworking families.” At a congressional hearing last year on “The Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance,” he claimed without evidence that China was funding the climate lawsuits brought by U.S. communities.

Notably, Hageman and Cruz’s bill defines protected energy as “crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, or coal,” with no mention of renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

The two lawmakers previously told E&E News that they “hadn’t heard from” oil industry groups on the legislation. But those same groups were quoted in Hageman’s press release on the new bill.

“We thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers,” said American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers in a joint statement.

Hageman and Cruz’s offices did not respond to a request for comment on whether they were in contact with the groups about the bill.

The bill would provide a climate liability shield not only to companies but also to individuals, partnerships, government entities, and trade associations accused of climate deception. That includes the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association that is a defendant in several of the climate lawsuits.

Hageman and Cruz’s legislation is also backed by a group of Republican attorneys general, who in June asked then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to recommend Congress provide a “liability shield” for oil companies, citing firearm manufacturers’ gun-violence immunity as an example. The attorneys general are all members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a political advocacy group that has received funding from several fossil fuel defendants in the climate lawsuits, including Exxon, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute, as recently as 2024.

Trump, Leonard Leo, And Constitutional Questions

The constellation of players working to kill liability efforts against the oil industry also includes the Trump administration and right-wing judicial activists like Leonard Leo, known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority.

Most of the Republican state bills blocking climate laws and lawsuits have been part of a coordinated effort by groups tied to Leo’s dark money political network, according to a recent ProPublica investigation. Leo-linked groups have also been top funders of the Republican Attorneys General Association.

After promising the oil industry favors in exchange for campaign donations, Trump directed his Department of Justice to stop state climate laws and lawsuits. Federal prosecutors tried to deliver, filing preemptive lawsuits against Michigan and Hawai‘i state officials to stop them from suing oil companies. Both states brought their climate cases anyway, and the Justice Department’s lawsuits have been dismissed by federal judges.

The Trump administration has also sued to block New York and Vermont’s climate superfund laws, and those cases are pending in federal court.

Climate accountability lawsuits face another challenge: A petition by oil companies to throw out a case brought by Boulder, Colorado, is currently being considered by the Supreme Court. Backed by both the Trump administration and Leo-tied groups, the petition argues that such state and local lawsuits are preempted by the federal Clean Air Act and by “our constitutional structure.” Justice Samuel Alito, who owns thousands of dollars in stock in oil companies, took part in the decision to hear the case.

The new federal climate immunity bill appears to back that argument in a section on “federal preemption,” which would go even further to prevent any state-level regulation of greenhouse gases and climate change. According to Parenteau at Vermont Law and Graduate School, the measure is “an unconstitutional assertion of authority Congress does not possess.”

The section states that “The regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is and continues to be governed exclusively by Federal law and regulated by Federal agencies with authority delegated to those Federal agencies by Congress.” That provision is “stunningly broad and could be used to attack a broad swath of state climate laws,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, in an email.

“Since 1970, the Clean Air Act has clearly allowed states to regulate air pollution from stationary sources more stringently than the EPA; this would break with a statutory rule that has been accepted for more than half a century,” he added.

However, that language could be rendered meaningless if the Trump administration succeeds in its plan to overturn the basis of the Clean Air Act.

Ultimately, even if the federal climate liability shield were to pass, the law could face constitutional challenges for invading state sovereignty and the constitutional separation-of-powers doctrine, said Wallsgrove at the University of Hawai‘i. He wonders what that says about legislative deference to fossil fuel interests.

“To do this just so your political donors in the oil industry don’t have to worry about these lawsuits seems like a troubling reason to abandon constitutional principles,” he said.

Editor’s note: ExxonKnews is a reporting project of the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), an advocacy and watchdog group that provides research and tools to help communities hold oil and gas corporations accountable. CCI’s political staff are opposing immunity for the fossil fuel industry, but had no role in producing this story.

Super Typhoon Sinlaku is slamming the Northern Marianas Islands with life-threatening winds, rain, and floods. The monster storm came remarkably early in the year, hitting U.S. territories in the west Pacific that have long been on the very frontlines of climate change with the least political clout to mitigate the crisis and access resources when it strikes.

As climate-fueled extreme weather events become more destructive, the Trump administration is dismantling the government agency whose mission is to “hel[p] people before, during and after disasters.” While diminishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and politicizing the distribution of aid, the federal government is doing everything in its power to boost reliance on fossil fuels and to undo regulations on their climate-warming emissions.

“Disasters are absolutely shrouded in injustices from start to finish,” Dr. Samantha Montano told me when we spoke last week, before Sinlaku made landfall. Montano is a self-described disasterologist — a term she uses to describe anyone who studies disasters, from historians and psychologists to sociologists and emergency managers, like herself. After helping gut and rebuild houses in the fallout of Hurricane Katrina and then assisting with recovery efforts during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, she went on to study the policies underlying emergency management in a quest to make the system more efficient and equitable.

Montano is a co-founder of Researchers for Justice and the Center for Climate Adaptation Research, an associate professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and the author of Disasterology: Dispatches from The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis. Our conversation about this precarious moment for emergency management in the U.S., edited for length and clarity, is below.

ES: What does it feel like to do this work right now, twenty years after Hurricane Katrina? Since then, we’ve had Helene, Maria, Sandy, Ian, the list goes on. Has our response gotten better or worse, and how prepared do you think we are to respond to the next disaster?

SM: Some things have definitely gotten better. There was a tremendous amount of research done post-Katrina that really expanded our knowledge of how to respond to events like these, how to prevent them, how to go about recovery in a better way. The field has professionalized a lot. Our emergency management system in the U.S. has definitely needed a lot of policy change to make it more effective and more equitable, but we were on the right track until the second Trump administration started.

In the past year or so, we’ve seen a pretty intentional dismantling of a significant portion of emergency management, mainly surrounding FEMA. There is tremendous uncertainty right now about what the future of the agency is, and that’s affecting how state and local [agencies] are able to make plans. We’re in a pretty bizarre moment in the history of emergency management right now.

I saw that Markwayne Mullin, the new Secretary of Homeland Security, where FEMA has been housed since 9/11, now wants states to take the lead on disaster recovery instead of FEMA. What would this mean?

He has said this, other people in the Trump administration have said this, and the actual logistics of what that looks like have not been made clear by any of them.

I think the first thing to understand is that for the vast majority of disasters, it is a locally led response where you have the state and the federal government, particularly FEMA, coming in as support. I think what they’re talking about here is taking FEMA out of the equation, and that is a really scary thing from the perspective of local and state emergency management. There’s a real, fundamental purpose of having that next level of government to be able to rely on.

This idea of removing FEMA from that equation is alarming in the sense of potentially losing a lot of resources. But, importantly, we’re not just talking about money here. FEMA also has expertise in disasters because they’re the ones who are responding all over the country all the time, so especially in places that don’t get many disasters, the expertise that FEMA brings in terms of how to effectively go about a response, how to set up recovery programs, is something that just doesn’t exist at many of our state level agencies.

The third, really important thing that FEMA does is coordinate all the other federal agencies when we respond to a disaster and get those resources down to that state and local level. When we go through a recovery, it’s not only FEMA that is involved at the federal level. It’s the EPA and the CDC and HUD and the Department of Agriculture, and any other possible federal agency. So in the complete absence of FEMA, which at times has been suggested by the president, it’s really not clear who would fulfill that function.

You talk about the expertise that is at FEMA — is that still there since there has been so much gutting of the agency?

There has been a pretty alarming loss of staff at FEMA, either through firing or people leaving. They have lost multiple thousands of people from the agency in the past year. FEMA has experienced what we would call a “brain drain,” where the top leadership, people who have been there a really long time, who have managed dozens and dozens of disasters and have this real depth of experience on how to get the bureaucracy to work in these really critical moments, have left the agency. Certainly, there are many people who are still left at FEMA that do have a lot of experience and a lot of expertise and have been holding on trying to get through this. Whether or not those people are able to maneuver the current leadership and have their voices heard I think is an open question right now.

There’s also, because of the climate crisis, more frequent disasters happening in multiple locations at the same time. How does that impact disaster recovery?

In the past ten years or so, there are so many instances of disasters happening across the country simultaneously or very close together in time. The 2017 hurricane season is maybe the obvious example, where we have Harvey in Texas, followed immediately by Irma in Florida, and then Maria in Puerto Rico at the same time as we had wildfires out in California. That is just a situation where our entire emergency management system becomes extremely strained. Each of those disasters on their own would have required a major response from all across the country in terms of sending resources from states to states, the involvement of the federal government — but to have all of those happen effectively at once pushed our system to its limit.

So it’s really concerning to look to the future knowing that because of our increasing risk, that we will have more disasters in more places, sometimes at times that we wouldn’t expect them to happen, because it means more strain on our emergency management system.

I’ve talked to a lot of people after disasters who are still recovering from a prior disaster, who find themselves trapped in these cycles of recovery and rebuilding. At the local and state level, what types of resources do we need to make sure that doesn’t happen?

You’re spot on: there are a number of places — Southeast Texas, kind of the entire coast of Louisiana, Appalachia, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina — some of these places are getting hit repeatedly. You do get trapped in this cycle of not being able to recover before the next one hits, and that actually makes you more vulnerable to that next [disaster] because you haven’t rebuilt yet. So from an emergency management perspective, we need to figure out how to rebuild more quickly. We need to find ways to get more money to more people more quickly, we need to do things like broaden our bench of contractors and construction workers. Some places are finding that they have a shortage of those folks with those specialized skills to even be able to rebuild.

Ideally, you’re preventing these disasters from happening in the first place. So we would be doing more hazard mitigation. Things like moving people out of really high risk flood areas, looking at existing flood infrastructure, making changes to accommodate increased rainfall or whatever the case may be. Looking at other forms of more natural mitigation, like wetland restoration on the coast. A lot of that work needs to be done at the local level, so bringing more attention to emergency management and the need for mitigation among local government and state level government, I think is really important right now, especially in the context of there being so much uncertainty with what’s happening at the federal level.

FEMA was ordered by a judge last month to restart the BRIC program, the largest federal grant program for disaster preparedness. Can you explain what that program is, how that money is going to be disbursed, and what happens for the communities that don’t get it?

The BRIC program was actually started under the first Trump administration. There’s been a long history of mitigation grant programs throughout history. This is just the most recent iteration of that. The [second Trump] administration came in and they basically canceled the program and told states they had to return money for mitigation projects all over the country. This obviously was not legal, so a number of states sued the administration to try and get the program back. And the good news is they won those lawsuits, and BRIC has been reinstated for next year. Now states are now going to have to put together grant applications with specific mitigation projects that they’re wanting to do — so that could be anything from relocating a community to building a levy or buying more generators for their shelters. States will submit those grant proposals to FEMA, and FEMA has implemented a new system for looking through those grants and deciding where that money goes.

Thinking about a post Trump world, what would it look like to make sure that disaster response is not politicized? If Democrats regain power in 2028, how should the government be structured differently with respect to emergency management?

The number one thing that needs to happen here is that FEMA needs to be taken out of DHS and returned to its pre-9/11 status as a cabinet-level independent agency. That was when FEMA worked most effectively. We know eliminating barriers of bureaucracy in the midst of a crisis is always a good thing. And certainly, the vulnerability of FEMA to political agendas being within DHS is just completely unacceptable.

Hiring people needs to be a number one priority here. We also need to look back through all of the mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery programs that FEMA has, at what’s working, what’s not working. Things like the formulas that are being used to give out grants and making sure that those are equitable. We also really need to look at FEMA’s overall budget and find some other ways of pushing more money towards mitigation, whether it’s BRIC or some other mitigation grant program, to get that money out to state and locals to be doing that work. And then certainly we need to find ways to speed up the recovery process. Some of it requires Congress, but we really need to have a clear plan going into the next administration in terms of how to do all of this and to do it as quickly as possible.

There was an analysis done by Tom Frank at E&E News that demonstrated a clear red versus blue in terms of how the President is issuing disaster declarations. That is a massive deal, because all of those blue states are getting locked out of recovery money. Whether that’s households who can’t apply for money to fix their houses, all the way to local governments who now don’t have the money to fix their roads and bridges and schools — when the next administration comes in, we are going to have a backlog of recoveries across the country that are going to require attention.

We have a climate denying administration in the White House right now, but we know that the burning of fossil fuels is causing the climate crisis and making extreme weather events far more frequent and devastating. What is the connection between fossil fuels and disaster management?

Climate change underlies everything we do in emergency management. Most events that we’re responding to at this point are at least in part influenced by climate change. Even ones that aren’t directly linked to climate change are kind of indirectly linked, because of the strain on our resources and the capacity of our overall system. Climate change is not controversial and hasn’t been for a really long time in emergency management, because emergency managers are on the front lines of managing the consequences.

Past that, there’s an important philosophical question that has not been answered yet for emergency management: what is our responsibility in terms of preparing for climate change? Thinking like 10 years, 15, 20, years down the line, the potential disasters that we are talking about are massive. In an ideal world, emergency managers would be planning for those bigger disasters, planning for sea level rise, creating programs and policies well in advance. The reality is that our emergency managers across the country just don’t have the resources to do that. Again, this strikes me as being a resource issue — needing to create positions, hire people to be doing that longer thinking and that longer work of figuring out for specific communities what needs to change now to set us up better to manage those disasters in the future.

So I want to ask about the companies that have made billions of dollars in profits off of products that created the climate crisis. We’re in this moment where the country is trying to figure out what role fossil fuel companies should play in the future of climate disaster recovery and adaptation.

We’re seeing state and local governments taking major fossil fuel companies to court, arguing that they deceived the public about their products and should have to pay to help communities adapt and recover from the damage. Some states are also passing laws to make the companies contribute to climate superfunds for disaster adaptation and recovery. I recently wrote about a growing wave of bills from red states that would shield the oil industry from these actions. As an emergency manager, what are your thoughts?

I think about this in terms of how our understanding of disasters has evolved over time. It used to be the case that disasters were considered to be an act of God, and that they were completely outside of our control. That thinking started to evolve, and we started to think about disasters in terms of natural disasters versus man made disasters. Then largely in the 1970s, I would say, disaster researchers started pushing back against using this term natural disasters, because it kind of removes that human culpability and takes away our responsibility to do something to prevent those disasters from happening.

Now we’re in another situation where we can directly, through attribution work, see how climate change has affected those specific hazards and then translate that, in some cases, to how much of this damage was actually caused or influenced by climate change itself. You can much more clearly identify responsibility for disasters that have happened. So I think of these lawsuits as being part of that evolution.

In the same way that we look to hold oil companies responsible for oil spills or workplace accidents, for me, this falls into kind of that same line of thinking. I think the approach of looking to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for climate damages makes a lot of sense. I think there are other people and companies that are also responsible here that I would like to see also held accountable: developers who build in known high risk flood plains, the local politicians who allow that to happen knowing that there is a significant flood risk for the people who buy those properties, the real estate industry who’s not required to disclose certain types of risks that properties face. If companies don’t know [that they’ll face] consequence for their actions, they tend to take greater risks and have a greater ability to shield the public from knowing about what that risk is.

Note: If you’re looking for context on Super Typhoon Sinlaku, I recommend following climate journalist Rachel Ramirez, who was born and raised in Saipan, one of the islands being hit by the storm.

In states that were recently hit by disasters made worse by the burning of fossil fuels — from extreme heat to severe winter storms — Republican lawmakers are working to shield Big Oil companies from having to pay for the damage.

Bills in at least five Republican-controlled state legislatures would prohibit lawsuits that aim to hold fossil fuel companies and other greenhouse gas polluters liable for climate damages. The wave of legislation comes as lawsuits brought against fossil fuel companies by mostly Democratic-controlled state and local governments continue to advance through the courts.

Utah has become the first to pass a law shielding fossil fuel companies from such lawsuits, and similar bills are awaiting signatures from the governors of Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Iowa. A lawmaker in Louisiana introduced a bill in February.

Scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels have led to more frequent and severe weather events like wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes, and floods. Oil companies spent decades undermining that connection.

Now, state and local officials from Maine to Hawaiʻi are arguing in court that oil companies deceived the public about the dangers they knew their products would cause, and should pay billions of dollars to help communities recover and adapt. Many states are also seeking to impose liability on oil companies for emissions-related damages through climate superfund laws, with Vermont and New York the first to pass their bills.

Sponsors of legislation that would block such actions say their bills would protect fossil fuel operations in their states, and some have openly cast doubt on climate science. Local representatives and advocates opposing the bills contend that they would allow massive corporations to operate with near-total impunity in their communities — and would restrict their ability to recover the increasingly crippling climate costs they face.

The bills appear to closely resemble model legislation published by conservative group Consumers Defense. According to a new ProPublica investigation, the bills are part of a coordinated strategy by groups linked to conservative activist Leonard Leo, including Consumers Research and Alliance for Consumers, to draft, disseminate, and pass laws shielding corporations from liability. Louisiana State Representative Brett Geymann, a Republican and the sponsor of that state’s bill, and the only bill sponsor to reply to a request to comment for this story, said he did not work with the groups on the legislation.

Oil industry lobbyists have been asking Congress to shield fossil fuel companies from both climate lawsuits and superfunds, with a group of Republican attorneys general pointing to the sweeping protections Congress gave to the gun industry as a model “liability shield.” In February, U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) said she was working to draft federal legislation “as a form of preemption” of climate lawsuits and superfunds.

The state-level bills will be the first test of what oil industry immunity could look like.

Who gets to recover climate costs?

Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, last month signed the nation’s first law to declare that companies “may not be subject to any judicial remedy” for climate damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions. It makes an exception for liability only if a court finds “clear and convincing evidence” that the defendant violated an existing federal or state regulation or permit, and that any damage has or will result directly from that violation.

In addition to raising the burden of proof to show that companies violated existing statutory laws, the bills would bar claims for climate damages under state common laws, like public nuisance and negligence, which are the focus of many states and cities’ climate accountability cases.

The oil industry “made an unbelievable fortune at the expense of everyone else, and they’ve known that for 50 years,” said Dr. Brian Moench, the president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. Now, from the state’s worsening drought to its more frequent and devastating wildfires, there’s a “significant, desperate need for economic resources to try and stem this tide.”

But without access to courts to recover damages, residents and local businesses will continue to be saddled with the financial burden — and some find themselves trapped in a cycle of disaster recovery. In Tennessee, still rebuilding from Hurricane Helene and other storms, Winter Storm Fern left communities without power for days in January.

“Our insurance prices are going through the roof, and we have to repair infrastructure on a regular basis,” said Pat Cupples with the Tennessee Sierra Club. He said Tennessee’s push to ban climate lawsuits could mean “an inability to help local communities, wherever they are in the state, bounce back.”

Utah State Senator Nate Blouin, a Democrat who voted against the state’s bill, said that the legislation deepens the control of fossil fuel interests over the law in states like his. Many of the same states have also worked to pass industry-backed bills preventing a transition away from and penalizing opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure.

Communities in blue and red states have long faced disparate policy landscapes that have a major impact on peoples’ lives, from gun control to reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare to moratoriums on data centers. “I think that is going to be the case with laws like this, where you see blue states and cities in blue states have the ability to hold polluters accountable, and in red states, you’re going to see them get away with everything,” Blouin told ExxonKnews.

What types of lawsuits could be blocked?

Some of the bills include language that could obstruct a much wider range of lawsuits against polluters.

Utah’s law and Iowa’s bill extend to criminal liability, and could bar climate cases brought under state criminal racketeering, antitrust, or homicide claims over climate-related deaths.

In Oklahoma, the “Energy Security and Independence Act” would ban liability claims for fraud, misrepresentation, deception, or failure to warn relating to climate change or greenhouse gas emissions. The bill would “preserve lawful access to affordable, clean, and reliable fossil fuels” — and include trade associations as well as “any product derived from” fossil fuels in its immunity shield. Taken together, those provisions could preclude lawsuits alleging deception over the marketing of plastic products, like the one brought against Exxon by the state of California.

Iowa’s bill expands the definition of a greenhouse gas as originating not just from fossil fuels, but renewable fuels and agriculture sources — indicating that ethanol producers and the agricultural industry would also be shielded.

Tennessee’s bill would go further to establish a “right to engage in activities related to coal, oil, and gas” and “prevent discrimination against the exercise of such right.” Like Oklahoma, Tennessee’s bill protects companies from being held liable for “statements or omissions” about their emissions, meaning it could prohibit consumer protection claims tied to those emissions.

“Trying to slam the courthouse doors shut”

The bills would raise the burden of proof for plaintiffs and requirements for bringing a lawsuit to begin with. Utah, Iowa, and Louisiana’s bills, for example, demand that plaintiffs must specify exactly which greenhouse gas caused the alleged harm.

Louisiana’s bill would also require plaintiffs to prove through “clear and convincing evidence” that the emissions resulting from companies’ actions caused more than 50% of the alleged climate damages.

“Louisiana is a heavily industrialized state. We have a lot of oil and gas and refining,” said Geymann, the sponsor of HB804. “You need to prove that that company is mainly the one responsible for that emission that caused the damages, instead of being able to just say, ‘I’m gonna file a claim against every single fossil fuel company in the entire state.’”

But Delta Merner, lead scientist and associate director of the climate accountability campaign at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the bills “appear strategically crafted to exploit the gap between what attribution science can do and what these laws require.”

“By setting evidentiary requirements that exceed what the best available science can deliver, these laws are trying to slam the courthouse door shut,” she said.

Louisiana’s bill raises the bar for state or local government entities bringing a lawsuit for climate damages even higher, requiring written approval from the state governor, attorney general, and the Louisiana House and Senate committees on natural resources — all in a state government with close ties to the oil industry. It also states that plaintiffs must prove that they themselves did not “directly or indirectly” contribute to any of the emissions that caused the resulting damages.

The bill’s stated intent is “to protect energy producers and related industries from claims for emissions.” But Geymann, the sponsor, said the bill “does not provide special protection to fossil fuel companies” because it applies to any greenhouse gas emitter — for instance, he told ExxonKnews, a diesel truck driver would be protected from climate liability.

Geymann, the sponsor, insists his bill “is very narrow and only applies to claims resulting from climate change and not from emissions.” Lawsuits could still be brought for damages, including to health and property, caused by local emissions “beyond what was allowed,” he said.

But as written, the bill could be understood to mean that any lawsuits over damages caused by emissions “are not allowable in Louisiana except under the very difficult-to-meet thresholds established,” said Jackson Voss, the government and policy affairs coordinator at the Louisiana-based Alliance for Affordable Energy.

Rep. Geymann conceded that the bill would need to be revised to make that distinction clear. “I’m not an attorney, so when I first read it, I said the same thing: ‘Gosh, it looks like we’re just stopping any chance of anybody ever being able to seek damages,’ but it’s not,” Geymann said. “I will tell you, the bill has been very confusing for all of us, so I’m going to insert some additional language.”

With the massive influx of chronically polluting fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ and the state’s unique vulnerability to the effects of climate change, the consequences of restricting access to the courts in the state can’t be understated, said Voss. “By passing this bill, the state government and legislature would be saying, ‘we’re siding with these companies over the ability of our citizens to actually protect themselves’,” he said.

Challenging the laws

“If more and more of these laws get passed, it will handcuff communities and society from really finding solutions” to hold industry accountable for the burdens it has passed onto the public, said Moench, of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. When your legislative and judicial options are taken away from you, he asked, “what do you have left?”

Utah’s law could be challenged under the state’s constitution, said Andrew Welle of Our Children’s Trust, the lead counsel on a climate lawsuit brought by youth plaintiffs in Utah against the state government. Like many other states across the country, Utah’s constitution has an Open Courts Clause, which would ensure public access to the courts to redress injury or harm. “I think that this legislation may very well cross the line,” Welle said.

This piece is co-published by ExxonKnews and DeSmog, a leading outlet covering climate disinformation and accountability.

Major oil and gas lobby groups are leveraging energy shortages during the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran to call on the European Union to pause its regulations on methane, a powerful climate pollutant. If successful, the delay could help pave the way for a marked expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across the United States.

Two industry groups, the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) and Fuels Europe, urged policymakers earlier this month to stop the next phases of the law’s implementation until “targeted adjustments” could be made. The groups cited a Wood Mackenzie study commissioned by IOGP that found up to 43% of U.S. gas imports could fail to meet the law’s standards.

“The EU cannot afford a self-made regulatory supply shock, even more so in the current geopolitical context,” said François-Régis Mouton de Lostalot, managing director of IOGP Europe, whose member companies include Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP, in a statement.

The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of liquid natural gas (LNG), and oil and gas companies and their trade groups have spent years lobbying to weaken the EU’s methane law in the name of energy security concerns. Now, attacks on gas infrastructure in the Middle East and spiking energy shortages in Europe add urgency to the industry’s push.

As U.S. gas companies are poised to reap windfall profits from the war, communities around the world are caught in the fray. Many proposed LNG projects in the U.S. — from Louisiana to Texas to Pennsylvania — are waiting on final investment decisions, and increased demand from the EU could be a deciding factor. While new capacity might not come online in time to solve Europe’s new energy shortages, environmental advocates say the potential boost in LNG projects in the U.S. will have a lasting impact on the health of nearby residents, pocketbooks, and the global climate.

As it stands, the EU’s law imposes new requirements on imported gas beginning in 2027, making it more difficult to sell highly polluting U.S. gas projects.

The oil and gas industry “loves crises from an economic standpoint, but also to force policy changes,” said Justin Mikulka, an energy industry analyst and communications director at the environmental watchdog group, Oilfield Witness. The global economics of the LNG market do not support investing in more U.S. gas exports, “so this is an emergency situation for them.”

U.S. advocates appeal to the EU

Scientists say reining in methane emissions from gas operations is essential to avoid the most disastrous consequences of climate change. Despite the industry’s attempts to sell LNG as “green” and climate-friendly, its greenhouse gas footprint is 33 percent greater than coal in the short-term, according to a peer-reviewed study by Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University.

“Politicians and the industry talk about it as if the gas magically moves from the U.S. to Europe or to Bangladesh or wherever it’s going,” said Howarth, who documented the emissions associated with the process of transporting, producing, liquefying, and shipping U.S. gas.

Europe’s methane law requires imported gas to comply with its measurement, reporting, and verification requirements, as well as with requirements to mitigate emissions from leaks and flares. But U.S. LNG exports are so energy-intensive and polluting that experts think they are unlikely to ever meet the EU’s requirements.

“It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around how much [methane] is escaping at these LNG terminals,” Sharon Wilson of Oilfield Witness, who tracks emissions from oil and gas facilities in Texas and across the country, told DeSmog and ExxonKnews. Venting and flaring methane are routine at every stage of gas production in the U.S., and methane emissions are drastically underreported by the industry’s own accounts. Wilson said she hoped European policymakers would come see the process through her optical gas imaging camera for themselves.

As the Trump administration works to unravel greenhouse gas regulation entirely, communities have been left vulnerable to intensifying climate disasters and the local health impacts of expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.

In Pennsylvania, gas extraction has been linked to more severe asthma reactions and elevated rates of rare childhood cancer in nearby communities. Fracking operations have sometimes led to the prolific dumping of toxic and often radioactive waste in local waterways, said Chris DiGiulio, an environmental chemist with Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania. She says her family was sickened by pollution from the 350 mile-long Mariner East pipeline, which runs through Pennsylvania and exports natural gas liquids for plastic production in Europe.

DiGiulio saw Europe’s methane regulations as a barrier against new gas export projects, like the $7 billion LNG facility proposed in the working-class communities of Chester and Eddystone Borough in Pennsylvania. She said she felt a pit in her stomach when she read that the gas industry’s lobbyists were asking Europe to put the law on hold.

The EU’s import requirements were “where our comfort was,” DiGiulio said. “There’s no way we could ever meet their emission standards. I wish [our politicians] were saying, ‘Fracking is bad for people’s health in Pennsylvania,’ but they don’t give a crap.”

Every operational LNG export terminal in the U.S. has violated pollution permits at least once in recent years, according to an analysis last year by the nonprofit watchdog group the Environmental Integrity Project.

On Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the expanding terminals are adding to a growing landscape of polluting infrastructure that is harming the fishing industry while driving up natural gas prices across the country. The infrastructure is also prone to explosions, like the one that erupted at the Delfin LNG pipeline in Cameron Parish last month.

“Our state and this federal government are captured by oil and gas,” said James Hiatt, a former oil and gas worker who now battles LNG terminals in Louisiana through his local advocacy group, For a Better Bayou. “We’re out of control, but Europe still seems to have their head on their shoulders and could push back and stop these harms that are happening here.”

More leverage to secure a buildout

The war in Iran gives the gas industry a better chance to lock in long-term projects. Just last week, U.S. LNG company Venture Global secured $8.6 billion in project financing for an expansion of its LNG export facility in southwestern Louisiana, which the company called “a strategically important project to global energy supply and security.”

At the CERAWeek energy industry conference in Houston this week, companies continue to argue that LNG expansion will combat wartime energy shortages. “We’ve been making this case for years that American LNG is the most reliable form of energy in the world, one, because it’s being produced and supplied in a part of the country that is safe, and number two, it’s backed by the world’s strongest military,” said Toby Rice, CEO of energy company EQT, one of the U.S.’s largest LNG producers, in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday.

“There are a number of projects that are still pending, and the opportunities for further expansion are still there to try to lock in either long-term contracts or speed financing,” said Ethan Buckner, energy program director at nonprofit advocacy group Earthworks. The longer the war and LNG shutoffs in the Middle East go on, he said, “the more leverage that LNG exporters will have.” It takes three to five years to build an LNG export terminal in the U.S., according to Global Energy Monitor, which may not be fast enough to supply short-term energy needs.

U.S. oil and gas companies and their trade groups, including the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have long cited energy security concerns in their lobbying to weaken the EU’s methane requirements and expand the LNG buildout, according to reports from the nonprofit research group InfluenceMap.

During his presidential campaign, Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with the CEOs of many of the gas companies now benefiting from the Iran war, promising them favors in exchange for campaign donations. Last year, his administration demanded that the EU entirely exempt U.S. gas from its methane regulations.

In a January policy agenda, API said it would ensure climate laws, including the EU’s methane law, “do not disadvantage U.S. producers.” The trade group also planned to “[p]romote U.S. LNG through coordinated action by the Department of Energy and State Department, using proactive energy diplomacy to support allies, strengthen global energy security, and reinforce U.S. economic leadership.”

Days before the U.S. attack on Iran, EU officials told U.S. gas industry executives that European countries would continue to buy large amounts of U.S. LNG, E&E reported.

A similar pattern played out after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when industry lobby groups and companies worked to exploit fears over energy security to promote more investment in gas infrastructure, according to a 2023 DeSmog review of social media posts and a report by Greenpeace. Industry lobbyists and officials also used the Ukraine invasion to attack climate policies, and to portray looser regulations as essential to energy independence, InfluenceMap found.

The lobbying today is “part of a broader strategy to secure long-term dependence on U.S. LNG,” said Eszter Matyas, a regional gas campaigner for Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe. During the war in Ukraine, she said, the industry has “argued for expanded LNG imports and new infrastructure while diverting attention from renewable alternatives.”

At a gas industry conference in April 2025, Alex Whittington, an executive at LNG company Cheniere Energy, explained why the U.S. could influence European lawmakers on the rules.

“When the Europ[ean] methane regulation was designed many years ago, I think the Commission saw a world in 2030 that was awash in gas, in LNG, where they could turn off suppliers if the supplier wasn’t clean to their standards,” he said in a recording shared with ExxonKnews and DeSmog. “That is not the world in which they find themselves in 2025, it is not a world they will find themselves in 2030.”

During the current war in Iran, European countries most reliant on gas have seen the greatest price spikes, while Spain, France, and Portugal were shielded by their increased reliance on renewables. If the EU wants to avoid those skyrocketing prices and further reliance on an increasingly unstable U.S. government, advocates said, perhaps it won’t take the industry’s bait.

This piece is co-published by ExxonKnews and DeSmog, a leading outlet covering climate disinformation and accountability.

Scott Eustis is doing what he can to keep Louisiana afloat. As a veteran wetland and fisheries researcher and lifelong resident, he says he is sure of what caused the damage to the state’s delicate marshlands and drowning coast: the oil drilling that employed his grandfather decades prior.

“My granddad worked for these companies,” said Eustis. “If he were still alive, he would tell you, straight up: They owe us the land.”

For a century, oil companies dredged canals through coastal wetlands, dissecting marshes to get to and from wells, and dumped toxic wastewater into marshes and unlined earthen pits. Those wells, canals, pits, and leftover pollution were largely abandoned. Oil drilling is a dwindling portion of the state’s economy today, but its legacy is a fixture of the now-sinking landscape.

Louisiana loses around a football field’s worth of its wetlands every hour, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and the problem is worsening as sea levels rise. As the coast sinks, home insurance rates skyrocket, local ecosystems collapse, shrimping and fishing economies shrink, and the state’s natural flood barriers disappear — an increasingly acute threat in the face of more frequent and torrential climate-fueled hurricanes.

“After Katrina, the state did wake up and say ‘Oh shit, we used to have 90 miles of land mass between us and the Gulf of Mexico,’” said Eustis, who provides input on local industrial developments and ​​wetlands restoration projects as community science director at the nonprofit Healthy Gulf. “‘Now, we have a bunch of swiss cheese.’”

So came a swell of legal efforts seeking to hold oil giants accountable for driving the collapse of Louisiana’s coast — including lawsuits brought by private landowners, a regional flood protection board, a local oil company, a Republican former governor, and local parishes, the state’s equivalent of counties.

Now, one of those cases is under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, a state court jury found Chevron liable in a lawsuit brought by Plaquemines Parish, one of more than 40 parish lawsuits accusing oil companies of failing to secure permits for their operations and neglecting to clean up the damage they left behind in violation of state coastal management law. After the landmark verdict requiring Chevron to spend $745 million to restore the coast, the company appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in January.

In light of the industry’s successful lobbying for legislation limiting landowners’ lawsuits, parish lawsuits are an especially crucial avenue to hold the companies accountable, some local attorneys say. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the parishes and they continue to win their cases in state courts, they could make Chevron, Exxon, BP, Shell, and other oil companies pay billions of dollars to help fund coastal restoration efforts as the state runs out of resources to support cleanup.

That’s an outcome the companies are fighting to avoid. “Chevron is not the cause of the land loss occurring in Breton Sound,” Mike Phillips, the company’s lead attorney in the Plaquemines case, told outlets in April. Litigation “risks delaying collaborative action, misdirecting resources and inhibiting cross-sector work” to restore the coast, Shell claimed after the U.S. Supreme Court denied an earlier request by oil companies to stop Cameron Parish’s case from moving toward trial in state court. Shell and Apache have reached settlement agreements with the state in some cases, and ConocoPhillips is nearing a deal.

But internal company documents show oil giants knew that their practices were devastating coastal land, water, and habitats, and would eventually incur legal action — yet worked to delay cleanup and accountability for as long as possible.

The documents were obtained in the earlier landowner lawsuits during discovery, or the legal process of gathering evidence before a trial, and many were first reported on in a 2013 investigation by Harper’s Magazine. As the Supreme Court prepares to release a decision that could help determine Louisiana’s future, the story of what oil companies knew is worth revisiting.

“Do not admit blame”

The oil industry began issuing internal warnings about coastal operations nearly a hundred years ago. In 1932, a report written by V.L. Martin of the Prairie Oil & Gas Company, for a committee of the American Petroleum Institute, cautioned of the dangers of saline and sometimes carcinogenic oil production waste (or “brine”) leaking into the environment — and the likelihood of lawsuits to follow.

“It’s only a question of time until the opposition to the escape of our waste will become strong enough to force us, as an economical measure, to dispose of them in such a manner as will not be objectionable to anyone,” Martin wrote, adding that “we cannot escape the moral responsibility for the effect of such wastes.”

While the “field man is primarily concerned with the production of the maximum amount of oil at a minimum cost,” he wrote, “the cost of litigation” and “settlement of claims” might change that calculus.

Even though the companies were keenly aware of the potential for litigation over their waste-disposal practices in the future, they continued to dump brine in open pits and coastal marshes in Louisiana through the 1980s, state legal records and internal documents show.

In 1970, Humble Oil, which was later consolidated as part of ExxonMobil, sent out an internal company memo describing ways to prevent harm to personnel and the environment. The first instruction under a section titled “What to do when cited” reads “Do not admit blame: personally or on the part of the company.”

A 1980 report from Shell’s Division Safety and Environmental Conservation Manager labeled “Private” documented “flagrant violations of the law” at three of four facilities that were surveyed. The report describes those violations in detail, including intentional discharges of fluids and leaks from pit dikes leaking into nearby waters; standing oil in surrounding wetland areas that was never cleaned up; and oil byproducts from compressors being drained into wetlands.

In a memo four years later, a subsidiary of Shell once again sounded the alarm. “EPA has cleaned up some of these [oil field waste] pits at high costs to taxpayers, and evidence show[s] these pits have definitely contaminated soil and groundwater resources,” the memo reads. “Operators must begin to design and close pits properly or lawsuits will become a severe problem in the future.”

Despite the recent statements of fossil fuel defendants facing lawsuits, the industry’s own research pointed to its outsized responsibility. For instance, according to a 1989 study commissioned by the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA), a trade group for oil and gas companies operating in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, the effects of canal development to access well sites and for pipeline transport “tend to be the overwhelming cause of wetland losses.”

Keeping the law at bay

Rather than address the issues they were warned about, documents show the companies worked to weaken regulation of its coastal drilling operations and pushed legislation that would help shield them from liability for the fallout.

In a 1986 memo, Unocal, later acquired by Chevron, discussed its plan to stave off regulation and litigation that “can be expected in most cases where drinking water aquifers have become contaminated” from leaks and spills.

“Our environmental legislative and regulatory group, under Pat O’Toole, has been effective in tempering state bills and proposed regulations which would have increased clean-up and disposal costs,” its memo says. “Identified savings exceed some $20 million. This work continues, and future savings are anticipated.”

Two years earlier, a memo from Amoco (now BP) suggested that rather than backfilling old waste pits at a high cost to comply with regulations that would be implemented the following year, it could “donate” them to landowners, some of whom wanted to use them as duck or fish ponds.

“It is estimated that compliance with these new regulations will increase our pit cost by 50%,” reads the memo. “Donation of drilling pits will save Amoco the cost of backfilling and sampling and put these obligations on the landowner.”

Once the industry began to face the lawsuits they had predicted decades earlier, its lobbyists took to pressuring lawmakers to kill the suits before they could reach trial. LMOGA, the Louisiana oil industry association, pushed for the governor to sign a bill that aimed to effectively block a lawsuit brought against 97 oil and gas companies by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority (the case was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge). According to reporting by The Lens, a New Orleans-based nonprofit news site, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA), another industry lobbying group in the state, lobbied heavily for Act 312 — a 2006 law that placed state regulators in charge of overseeing cleanup in hundreds of “legacy lawsuits” brought by landowners against oil companies for soil and groundwater contamination on their properties.

Advocates and local lawyers say the law installed a bureaucratic maze controlled by the industry-friendly Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, helping insulate oil companies from the lawsuits. Under new legislation that will take effect September 2027, landowner lawsuits will be subject to even more restrictions.

“There’s been lies about this [coastal damage] my entire life,” said Eustis. “When the industry doesn’t want to follow your law, they buy your legislature.”

Exxon, Chevron, BP, API, and LMOGA did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Shell declined to comment.

‘Essential to any hope’ of Louisiana’s future

The changes come as the same oil companies and their allies in government mount a larger attack on lawsuits that could hold them accountable for climate damages — including Boulder’s climate lawsuit, which Exxon has brought before the U.S. Supreme Court. The industry is also lobbying for legislation that would shield its members from such lawsuits. Earlier this month, a Louisiana state lawmaker who has received thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry introduced a bill that would “limit liability for emissions of greenhouse gases” and “protect energy producers and related industries.”

In a brief in support of the companies’ arguments against the Plaquemines case, seven Republican attorneys general told the Supreme Court that “no matter the theory, the sought-after remedy” of climate and coastal damage lawsuits “is largely the same: the plaintiffs want to punish energy producers with crushing damage awards for activities that were concededly lawful (and often federally endorsed) at the time.”

Louisianans may see things differently. The parish lawsuits have enjoyed unique support from Louisiana officials who have been otherwise friendly to the industry, whose abandoned infrastructure is still causing damage along the coast. The state has a $50 billion coastal master plan set aside for rehabilitation, but the fund — much of which was supplied by a settlement with BP after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill — is running dry.

“The industry has just cut and run from all investment,” said Eustis. “They know they need to restore the wetlands, it’s just money that they don’t want to spend. But we’re really staring down the end of Louisiana, and restoring the land is essential to any hope of prosperity here.”

For the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court has granted oil companies’ request to weigh in on whether climate accountability lawsuits are preempted by federal law — setting the stage for a battle that could determine if dozens of similar cases are allowed to move toward trial.

The decision means the court will hear arguments from ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to overturn an earlier ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which decided that a case brought by Boulder, Colorado, could move ahead in state court. You can read more about the companies’ petition in ExxonKnews and DeSmog’s previous coverage here.

Oil companies have previously and repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to take up issues in the lawsuits, which point to growing evidence that the companies spent decades deceiving the public about climate change and blocked the transition to renewable energy. Since a narrow procedural ruling in 2021, the companies were rejected each time.

But two factors were different this time: the Trump administration urged the justices to take the oil companies’ petition in Boulder’s case, and Justice Samuel Alito participated in discussion of the case, despite recusing himself in the past.

Alito owns up to $15,000 in stock in ConocoPhillips and between $15,000 and $50,000 in Phillips 66. Those companies are defendants in other cities’ and states’ climate lawsuits, whose fate could be determined by a ruling in Boulder’s case.

Alito clearly acknowledged his conflict of interest in the past, because he recused himself from considering several other appeals related to the climate accountability lawsuits — including a nearly identical petition in Honolulu’s case, which the Supreme Court rejected last year. He even recused himself in Boulder’s case when it was brought before the high court on a jurisdictional question in 2023.

Back then, Exxon’s lawyers argued that Boulder’s case was an “ideal vehicle” for Supreme Court review because it “involves a smaller group of defendants and thus is less likely than those [other climate deception] cases to present recusal issues.” Translation: the companies that posed financial conflicts for some justices were not parties in this specific case. (Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a longtime lawyer for Shell and had a leadership role at the American Petroleum Institute).

Alito has not always recused from cases that would impact companies in which he has financial investments. When oil-funded Republican attorneys general petitioned the court to shut down similar state lawsuits in which ConocoPhillips and Phillips66 were defendants, he not only participated in reviewing the request, but also joined Justice Clarence Thomas in a dissent arguing the court should have taken it.

But Alito did recuse himself from a case the Supreme Court heard in January about oil companies’ liability for coastal damage in Louisiana, even though ConocoPhillips and Phillips66 were not direct defendants in that case, either. That was because ConocoPhillips is the parent company of Burlington Resources Oil and Gas Company, a defendant in the lawsuit in the lower courts, but not part of the oil companies’ arguments before the Supreme Court.

According to his 2024 financial disclosure, Alito also invested up to $100,000 in a high-dividend yield fund that listed Exxon as its third largest holding as of January.

In 2023, the Supreme Court published an unenforceable code of conduct which stated that a justice should recuse from hearing a case if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” including because that justice or their spouse has “a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding.”

The code qualifies that “ownership in a mutual or common investment fund that holds securities is not a ‘financial interest’ in such securities unless the judge participates in the management of the fund.” It also says that ““the rule of necessity may override the rule of disqualification” — in other words, if a tie-breaking vote is needed, a judge with conflicts of interest may be asked to participate.

Lisa Graves, executive director of national investigative watchdog group True North Research, said it was “no coincidence” that the court took up Exxon’s plea. Between Alito’s financial ties to oil companies, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father’s long employment for the oil industry, Clarence Thomas’s relationship with the Koch brothers, and the influence of Leonard Leo, who helped pick many of the justices on today’s court and has worked hand in hand with Koch networks, the court is “captured with the help of carbon cash,” Graves said.

Exxon and Suncor have also had help from the Trump administration and the GOP in getting their petition before the court. After an executive order from the President instructing the Department of Justice to block the cases, the DOJ submitted an unsolicited brief in support of the companies’ request. More than 100 Republican members of Congress also filed a brief on behalf of the companies, asking the justices to protect the industry from cases that “would restructure the American energy industry if not bankrupt it altogether.”

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Big Oil and Leonard Leo muster their forces

As some climate lawsuits have inched closer to trial, the fossil fuel industry has gotten more desperate to stop them. “I have to win every case that is brought,” said Exxon assistant general counsel Justin Anderson at a November panel discussion hosted by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal advocacy group funded in part by fossil fuel interests and co-chaired by Leonard Leo. “They just need to find one they can get through — and that’s why it is so important for the Supreme Court to take this case.”

The U.S. oil lobby and their allies in state and federal government — along with the same Leo network that helped stack the court — have been ramping up pressure on lawmakers to pass a “liability waiver,” or a bill that would immunize the fossil fuel industry from such lawsuits. Last week, U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) said she was working to draft such a bill.

At the state level, lawmakers in Utah and Oklahoma have introduced bills that would shield fossil fuel companies from climate liability; Utah’s is now awaiting the governor’s signature. Those bills appear to draw from a model bill published by Consumer Defense, a Leonard Leo-linked project, the New York Times reported. Alliance for Consumers, another Leo-tied project, has also been behind other broader state bills that would limit corporate liability. The Leo network has also pressured the Supreme Court to step into the climate accountability cases on behalf of oil companies.

The DOJ has also attempted, unsuccessfully, to preemptively block Michigan and Hawaiʻi from filing climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.

“It’s a bad sign for sure” for the plaintiffs that the justices took the case, said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School. But, Parenteau noted, the court may not end up ruling on the preemption question at all. In their decision to grant review, the justices said they would consider the question of whether the court has jurisdiction over the case, considering there has not yet been any final decision from a lower court on its merits.

While the Trump administration has backed the industry in fighting the lawsuits, its EPA also recently repealed the Endangerment Finding, the scientific finding behind federal greenhouse gas regulation in the United States. That decision could undermine the companies’ preemption argument and open up a new front for litigation against the fossil fuel industry.

Boulder’s lawsuit argues that the companies violated state laws like public nuisance, trespass and conspiracy, among others, and should help communities pay to adapt and recover from increasingly devastating and expensive climate disasters.

“The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was correct in holding that these state law claims for in-state injuries can continue in state court,” said Michelle Harrison of legal advocacy nonprofit EarthRights International, who serves as co-counsel for Boulder. “Exxon’s ever-evolving arguments as to why they should be immunized from such claims are baseless.”

Exxon is represented in the Boulder case by Paul Weiss, a law firm that has worked to defend a wide range of corporate clients from liability and, last year, cut a deal to work for Trump. The firm’s longtime chairman recently resigned after his name appeared multiple times in emails with Jeffrey Epstein.

This month, the firm notified courts in Connecticut, Hawaiʻi, Maine and Washington state that they would no longer be representing Exxon in pending climate lawsuits there.

Earlier this month, after a group of 27 Republican attorneys general objected to a new climate chapter in a scientific reference manual for judges, the federal agency responsible for publishing it decided to remove the chapter entirely.

The decision came as oil and gas companies face a growing number of lawsuits accusing them of deceiving the public about climate change, which could result in billions of dollars in liability for the industry. Without the chapter, federal judges ruling on those and other cases will have no official guidance on how to evaluate climate attribution science, which is used to link extreme weather events to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions to specific polluters.

That wasn’t the only attack on climate lawsuits to make the news last week: a U.S. House representative announced that she’s drafting legislation to shield oil companies from such cases entirely. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told E&E that her legislation will serve as “a form of preemption” to stop climate lawsuits.

Hageman’s comments echo a June letter from 16 Republican state attorneys general urging the Department of Justice to “recommend legislation” to Congress to block such cases, including through “federal preemption” and a “liability shield” that could give the companies legal immunity from them.

What do these efforts have in common? The officials that pushed them forward are all members of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a group that receives massive amounts of money from some of the same fossil fuel industry players facing lawsuits over their role in destroying the planet.

“RAGA has been in bed with the carbon industry for years, and many of its state AGs have close ties to those industries,” said Lisa Graves, a former Justice Department official and now executive of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group.

Under the mantle of “defending the rule of law” and “protect[ing] … opportunity for future generations,” RAGA is now playing a central role in oil industry donors’ escalating efforts to defeat climate lawsuits through the courts and Congress.

Censoring the science

The Federal Judicial Center — the agency tasked with helping courts understand complex issues that come before them on the bench — removed the climate chapter explicitly in response to the Republican attorneys general request. “Republican AGs FOUGHT and WON,” RAGA wrote in a celebratory X post lauding the decision to remove “ridiculous WOKE climate science from judicial manuals.”

The incident reflects a dramatically increasing influence of well-funded political interests on the judiciary, said two former judges.

Retired judge Shira Scheindlin, who served on the federal bench in New York for 22 years, said she was “kind of shocked” to see the chapter pulled after what “seems like inappropriate political pressure on the judicial branch.” Throughout her years as a judge, the peer-reviewed reference manual was used regularly by federal judges and their clerks “for any scientific type question.” The booklet helps judges understand complex issues emerging in courtrooms, including AI, forensics, and epidemiology. Scheindlin said she had seen chapters updated, but never removed entirely.

“There is no comparable example of how judges have been prevented from receiving information on important issues in society that are being brought into court,” said former Hawai‘i Supreme Court Justice Michael Wilson, who served on the state’s highest court for a decade. “This is a tragic but important insight into a serious erosion of judicial independence.”

So who exactly is funding RAGA, which helps Republican candidates for attorney general with their election and reelection campaigns, in the first place?

In 2024, the group received $125k from ExxonMobil; $250k from the American Petroleum Institute; and $250k from Koch Industries, all of whom are defendants in climate lawsuits, according to tax filings. Its top contributors have long been groups linked to conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is known for hand-picking justices on the current Supreme Court. Leo co-chairs the Federalist Society, a legal advocacy organization that has also received major funding from Koch Industries.

That could help explain the group’s crusade to paint scientific consensus on climate change as an effort to sway judges.

In his letter to the Federal Judicial Center, lead signatory West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey and 26 other Republican attorneys general — all members of RAGA — accuse the authors of bias and argue that the chapter places the courts “firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and ‘attribution.’” Attribution science is being cited in climate lawsuits more frequently after years of industry efforts to suppress it.

Without the chapter, federal judges will now be reliant on lawyers and experts on both sides of an argument to explain climate science to the court, Scheindlin said.

The effort was part of a larger play to keep climate science education away from the judiciary. Just before the agency rescinded the chapter, the attorneys general asked Republican members of Congress to add the Federal Judicial Center to an existing investigation into the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), a nonprofit that works to educate lawyers and judges on climate issues. ELI was also a target of attacks by a Leonard Leo-linked group that charged it with influencing the courts with “questionable climate science.”

RAGA did not respond to a request for comment.

Shielding the fossil fuel industry

RAGA’s donors began planting seeds with the group — specifically, with West Virginia’s highest legal official — to shield the industry from climate action years ago. According to a 2012 tax filing obtained by Graves and reviewed by ExxonKnews, the Judicial Education Project (JEP), a dark money group tied to Leo, “conducted research into statutory and constitutional authority of the West Virginia Attorney General to sue the federal government, particularly in the context of EPA regulations.”

In 2015, West Virginia’s then-attorney general Patrick Morrisey sued the EPA to limit its ability to regulate emissions from power plants. Backed by other RAGA members, the case ultimately went before the Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor.

Today, the group’s donors have their sights set on climate deception lawsuits. In a policy agenda published in January, the American Petroleum Institute, a major RAGA funder, listed “protect[ing]” oil companies from “abusive state climate lawsuits” as a top priority.

West Virginia’s current attorney general, McCuskey, has followed suit. “Congress needs to step up, because the biggest problem that we have is that our national energy policy is being dictated in district courts,” he said during a Federalist Society panel last year. McCuskey co-led the letter to the Justice Department calling for a liability waiver.

Those calls are now being answered. At a hearing last week, Rep. Hageman announced that she was working with House and Senate colleagues to “craft legislation tackling” state climate lawsuits and climate superfund legislation, which would make polluters contribute to climate disaster recovery and adaptation costs. Hageman received $58k in contributions from the oil and gas industry in 2024.

Republican attorneys general have tried to intervene to undermine the lawsuits before, including through a “highly unusual” request to the Supreme Court. Republican AGs also backed petitions brought by oil companies seeking Supreme Court review in Honolulu’s climate lawsuit, both of which were rejected by justices last year. The petitions in Honolulu’s case were amplified through a media campaign run by the Alliance for Consumers, a project tied to Leonard Leo.

Alliance for Consumers is now pushing bills in several states that would make it harder to bring public nuisance claims, which are part of many states’ and cities’ climate lawsuits against oil companies.

According to documents obtained by True North Research and the Center for Media and Democracy, RAGA has offered special access to its highest donors, including opportunities for issue briefings and invitations to dinners, events, and policy discussions that have led to action by the AGs.

Oil donors’ money, at least, is already paying off.

[Note: RAGA is also coming after climate nonprofits that have called for oil industry accountability. Last week, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen led a coalition of 19 AGs asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate more than 150 climate groups (including a former parent organization of the Center for Climate Integrity, of which ExxonKnews is a project.]

Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe. The state of Michigan, home of America’s auto industry, is a thriving hub for electric vehicles. They are not “a fringe technology or a luxury alternative,” but rather, “a common sight in every neighborhood — rolling off assembly lines in Flint, parked in driveways in Dearborn, charging outside grocery stores in Grand Rapids, and running quietly down Woodward Avenue.”

That Michigan could have existed by now, a new lawsuit brought by state Attorney General Dana Nessel argues, if four major oil companies and their biggest trade group hadn’t conspired to block it for decades.

The Michigan case, filed last week in federal court, accuses ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute of engaging in a decades-long conspiracy to block the development of clean energy and electric vehicles in order to ensure that their fossil fuel products dominated the market.

The case is distinct from the dozens of other climate deception lawsuits brought by state and local governments against oil and gas giants, arguing that the companies violated state and federal antitrust laws. Acting as a “cartel,” the defendants robbed consumers of energy and transportation choices in “one of the most successful antitrust conspiracies in United States history,” the complaint says.

But Michigan’s lawsuit also represents the Trump administration’s latest failure to quash climate lawsuits against Big Oil. After President Trump last year directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “take all appropriate action” to stop such suits, the Justice Department preemptively sued Michigan to stop Nessel from filing a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies, as she had pledged to do in 2024. At the time, Nessel called the DOJ lawsuit “arguably sanctionable” and said she was “undeterred” in her “intention to file this lawsuit the President and his Big Oil donors so fear.”

Days after her lawsuit was filed, a federal district court dismissed the Trump administration’s case. U.S. Judge Jane Beckering skewered the DOJ for “fail[ing] to cite any case in which a court has preemptively enjoined a party from bringing a broad swath of unspecified claims against unspecified members of a given industry simply because that party has begun investigating whether a litigation strategy may have merit.”

The DOJ’s lawsuit “represents an escalation in a decades-long series of clashes between state attorneys general and industry groups,” including lead paint, tobacco, and opioids, Beckering wrote.

In a statement Tuesday, Nessel said, “My office will not be bullied, and we will continue to stand up for the people of Michigan, no matter how domineering the interests we face.”

How oil companies stifled their competition

Michigan’s case argues that renewable energy and transportation markets have failed to evolve “not because clean alternatives are not viable, but because Defendants have suppressed the conditions for their otherwise-inevitable deployment and adoption.”

Oil companies purchased solar and EV patents to ensure others couldn’t use them, solicited control of renewable markets and then abandoned them, and funded powerful institutions to promote false solutions, all while using trade groups to downplay the harms of fossil fuels, according to the complaint.

The alleged conspiracy began after 1979, when Exxon’s internal research concluded that renewable energy would need to account for at least 50% of the energy supplied worldwide by 2010 in order to maintain planetary warming at “a relatively safe level.” Instead of competing to develop clean energy technologies, the companies coordinated to thwart them under the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” a group established by the American Petroleum Institute, Michigan alleges.

The Task Force was used to share information among the companies, who began what Michigan’s complaint calls a “capture-and-kill” strategy of buying up solar and electric vehicle patents and then allowing them to lapse.

Exxon, for example, obtained key patents for developing public charging stations for EVs — but never used them. After developing the first hybrid vehicle prototype, the oil giant abandoned its cutting-edge EV and solar technology research and ventures in the early 1980s. The other defendants similarly retreated in concert from their EV and solar innovations, and used patent litigation against their rivals to “deter new market entrants” from deploying the technology.

The companies went on to run advertising and lobbying campaigns attacking EVs, and falsely promoted themselves as leading the energy transition while instead pushing for technologies that they knew would continue to bolster fossil fuels, other reports show.

Michigan’s lawsuit is also the first to include reference to an elaborate hack-for-hire ring that targeted climate activists as part of the alleged conspiracy. The hacking scheme has been linked to DCI Group, Exxon’s longtime lobbying group, and is under investigation by federal prosecutors. DCI is named as the outfit that allegedly commissioned the hacking scheme in legal filings that were part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s effort to extradite an individual for trial in the U.S., according to previous reporting by NPR.

The defendants restrained the energy transition, “raised prices for Michigan consumers, and caused the United States to fall behind China and other foreign markets,” the lawsuit says.

Nessel’s case taps into the national political conversation about affordability by directly attacking the narrative that fossil fuel-derived energy is “affordable” energy. “Michigan is facing an energy affordability crisis as our home energy costs skyrocket and consumers are left without affordable options for transportation,” Nessel told the New York Times. “These out-of-control costs are not the result of natural economic inflation, but due to the greed of these corporations who prioritized their own profit and marketplace dominance over competition and consumer savings.”

An “inflection point” for climate lawsuits

Michigan was the first of eleven states with climate lawsuits against the oil industry to include antitrust claims. Other lawsuits brought by Puerto Rico municipalities included antitrust claims, but they were dismissed last year after a judge ruled they were time-barred by statute of limitation requirements. Plaintiffs in those cases have appealed.

Michigan’s lawsuit goes into significant detail about the alleged antitrust violations, said Aaron Regunberg, a lawyer and director of Public Citizen’s Climate Accountability Project. “It’s an extremely effective and precise way to describe the fossil fuel industry’s campaign of climate denial, and its ongoing strategies to block the clean energy transition,” he said. “I think it could be a real inflection point in the fight for climate accountability.”

Some other defendants in recent antitrust lawsuits include New Jersey landlords accused of colluding to raise rents, Tyson Foods, accused of price-fixing beef and pork, and tech giants accused of monopolistic behavior.

“These are powerful laws,” said Regunberg. “Now people are starting to apply them to this vast conspiracy that we’re all living the consequences of. In the United States, these big oil corporations have incredible anti-competitive sway.”

Ryan Meyers, senior vice president and general counsel for API, told outlets that the lawsuits were a “coordinated campaign against an industry that powers everyday life, drives America’s economy, and is actively reducing emissions,” despite evidence that fossil fuel emissions are on the rise. “This lawsuit also ignores the fact that Michigan is highly dependent on oil and gas to support the state’s automakers and workers,” Chevron’s lawyer, Ted Boutrous of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, told the New York Times.

Elise Otten, a spokeswoman for Exxon, told outlets that “This is yet another legally incoherent effort to regulate by lawsuit.”

According to Exxon assistant general counsel Justin Anderson, the lawsuits are “a problem” for the industry. The company has a petition pending before the Supreme Court in one of the lawsuits, brought by Boulder, Colorado, to intervene in the cases and toss them out.

An escalating effort to kill the cases

Oil companies and their allies have ramped up efforts to shut down climate lawsuits over the past year. As new cases are filed and others continue to move toward trial, the industry is escalating its push for Congress to grant it complete legal immunity from climate lawsuits. A new agenda from the American Petroleum Institute, a defendant in Michigan’s lawsuit and many others, listed “protect[ing]” oil companies from “abusive state climate lawsuits” as a top policy priority for 2026.

That could become the primary strategy for the industry if the Trump DOJ’s efforts continue to fail. Hawaiʻi, the other state to be sued by the DOJ for a planned climate lawsuit, filed its case against oil companies the following day. The DOJ’s lawsuit against the state is still pending.

The DOJ’s loss in Michigan is a reminder that the will of the Trump administration and the oil industry is not a final decree, said Regunberg: “Sometimes, what the law is can still matter.”

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include more information about a hack-for-hire scheme and DCI Group, ExxonMobil’s longtime lobbying wing.

The U.S. oil lobby aims to bulldoze European climate regulations as a top policy goal in 2026.

In a policy agenda published this month by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the country’s largest oil and gas trade association said it will ensure that laws outside of the country “do not disadvantage U.S. producers.” The API explicitly names two European climate laws it will zero in on: the EU Methane Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a law designed to force large corporations to cut emissions to deal with the negative environmental and human rights impacts of their businesses.

API’s policy directive around European climate laws comes amid precarious trade negotiations and tensions between the U.S. and the EU. President Donald Trump’s chaotic quest for worldwide “energy dominance” and allegiance to fossil fuels has worked out in the favor of American oil companies before, which doesn’t bode well for the future of EU climate regulations.

Behind the scenes, the U.S. fossil fuel industry has already spent nearly a year coordinating a campaign of attack on the CSDDD, a trove of leaked documents obtained by the research group the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), and reviewed by DeSmog and ExxonKnews, shows. Their strategy, in part, was to “amplify” concerns about U.S. trade threats and international tensions to unravel key provisions in the law.

The effort was orchestrated by the Competitiveness Roundtable, a coalition of primarily U.S. fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Koch Inc., with close ties to the Trump administration, DeSmog first reported last month. The PR company Teneo, which represents major U.S. oil companies, organized the Roundtable.

“It’s extremely worrying that the API appears to continue its campaign against the CSDDD in 2026 and wants to water it down even further, despite the massive concessions the EU adopted already following intense lobbying by U.S. fossil fuel companies,” said David Ollivier de Leth, a researcher at SOMO and author of a December report on the Competitiveness Roundtable documents.

“With all the political turmoil at the moment, it is crucial that the EU stands strong and defends its laws aimed at protecting people and the climate against even more interference from corporations and the Trump administration.”

The American Petroleum Institute did not respond to a request for comment.

The Competitiveness Roundtable met weekly, as documented in activity updates and strategy outlines, after the European Commission announced last February that it would renew talks over the legislation and draft an Omnibus package to “simplify” the CSDDD law.

In mid-December, the European Parliament approved a new version of the CSDDD stripped of several elements the coalition had opposed. Those included provisions for large companies trading in the EU to implement climate transition plans, and harmonization of civil liability laws, which would have allowed companies to be sued for failing to comply with the CSDDD across EU member states.

‘Take advantage’ of negotiations

How has the U.S. oil lobby worked to dismantle EU climate regulations so far? By exploiting frailties in the legislative process while encouraging the Trump administration to fight the law on its behalf, according to documents uncovered by SOMO.

The Competitiveness Roundtable pressured European lawmakers to ally with the European Parliament’s far-right and adopt “the most extreme position” on the CSDDD, documents reveal.

In a July 11 document, the coalition said it would “take advantage of the ‘weak’ Council negotiating mandate and disagreements on contentious articles,” like the one that would have required companies to make climate transition plans. It would “push for a blocking minority” to kill that article by assigning teams of oil majors to “establish rapporteurships” with the opposing member states, thus “divid[ing] and conquer[ing] in the Council for influence.” (A minority of governments representing at least 35 percent of the EU’s population or at least four EU member states can block an EU Commission proposal from being adopted.)

At the same time, the companies strategized to encourage U.S. officials to “have the EU use [the CSDDD] as a concession in negotiations on tariffs.”

“Amplify concerns through US foreign and trade policy channels,” reads one document from May.

In June, the coalition discussed pressuring their U.S. allies to present the CSDDD as a “key barrier” to EU-U.S. trade and tariff negotiations. That month, the Trump administration threatened to increase tariffs from 20 to 50 percent.

In July, the companies discussed using their “close ties” with the Trump administration to ensure that upending the CSDDD was a top priority for the U.S. Trade Representative, the agency handling international trade agreements.

In August, the EU agreed to propose changes to both the civil liability requirements and climate transition plan mandate of the CSDDD in exchange for a tariff freeze.

The coalition aimed to get “third countries” involved, too. After Qatar threatened to stop exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the EU if member states strictly enforced the CSDDD penalties, the coalition planned to get an op-ed or open letter published “similar to the [interview with] Qatar Energy in the FT,” referring to the Financial Times.

A day prior to a critical vote on CSDDD negotiations in October, the governments of Qatar and the United States published an open letter warning of “unintended consequences for LNG export competitiveness” if the law was not repealed or at least modified to remove the civil liability and climate transition requirements, among others.

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Involving third parties

The U.S. companies worked to disguise their role through trade associations, think tanks, outside countries, and its facilitator, PR company Teneo, sometimes the only firm listed as a lobbyist in meetings recorded by the EU’s Transparency Register even though other companies were present.

“If the message comes from so many different sides, for policymakers, it starts to feel like it’s not just you, Exxon, or any other company,” de Leth said.

In the July meeting notes, Exxon and Chevron were assigned to support lobbying against the CSDDD by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, including through a white paper that would ultimately be published in October. The paper warned that if the EU imposed CSDDD penalties on companies outside the EU, it would be “undermining international law” and “alienating key trading partners.” It also decried that the law could hold companies liable “in EU courts for U.S.-based conduct that is lawful in the U.S.”

Ironically, around the same time, Exxon and the Chamber were fighting climate laws in the United States in court. U.S. oil companies, and now the American Petroleum Institute, are also fighting for immunity from climate lawsuits in the U.S.

In August, the coalition planned to pay at least €185,000 for TEHA Group, a Brussels-based management consulting think tank, to write a paper and organize an event on the CSDDD with “those favouring our view and relevant policymakers.” TEHA group later confirmed to SOMO that Roundtable companies funded the resulting report and Exxon funded the event.

TEHA Group told SOMO that “the analyses and findings presented are the result of TEHA’s independent research and are not determined by, nor bound to, the views or positions of the supporting companies,” and that it “had sole responsibility for the professional organisation and curation of the event” sponsored by Exxon, according to SOMO.

The Roundtable also discussed a larger strategy to “activate third countries with minimal US visibility,” including organizing a “letter campaign by third countries / third country associations” to push the European Commission on its priorities.

The American Petroleum Institute and Roundtable companies have a decades-long, successful history of profoundly influencing international climate negotiations, DeSmog has revealed. Robert Brulle, a visiting professor of environment and sociology at Brown University who researches fossil fuel lobbying, called this latest effort a “casebook example of an information and influence campaign to undermine the laws of the EU by the oil and gas sector.”

The Roundtable effort has “all the hallmarks” of such a campaign, Brulle said, including coordinated lobbying, financial contributions to garner political support, facilitation by a major PR firm, and the enlistment of think tanks to obstruct climate action. “The question is whether they’ll get away with it or not.”

What comes next: LNG or liability

The final EU Sustainability Omnibus package is expected to be approved by EU member states next month, though its compliance has been pushed back until July 2029.

It’s unclear what the American Petroleum Institute plans to do between now and then — though it also included in its agenda a priority to “Promote U.S. LNG through coordinated action by the Department of Energy and State Department, using proactive energy diplomacy to support allies, strengthen global energy security, and reinforce U.S. economic leadership.”

The question of LNG exports now also looms over struggling trade negotiations between the EU and Trump. With the EU increasingly more dependent on the U.S. for LNG and Trump forcefully encouraging Europe to embrace fossil fuels as he threatens its sovereignty, EU climate policies — including the CSDDD and EU methane regulations — could once again be sacrificed for Trump and U.S. companies’ demands.

The American Petroleum Institute has lobbied for the expansion of LNG export infrastructure and has been a key U.S. opponent of EU methane regulation, the other target it listed in its 2026 agenda. Those regulations would limit companies’ ability to export far less regulated gas from the United States. According to reporting from the New York Times, the Trump administration is lobbying European lawmakers to overturn the climate laws, or at least exempt American oil companies from penalties.

“[U.S. LNG producers have] spent so much money in developing their LNG infrastructure,” said Brulle, adding that a “whole new category” of front groups have been created to sell the product overseas. “This is kind of an existential crisis for them.”

The consequences would be dire if the companies succeed in completely thwarting EU climate regulations. “Given current policies alone — with no further progress — we are currently looking at planetary warming that likely lies between 2.5​​ and 3℃, teetering on the edge of societally destabilizing planetary warming,” said climate scientist and professor Michael Mann, who has co-authored a recent book on the topic, Science Under Siege.

Some climate advocates point to the courts as the remaining avenue for accountability. Fossil fuel majors have increasingly been sued in the EU over climate harms and damages, particularly the small group of producers most responsible for global emissions, including Exxon and Chevron. Those claims will move forward, even without the harmonized liability regime proposed in the CSDDD.

“As climate impacts intensify and demands for justice mount, the fossil fuel industry has been working transatlantically to insulate itself from accountability,” said Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. “Policymakers must reject attempts by the biggest climate culprits to dodge their duties while communities suffer and the planet burns.”

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One of the U.S. oil lobby’s top priorities for 2026 will be trying to put an end to the growing number of state laws and lawsuits that could make fossil fuel companies pay billions for their role in the climate crisis.

The plans to “protect” oil companies from “abusive state climate lawsuits” were laid out in a policy agenda yesterday from the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas trade association in the country. In an effort to avoid becoming the next Big Tobacco, according to previous reporting, the oil lobby is hoping to stomp out lawsuits that could result in massive damages, unearth private company documents, and in some cases dramatically alter their marketing practices, before they reach trial.

API also said it would try to quash the “expansion of climate ‘superfund’ policies” — state laws that make oil companies fund climate disaster recovery and adaptation, two of which the American Petroleum Institute and other industry allies are challenging in court.

The agenda makes official the oil industry’s escalating lobbying effort since Trump took office to pressure Congress to pass legislation shielding oil companies from climate cases brought by dozens of state, local, and tribal governments across the country.

The industry may only have a year left with a Republican trifecta in Washington to secure a “liability shield,” which 16 Republican state attorneys general asked the U.S. attorney general to recommend to Congress last year. State bills strictly limiting state and city officials’ ability to bring climate lawsuits against oil companies have already been introduced in Utah and Oklahoma.

A separate House Republican proposal to prevent the District of Columbia from using funds to enforce its consumer protection laws against “oil and gas companies for environmental claims” appears to have been defeated for now.

The lawsuits argue that major oil companies should be held liable for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels, and despite some rulings for oil companies in lower courts, a number of cases are moving forward toward trial. The American Petroleum Institute itself is named as a defendant in many of them, including cases filed by the attorneys general of California, Minnesota, Hawai’i, Delaware, and New Jersey.

The push comes as other industries, including pesticides, Big Tech, and private prison operators, are seeking similar industry-wide legal protections. The most notorious success was notched by the gun lobby in 2005, when it convinced lawmakers to pass a law shielding gun manufacturers and sellers from lawsuits brought by victims of gun violence and their local representatives. If oil companies are as successful as the gun industry was, advocates and legal experts fear victims of climate disaster could also be prevented from holding companies accountable for their wrongdoings — at a cost to democratic rights.

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The oil industry’s lobbying in Congress comes as they continue to fight climate deception lawsuits in court. The Supreme Court has already turned down five oil industry requests to intervene in the cases before they reach trial. But a sixth petition from ExxonMobil and Suncor in a lawsuit brought by Boulder, Colorado, is currently under consideration by the justices. Like many of the other lawsuits, Boulder’s case seeks to recover damages from climate-fueled disasters, like Colorado’s deadly and destructive Marshall Fire, and for adapting to extreme weather events.

The oil industry has had a valuable ally in the Trump administration in its effort to defeat the cases. The Department of Justice supported the fossil fuel companies’ petition for the Supreme Court to take Boulder’s case. Trump previously issued an executive order ordering the Department of Justice to put an end to climate lawsuits, and the DOJ has since preemptively sued two state governments that signaled their intent to bring climate deception cases.

The Trump administration has also targeted superfund legislation, or state bills that would make oil companies pay into a fund for climate adaptation and disaster recovery based on their respective levels of emissions over a set period of time. The DOJ is suing Vermont and New York over their superfund laws, and similar laws have been introduced in other states. According to lobbying disclosures, ConocoPhillips has pressured Congress on the superfund bills.

In a Tuesday keynote address, API president and CEO Mike Sommers said that “punitive state proposals and extreme lawsuits would retroactively punish energy producers for meeting consumer demand.” Sommers labeled those who challenge the industry or oppose the record-high production of oil and gas as “denying facts, delaying progress, and ignoring the realities of rising demand.”

In an interview with ExxonKnews last month, environmental law professor and senior fellow Pat Parenteau of Vermont Law School asked: “If these cases are as frivolous as the oil companies’ briefs pretend, then why in the world are you busting your butt to get a declaration of immunity from Congress?”

This is a developing story.

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President Donald Trump hasn’t minced words in his justification for the raid and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: He wanted to “take back the oil” that was nationalized by the Venezuelan government. Trump, who promised to fulfill Big Oil’s wishes in exchange for campaign donations, told reporters over the weekend that he met with “all” of the American oil companies before the raid and that “they want to go in so badly.” Such claims have led Senate Democrats to launch an investigation into these communications.

But even as their stocks ratcheted up in the wake of the raid, companies like ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips, and Chevron are denying any involvement or advance notice of the invasion, albeit under the cover of anonymity, and industry sources are saying that Big Oil is actually hesitant to make the expensive and risky investment in Venezuelan oil infrastructure.

So what does Big Oil really want from Venezuela? How does the situation compare to past wars fought over oil? And what does it mean for the rest of us?

Investigative journalist and oil policy analyst Antonia Juhasz, who’s written several books on the topic of warmongering over oil, sat down with me to explain what’s really going on — and what could come next.

Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for length and clarity.

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Emily Sanders: What did you think when you first saw the news? How closely had you been following the attacks on Venezuela before this?

Antonia Juhasz: I’ve been following it pretty closely. It wasn’t that long ago that I was making the argument that Trump’s aggressive, illegal, deadly push against Venezuela was about oil. That was sort of pushing on the edges — he’s talking about supposed drug boats, but what this really is about is oil. And then suddenly, he started saying very clearly that it’s about oil.

It’s still unbelievably surprising. It’s still illegal. But I think the Trump administration has had a clear goal of removing Maduro and getting U.S. oil companies back in on their terms. And now the administration is saying that out loud.

I’m very much of the opinion that primarily what is happening is a combination of U.S. oil companies’ longstanding interests directing Trump’s actions, and then Trump being Trump, who’s a very difficult person to direct and control and contain. What’s happening in this administration versus the last one is that there are no guardrails, so Trump’s crazy talk becomes crazy action.

So I think there is a U.S. oil industry thread that is playing out, ultimately the way they would like it to play out, while they’re also having to deal with and negotiate Trump’s “everything is about me” modus operandi. He is envisioning himself to be and aligning himself with Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman. That’s a difficult negotiation, I would imagine, for the U.S. oil industry. But I also think that thus far, it looks like they’re going to get what they want, if they can contain Trump.

It’s really interesting to hear you say that the oil industry has a role here, because there’s been a lot of speculation that maybe this isn’t what they wanted at all.

I believe that the oil industry has been lobbying on this for a long time, and they’ve said as much outside of this immediate context. One of the things they do a lot around Trump is publicly protest too much and say, “Trump is pushing for deregulation, but that’s not what we are interested in.” They say in the media, “Just because Trump wants us to produce more doesn’t mean we’re going to.”

If the greatest lie the devil ever told was to convince us that he wasn’t real, the greatest lie the oil industry ever told us is to convince us that they don’t want oil. Where do we even begin to think about that as possible? They want to control when they produce it and how, and under what terms. They need to show a growing amount of oil that they can count as their reserves.

There are very few big pots of oil left sitting around anywhere unclaimed. The only way to get that is to increase technology, go into very expensive, technologically complex modes of production that face a lot of resistance. Venezuela is a country that [the big oil companies] were producing in not that long ago and making money in not that long ago and have wanted to get back into but on their own terms.

So I think when they protest publicly, one, it’s to distance themselves from Trump’s extremism, but two, it’s a great public negotiating tactic. They’re basically saying publicly, and the media is repeating it, “We wouldn’t want to operate in Venezuela. Oh, my God, it’s expensive, it’s technologically complex.” I actually think those are ridiculous things if you look where else they operate.

It helps their negotiating position with Venezuela, because ultimately, what this is about is: Will there be terms that will make it worth their while to go to Venezuela, and can those trust that those terms will carry into the future? Things like the cost of starting up Venezuela production, which is something that gets cited a lot.

Exxon was producing in Venezuela. So was ConocoPhillips. So was Chevron. When the Chavez regime changed the terms and took greater state control, Chevron accepted those terms. Exxon and ConocoPhillips did not. Exxon and ConocoPhillips operations were then expropriated by the Venezuelans. Exxon and ConocoPhillips believe that they are owed money, and my guess is that part of what’s being negotiated is the billions of dollars which they believe that they are owed, and then can they come back in under terms that they can trust and are favorable to them?

They [also] want greater access. Exxon is also operating in waters offshore Guyana that Venezuela and Maduro claim as theirs. Maduro has even sent military gunboats in to threaten Exxon. Marco Rubio was in Guyana in March and said we will defend Exxon from Maduro. This is a massive new production that Exxon started from scratch and has hardly cost them a penny, because Guyana is fronting the bill.

That’s what happens: The promise of production in the future entices governments to front-end the expenses for the wealthiest oil companies in the world at the start. Chevron has already said that they hope to help guide the development of the new era of Venezuela’s oil production.

This is all a negotiation. Now Chevron bought their way into offshore Guyana. [Oil companies are] also interested in offshore Trinidad and Tobago. They’re also interested in offshore Suriname. This is just one big pot of oil and gas. And what Trump has accomplished at the barrel of a gun is opening that door.

I think one of the things that the media has to be really careful with is not buying what the industry is spinning.

Trump has also talked about subsidizing the oil companies’ investments with U.S. taxpayer money, and now, his administration is saying the U.S. will control Venezuelan oil “indefinitely.”

He’s saying a lot of stuff! He also posted on Truth Social that he was directing about 50 million barrels of oil from Venezuela to the United States that he would make decisions about — he would sell it on the market and make decisions about the proceeds. According to Trump, some of those tankers were bound for China, but instead, he directed Venezuela to send them to the U.S. It’s just totally gangster. It’s just saying, “Give me this oil, or we will do worse to you than we did to Maduro.” It’s taking payment so that we won’t harm you.

I think he’s imagining the Venezuelan oil system to maintain a nationalized oil system, except with him at the top of it, deciding what’s going to happen.

At least initially, a lot of people were comparing this to the invasion of Iraq. It’s also part of a much broader history of U.S. imperialism and resource extraction in Latin America. How does this compare or differ from other wars and conflicts over oil?

Trump has long said that he thinks that the Iraq War was a failure, that he would never repeat such a thing. And there are some misconceptions on that. The Iraq War was an illegal, horrific, unprovoked war, but it turned out great for the oil companies. All of the Western oil companies were shut out of Iraq, and as a result of the war, they all came in. They got huge fields and produced a lot of oil, and continue to negotiate with the Iraq government. Obviously, it was a complete disaster for Iraqis and U.S. soldiers and other members of the military who had to fight in that war.

Oil was the explicit reason for the first Gulf War, but in the second Gulf War, George H.W. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, a former oil man, learned the lesson, and denied that the war had anything to do with oil — which, of course, it did. The U.S. has explicitly engaged in other wars for oil and other overt and covert engagements, but it’s rare for a president to say as much.

[Venezuela is] also different from Iraq, in that, I believe, from the Trump administration’s perspective, it’s over. They don’t care about remaking Venezuela. [The war in Iraq] was very driven by privatization and oil interests, but it had an imperial ambition. Trump, in his National Security Strategy and in his actions, has made clear he is concerned about a sphere of influence and about other autocrats who he wants to be on a team with.

So Putin maintains his sphere of influence, and Mohammed bin Salman maintains his sphere of influence, and Trump gets his sphere of influence. And let’s just lay it out: These are all fossil fuel-based powers, right? Putin needs a world committed to fossil fuels to maintain power. Mohammed bin Salman needs a world committed to fossil fuels to maintain power.

Trump has joined that club, and to join that club, he needs to support their position. The United States is not dependent on fossil fuels at all, but U.S. oil companies are. We don’t have to have that same agenda.

[That agenda has] broadened to now include Greenland, which I also ultimately think is about fossil fuels, since climate change is melting ice and creating more of the Arctic oil and gas accessible to drilling. It has repeatedly been called the next Middle East, the place where there will be wars for oil and the Arctic.

What does this mean for people on the ground, both in Venezuela and in the U.S., where more oil operations are going to occur, and what does it mean for the climate?

There was so much in that National Security Strategy document that had alarmed me, and somehow I had forgotten this particular line: “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.” So that is clearly the policy that this administration is advocating for domestically and internationally.

Venezuelan crude is heavy crude. It’s like Canadian tar sands. It’s much more harmful to the climate to produce and refine. Please read Adam Mahoney’s new article in Capital B, where he interviewed folks in Texas and Louisiana who are at the Gulf Coast refineries that refine the dirtiest crude in low-income Black neighborhoods. Chevron refines its Venezuela crude in its Pascagoula, Mississippi, refinery. These are already extremely hard-hit communities of color that are going to face greater pollution and greater climate harms as a result of this agenda.

And anything that keeps us locked into a fossil fuel agenda reduces the time we have on our clock to avert the most disastrous harms of the climate crisis. This administration is taking time off of that clock as aggressively as it can.

For the people of Venezuela, we’ve already seen increased repression from the current Venezuelan government against any dissidents and journalists. This is an agenda that will further strengthen the hand of the U.S. oil industry and the oil industry more broadly, and those who it supports. That is going to make it more difficult to address democracy anywhere.

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Hey there, Emily here. Folks, you already know it’s been an extremely shitty year for anyone who cares about the future of our planet, let alone basic rights and dignity for all of the people who live on it. But as I wrote at the end of last year: “People are still showing up to protest and make their voices heard. Communities are still taking goliath corporations to court. Investigators and reporters are still exposing the truth and those who try to bury it.” Even in these dark times.

So, truly: thank you for taking the time to read the stories I bring you here. If we’re ever going to see accountability from the companies and politicians profiting from harm to our communities and climate, we need to document everything. And if we’re ever going to build a better future, we need readers like you to stay informed and help share stories that can lead to change.

With that, here are just a few of the topics and trends ExxonKnews reported on over the last year:

Oil and gas companies and their allies in the U.S. government escalated efforts to block accountability and silence their critics.

• Oil companies started lobbying Congress for a liability shield from climate lawsuits. I wanted to know what happened after the gun industry got something similar.

• Exxon kept taking California to court to try to ward off accountability efforts. After the state filed a lawsuit alleging Exxon lied about plastics recycling, Exxon sued the state back, claiming it was being defamed. Then Exxon sued the state again over its climate disclosure laws, which would force the company to account for its emissions, claiming the laws would violate the company’s free speech rights.

• Speaking of suppressing free speech, pipeline giant Energy Transfer won a massive jury verdict against Greenpeace over the organization’s role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests — a worrisome end result of a years-long legal saga seemingly intended to silence and erase Indigenous-led resistance. That story is still ongoing.

• State and local governments’ climate deception lawsuits faced new hurdles in court and from the Trump administration, but still, a major new case was filed in the U.S. this year. Oil companies once again asked the Supreme Court to get involved — we should learn their decision soon.

• It should not come as a surprise that most of the law firms that caved to President Trump’s threats this year also work to defend oil giants accused of harming the public.

Oil and gas interests pushed state legislatures to pass bills that define gas as “clean energy.”

• With The Lever, I reported on the legislative trend to redefine gas as “clean” or “green” energy — including what that means for states’ renewable energy portfolios — and exposed new details about the gas industry interests behind the push.

• For The Lens, environmental reporter Delaney Dryfoos and I were the first to report that Louisiana was considering one of these bills, which ultimately passed.

The fossil fuel industry got more tax credits to use carbon capture to drill for more oil — and Trump killed efforts to make the process of transporting CO2 safer.

• In collaboration with The Lever, climate journalist Dana Drugmand and I covered the Trump administration’s withdrawal of safety rules for carbon dioxide pipelines, and I dove into how states are approaching serious safety issues as the oil industry pushes for new pipelines.

• Environmental reporter Delaney Nolan at The Lens (yes, two Delaneys at The Lens!) and I dug deep into how Exxon got such a pipeline approved in close proximity to communities in St. James Parish, Louisiana — by skirting public feedback and downplaying safety concerns.

• Exxon billed carbon capture as a climate solution, where emissions would be permanently stored underground — but it’s using the tech to drill for even more oil. After the Trump administration and Congress rewarded the process with additional tax credits, I reported on one such Exxon project that made the switch.

• With HEATED, I took a look at Exxon’s promise to use carbon capture for “low carbon data centers” — its latest greenwashed plan to sell more gas.

A couple of other favorites:

• This story about the people and organizations tracking the oil industry’s methane pollution after the government proposed a major greenhouse gas reporting rollback.

• And this investigation with Joseph Winters at Grist into an unusual (at least at the time) partnership between a government agency and the country’s largest plastics industry lobbying group.

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Help us do more of this work next year!

I’m so grateful to the outlets and reporting partners who worked with me over the last year to make these stories the best they could be and to get them out to new audiences, locally and nationally, for a bigger impact. If you’re a reporter, researcher, or editor who wants to partner with us, reach out at emily@exxonknews.org.

If you have tips and want to reach out securely, message me via Signal @emilysanders.84.

If you’re already a subscriber, please share and encourage others to subscribe in the new year.

We’ll have some exciting updates about this project for you in 2026. See you then!

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This is a special joint edition of ExxonKnews and HEATED, a newsletter written by journalist Emily Atkin. HEATED is a must-read for anyone who cares about holding powerful people, corporations, and systems accountable for the climate crisis. Sign up HERE.

ExxonMobil has a new plan to sell more methane gas in a warming world: Frame it as a climate-friendly solution for artificial intelligence.

The fossil fuel giant is proposing to build massive gas-fired data center campuses — complete with power plants and pipeline infrastructure — to power the immensely energy-intensive AI boom. It’s also promising that this will be totally fine for the planet, because Exxon will remove 90 percent of the emissions from those facilities with taxpayer-funded carbon capture.

“We can offer a low-carbon data center where more than 90% of the emissions are captured and abated,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in an October earnings call.

He repeated the claim a few weeks later in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We can provide low-carbon data centers,” Woods said, “removing about 90 percent plus of the carbon to help solve the emissions associated with this short-term need and demand.”

Woods’s claims were not challenged in either venue. But according to energy experts, they should have been, because carbon capture has never been used successfully at a commercial gas-fired power plant in the U.S., and no existing carbon capture facility has ever consistently achieved a 90 percent capture rate.

“I’d like to see a commercial scale facility that runs for a period of time that’s actually capturing that level of CO2,” said Anika Juhn, an energy data analyst at the independent think tank Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “But I think we are seeing an example of the great greenwashing that [carbon capture] is, and people jumping on that bandwagon.”

And people are indeed jumping on the bandwagon, despite carbon capture’s shaky track record. Last week, major utility company NextEra Energy told investors it would work with Exxon to build a “carbon-abated” gas-powered facility at a yet-to-be-determined site in the Southeast, where it will be connected to the oil giant’s existing carbon dioxide pipeline network running through Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The companies will then sell the 1.2 gigawatt site to a potential big tech customer that will use the capacity — enough to power 750,000 homes.

It remains to be seen whether Exxon and NextEra will actually be able to capture all the carbon emissions they say they will. But if they can’t, their promise of “low-carbon” AI could easily transform into a sprawling build-out of high-polluting methane gas infrastructure — one with lasting consequences for both the climate and communities nearby.

A taxpayer-funded greenwashing campaign

Exxon isn’t the only fossil fuel company powering the AI boom. Other companies including Chevron, Energy Transfer, and Enbridge have made their own forays into directly supplying data centers with gas pipelines and power plants.

But Exxon is one of the only companies explicitly telling investors that it will build “low-carbon data centers” using carbon capture. Woods said that “in the near to medium term, [Exxon is] probably the only realistic game in town” to accomplish that feat.

It’s unclear where Woods’s confidence comes from, as Exxon has never used carbon capture on a commercial-scale gas-fired power plant. Its only major operating carbon capture project, the Shute Creek facility near its gas field in LaBarge, Wyoming, is used to capture emissions from gas processing. But as of 2022, about 95% of the carbon captured there was sold for enhanced oil recovery — a process of injecting carbon underground in order to extract more oil. Around 3% was sequestered, and the remaining 50% was vented into the atmosphere.

As a whole, carbon capture technology has been plagued by a history of failure. Half of the carbon capture projects announced over the past decade have been cancelled or delayed, according to data and analysis firm Wood Mackenzie. And when it has worked, the technology has mostly been used to drill for more oil.

“Everywhere and anywhere it’s been applied, [carbon capture] has been a financial boondoggle,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “There’s nothing sustainable about this proposal.”

Even if they did launch and work as promised, carbon capture projects would likely fall short of companies’ emissions-saving claims. Projections typically exclude emissions produced by the equipment itself, methane leaks during gas extraction and transport, or when the carbon capture system is offline. The EPA also does not independently verify the capture rates companies self-report—and that was before the agency proposed to stop collecting greenhouse gas reporting data altogether.

There’s also ample evidence that oil companies know carbon capture won’t work as promised. Beginning in 2016, Exxon discussed ways to avoid publicly acknowledging that carbon capture was limited in its capacity to reduce emissions, according to internal documents and company whistleblowers. But the company marketed the technology to the public and policymakers as a climate solution anyway.

To make this risky investment, Exxon will have help from taxpayers. Today, companies receive $85 per ton of carbon captured in tax credits under 45Q, a federal tax incentive the company spent years lobbying for under the premise that it would encourage significant emissions reductions.

What, exactly, would happen to the carbon once it’s captured? That’s unclear. While Exxon says it would store the carbon emissions produced at its data center site, there are frequently no details from the company as to where its captured carbon actually wound up. And there are few places to securely store captured carbon, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Typically, the carbon is stored in depleted oil and gas fields or saline aquifers deep underground in sedimentary rock formations. But the majority of those are off limits because they are likely to leak the carbon back into the atmosphere, contaminate groundwater, or trigger earthquakes (among other geographical and practical limitations).

Without federal oversight and often operating in states with lax regulatory enforcement, those details might not matter much to companies. The technology has primarily been used for enhanced oil recovery, which is usually considered storage by industry, even though the process results in more emissions. Enhanced oil recovery is now equally rewarded by tax credits, thanks to restructuring of 45Q by the Trump administration and Congress.

“Once the CO2 gets into that pipeline, we don’t really know where it’s going, what is going to be done with it,” said Juhn.

Exxon did not respond to requests for comment for this story by the time of publication.

What happens if Exxon’s “low-carbon” data centers fail?

The stakes are high if Exxon’s carbon capture promises don’t come to fruition, as has been the fate of some of the company’s other “low-carbon” investments.

Powering AI requires staggering amounts of energy and produces equally staggering emissions. Data centers could make up anywhere from 6.7 to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption by 2028, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory calculated. Another study, published last month by researchers at Cornell University, found that at its current rate of growth and without “substantial reliance on highly uncertain carbon offset” mechanisms, U.S. data centers could annually emit as much carbon dioxide as 10 million cars by 2030.

Energy experts have warned that building new fossil fuel projects is incompatible with preserving a livable climate, and that carbon capture “cannot be used to maintain the status quo.”

At the local level, advocates worry the buildout will come with new and compounded harms to nearby communities. Exxon says its new data center will be sited in Mississippi or Louisiana — close to the company’s expansive carbon dioxide pipeline network, which is used to transport the carbon captured from industrial sources. This year, the Trump administration revoked federal safety regulations over carbon dioxide pipelines, which have caused disastrous ruptures and leaks in both states.

The companies have acquired 2,500 acres of land for the project, according to NextEra, the largest renewable developer in the country (perhaps lesser known for its long list of controversies or for helping fund Trump’s ballroom).

Carbon capture is facing increasing backlash across the political aisle in Louisiana, where the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources — an agency that has faced scrutiny for failing to enforce regulations on the oil and gas industry — now has regulatory oversight over the state’s CO2 injection wells. Already burdened by pollution from extensive petrochemical development along the Gulf Coast, residents have found themselves battling additional pipelines and “low-carbon” facilities in their backyards.

Now come gargantuan data centers. This year, three new Entergy gas plants were approved in northeast Louisiana to power a $10 billion data center owned by Meta. After the first 15 years, the cost of those plants will fall onto ratepayers.

James Hiatt, a former oil and gas worker and founder of the local advocacy group For A Better Bayou, said communities have had little say in the fate of such projects. “It’s these economic developers and these profiteers from elsewhere that continue to come into our state and promise jobs and prosperity and deliver nothing,” he said, except for “the climate chaos that we are experiencing every day.”

For A Better Bayou was one of more than 230 local and national advocacy groups last week urging Congress to impose a national moratorium on data centers over their massive electricity and water consumption, contributions to climate change, and role in driving up energy prices. Voters in political battlegrounds across the country are also protesting the buildout, which could saddle ratepayers with liabilities if the AI investment bubble bursts.

For Hiatt, the Exxon deal is an ominous sign of things to come. After decades of fossil fuel development in the state, “Louisiana should have streets paved with gold,” he said. “The reality is, we’re subsidizing billion-dollar corporations to cause harm to our own communities.”

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This piece is co-published by ExxonKnews and DeSmog, a leading outlet covering climate disinformation and accountability.

Facing a growing number of lawsuits that could hold them liable for billions of dollars in climate damages, oil companies for the fifth time in three years are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the cases before they can reach trial.

This time, ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy want the justices to overturn a decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled that a lawsuit brought against the two companies by the city and county of Boulder could move forward earlier this year. The Colorado Supreme Court found that the state law claims against the companies were not preempted by federal law.

The potential stakes of the case were brought into sharp focus in 2021, when the Marshall Fire — the most destructive wildfire in Colorado state history — killed two people, burned down more than a thousand homes in Boulder County, and caused at least $2 billion in damage.

The companies have previously expressed to the Supreme Court their fear that the cases could result in “massive monetary liability.” Now, stopping them as soon as possible is “a big priority not just for ExxonMobil, but for the entire industry,” said Exxon assistant general counsel Justin Anderson at a November panel discussion hosted by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal advocacy group funded in part by fossil fuel interests.

“We’re seeing a lot more courage from people and groups and industry that’s recognizing that we have a problem, and we’re not going to wait another decade” to do something about it, he said.

Exxon’s latest request asks the Supreme Court to resolve what the oil giant calls “one of the most important questions currently pending in the lower courts”: whether the cases against Big Oil are preempted by federal law. It’s the same question the justices already declined to review in January, in a virtually identical petition in a case brought by Honolulu that is now proceeding toward trial.

The climate deception lawsuits filed by dozens of state, local, and tribal governments argue that Exxon and other oil and gas companies deceived the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and should be held accountable under state laws, including public nuisance and consumer protection. Many of the cases at stake, including Boulder’s, aim to recover the local costs of more frequent and severe climate disasters, like heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms.

But the fossil fuel industry has characterized the cases as attempts to regulate interstate and even global greenhouse gas emissions through the courts, instead of through Congress under the Clean Air Act.

The oil companies’ latest Supreme Court request comes alongside an escalating fossil fuel industry offensive against the cases, which has included lobbying Congress for immunity from lawsuits entirely. Its supporters in government have also taken up the cause on several fronts, and the Trump administration is backing its Supreme Court effort.

“The only thing that has changed [since this question was last before the court] is the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania — the facts and the law haven’t changed,” Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School, said in an interview.

The question before the court

Boulder argues that the energy companies’ petition comes too soon, and that there would need to be a final decision on the merits of a case to warrant Supreme Court review. Like the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court’s ruling the Supreme Court declined to review, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling only allows the case to move forward in state court.

“As much as defendants might not like that outcome [that Boulder’s lawsuit is allowed to proceed], their displeasure is simply not a reason to federalize a state law case,” Richard Herz, chief litigation attorney of EarthRights International, a nonprofit legal advocacy group helping to represent Boulder, said in an emailed statement.

But Exxon and Suncor argue that the Colorado decision “deepens a clear conflict” on the preemption question, which only the Supreme Court can resolve. “Our constitution does not allow one state or a municipality within that state to export its terrible public policy and impose that on everyone else in the country,” Anderson said at the Federalist Society panel. “That’s the clarity that we need from the Supreme Court.”

The public nuisance violations alleged by Boulder are “not because anything that’s going on in Guyana drifted over there,” Anderson later added, referencing Exxon’s operations in South America. “And if it was, Boulder wouldn’t have any right to tell Guyana not to [produce oil].”

Some lower court judges have been persuaded by Big Oil’s preemption arguments. Those rulings are mostly being appealed, but the two state Supreme Courts to review the issue have sided with the governments bringing the lawsuits.

The preemption argument was rejected last week by a Connecticut state court judge, who denied Exxon’s motions to dismiss in Connecticut’s consumer protection lawsuit against the oil giant. In his ruling, Judge John B. Farley wrote that the case is not preempted by federal law because it “seeks to regulate only the defendant’s marketing conduct” that allegedly deceived the public about fossil fuels, not to limit emissions.

The oil companies have relied heavily on a 2021 ruling from the Second Circuit in an early climate lawsuit brought by New York City, which affirmed the lawsuit’s dismissal on the grounds that it was preempted under federal law. But that ruling was “an outlier,” Victor Flatt, an environmental law professor and associate director at Case Western University School of Law, told ExxonKnews. Unlike its successors, the case was filed in federal court and did not center deceptive marketing claims as the cause of injury. State Supreme Court judges said that decision had “limited application” and that reliance on the ruling is “misplaced.”

“There may be unanimity on this panel that it makes very little sense to try to tackle the problem of climate change through dozens of lawsuits in dozens of jurisdictions around the country,” William & Mary Law School professor Jonathan Adler said during the Federalist Society event. “But the policy arguments can’t compensate for the lack of a legal basis to preempt these suits.”

Exxon and Suncor’s latest petition now claims that the lawsuits are precluded by “the structure of our constitutional system” itself — a completely new legal theory, said Vermont Law School’s Parenteau.

“The Supreme Court has never issued a decision saying, in this area of the law, the states have no authority or jurisdiction whatsoever,” he said. “They’re swinging for the fences on that one because they know that the argument that the Clean Air Act preempts is, shall we say, sketchy.”

‘A big priority’ for Big Oil — and now Trump

Exxon’s Anderson made clear that he is prioritizing shutting down legal efforts by its “absolutely relentless” adversaries. “I didn’t just move my family to Texas from the East Coast to have a bunch of activists and ambitious politicians bankrupt the company,” he said during the Federalist Society panel.

“I have to win every case that is brought,” Anderson added. “They just need to find one they can get through — and that’s why it is so important for the Supreme Court to take this case.”

Oil companies “are pushing extraordinarily hard — they’re going to use every possible theory they can, they’re going to use every possible case they can” to prevent the lawsuits from going to trial, said Flatt. “They potentially face an enormous amount of damages, but it’s also about the dam bursting — if one of these [cases] goes through, it shows that it’s feasible.”

Robert Percival, a law professor and director of the University of Maryland’s environmental law program, told ExxonKnews the industry is likely concerned about the disclosure of evidence supporting the plaintiffs’ deception claims. The companies “know win or lose, the stuff that will come out of trial will make them look so bad in the public’s mind,” Percival said.

Oil companies are not alone in pushing for an end to the lawsuits — they have also solicited help from government allies. After Trump issued an executive order for the Department of Justice to oppose the cases, the DOJ submitted an unsolicited brief in Exxon and Suncor’s petition, urging the Supreme Court to throw the cases out. More than 100 Republican members of Congress also filed a brief with the court, asking the justices to shield oil companies from potential liability that “would restructure the American energy industry if not bankrupt it altogether.”

At the same time, the Trump administration is working to repeal the Endangerment Finding — the scientific basis for greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act. Doing so could undercut the industry’s core argument that the cases are preempted by federal law.

After the companies reportedly began lobbying Congress for an immunity waiver themselves, 16 Republican state attorneys general urged the DOJ to recommend legislation that would reinforce federal preemption and create a liability shield for fossil fuel companies, similar to the one gun manufacturers obtained from Congress in 2005.

“If these cases are as frivolous as the oil companies’ briefs pretend, then why in the world are you busting your butt to get a declaration of immunity from Congress?” asked Parenteau.

A numbers game

When Exxon last petitioned the Supreme Court to review Boulder’s lawsuit, on a jurisdictional question in 2023, its lawyers called the case an “ideal vehicle” for the justices to review because it “involves a smaller group of defendants and thus is less likely than those [other climate deception] cases to present recusal issues ” — meaning justices with financial ties to oil companies named in the other cases might not recuse themselves from this one.

Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett both have connections to defendants in other cases that could be implicated by a decision in Boulder’s, raising ethical questions of whether they should recuse themselves from considering the case. While Alito has a mixed history of recusing himself from climate deception lawsuits, Coney Barrett has never recused herself from one since sitting on the Supreme Court — although she regularly recused herself from cases involving Shell as a circuit court judge. To grant a writ of certiorari, the type of petition oil companies have filed, four out of nine justices will need to agree to take the case.

“If cities and counties and states are not allowed to even sue the oil companies for the damage that unquestionably their products are doing, then that means simply the public will have to pay 100 percent for all of that damage, all of the adaptation, all of the resilience,” said Parenteau.

“These are not necessarily going to be easy cases for the plaintiffs,” said Percival. “They really have to dig deep into the science of climate attribution, which has been advancing by leaps and bounds. But there’s no reason not to let them try on the merits.”

ExxonKnews is a project of the Center for Climate Integrity, which has filed amicus briefs in support of state and local governments in their lawsuits against Exxon and other fossil fuel majors, including before the Colorado Supreme Court. Emily Sanders, the author of ExxonKnews, had no involvement in the creation or filing of those briefs.

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“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements,” the “father of advertising” David Ogilvy wrote in 1963. His global ad agency went on to create campaigns for oil giant BP, including helping it coin the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” as part of a rebranding effort.

“If you make [advertisements] look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers,” Ogilvy claimed. “You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.”

A new book out this week, Content Confusion: News Media, Native Advertising, and Policy in an Era of Disinformation, finds that Ogilvy got it wrong. Author Michelle Amazeen compiles her and others’ research on “native advertising,” a practice where corporations work with in-house content studios at news outlets to create ads that are designed to look and feel just like the publication’s journalistic articles. The book delivers a stark warning to outlets that native ads are eroding the public’s trust in media and poisoning the role of journalism in democracy.

Many of the native ad campaigns documented by Amazeen, a researcher and professor at Boston University, were created by mainstream media outlets on behalf of major oil companies and their trade associations over the past decade. The campaigns often advertise controversial technologies like carbon capture as climate solutions, portray fossil fuel companies as climate-friendly, or misrepresent their role in the energy transition.

In some cases, outlets run native ad campaigns for corporate clients that undermine their own journalism. One such native ad created by the Washington Post’s content studio claims utility Southern Company is helping to lead the energy transition, despite their role in blocking it and ramping up their reliance on fossil fuels. It also claims energy demand can’t be met by renewables alone, even while the Post’s own reporting demonstrates how transitioning to all renewables can actually decrease energy demand.

Another native advertisement for Exxon created by the New York Times’ T Brand studio as part of its “Unexpected Energy” campaign touts the company’s research into algae biofuels and still runs on their website — even though Exxon dropped its algae research years ago. In an award application obtained during a congressional investigation, media and ad agency Universal McCann wrote that it worked with the T Brand Studio to replicate the “Timesian” voice in order to “mirro[r] the award-winning journalism of the world-renowned publication.” The campaign set out to combat “a volatile news cycle [that] often owns the share of voice, not always providing an accurate depiction of ExxonMobil.”

T Brand Studio’s creation of that algae advertisement was not mentioned in the Times’ own coverage of Exxon’s other algae ads, part of its reporting on another congressional investigation into climate disinformation.

“Here then, we have evidence that the Times can be bought so that its branded messages are, indeed, meant to compete against its news agenda,” Amazeen writes.

Amazeen’s prior studies have found that readers almost always confuse such ads with real reporting. That confusion comes partly from a lack of standardized disclosure language clarifying the post was a sponsored ad, which is sometimes not detected by readers at all. The problem only worsens when the posts are shared on social media, where disclosures required by the Federal Trade Commission often disappear entirely.

“We’re in a time right now where it’s so hard to tell the provenance of so much of what we see online or and whether it’s authentic or not,” Amazeen said, pointing to the proliferation of AI-generated content. “Theoretically, news orgs are supposed to be the bulwark against all this fake stuff, but they’re contributing to the problem and compromising themselves.”

Through conversations, polling, and survey responses, Amazeen found that when readers do realize they’ve been served a native ad by a news outlet, they often become angry and lose faith in any content coming from that publication — even when it’s true journalism. Those responses indicated that people are more resentful of the publication than the advertiser.

“I’m tired of the news being owned by corporations,” one reader wrote in response to a social media post of a real native ad created by the T Brand Studio for Exxon. “Why is The NY Times pushing Exxon ads as if they are real posts… NY Times has no principles. They only care about money,” wrote another.

That consumer backlash “hurts the publications, not the advertiser, because news consumers see the publication as promulgating fake news,” Amazeen writes.

Jill Abramson, a former executive editor at the New York Times, said she was disturbed by the Times’ decision to run native ads. “I saw that, and still see it, as deliberately causing confusion among readers and viewers of mainstream news,” she said.

Apart from worrying whether readers were being deceived, Abramson was concerned about the impact on journalists, who might not be comfortable with an in-house ad agency at the outlet. She also said she opposed a policy that allows people working for the Times’ advertising division to write news for the paper after a year-long “cooling-off period.”

News outlets often claim there are strict barriers between their editorial and advertising teams. But “that proverbial wall is much more porous than outlets let on,” Amazeen said. She spoke with marketing strategists at those content studios, who told her they ask journalists to share information about the stories the editorial team is working on in meetings with corporate clients. She also found that the ads are frequently written by former journalists themselves, some of whom are sought out for hire by media content studios after facing layoffs at corporate outlets.

Amazeen explains how corporations first realized that “advertising could be used to sell more than mere products” — it could “shape cultural sentiment, social values, and political ideologies.” In the 1970s, fossil fuel companies began using advertorials, or ads disguised as editorials. Eventually, they used advertorials to promote doubt about climate science.

Both native ads and advertorials are cited in a growing number of lawsuits that accuse fossil fuel companies of deceiving the public about their role in climate change. The New York Times’ “Unexpected Energy” campaign for Exxon was cited in a lawsuit brought by the Massachusetts attorney general against the oil company. Another, created by the Washington Post for Shell, was cited in a lawsuit brought by New Jersey’s attorney general.

“This should be of concern to news organizations that own in-house content studios,” Amazeen warns in her book. “Although the Federal Trade Commission guidelines on native advertising only briefly mention liability, they do state that content creators are not immune from liability simply because they represent a client.”

Today, Americans are growing less confident in companies’ promises to address climate change, according to a new survey Amazeen co-authored. But even if the ads themselves don’t work to change the narrative, their existence degrades readers’ trust in the real reporting, Amazeen found. She posits that may be a “secondary benefit” for oil companies sponsoring climate-related newsletters, like Politico’s Morning Energy and The Washington Post’s Climate 202.

Native ads can also lead to an “agenda-cutting effect,” where outlets report less on their sponsors — a win-win for corporate interests that may be causing harm to the public. In another analysis of content across five years from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, Amazeen found that just over half the time when media outlets created branded content for corporate clients, their coverage of that corporation steeply declined. (Abramson said that during her tenure at the Times, “never once was a big advertiser able to influence anything to do with news coverage.”)

Still, evidence of that dynamic should be especially concerning as the climate crisis gets less and less airtime from politicians and media outlets, all while climate disasters get worse, tipping points whiz by, and oil companies produce more oil despite a global glut. Mainstream media outlets laying off climate staff en masse and failing to cover the story while inviting more corporate money and influence on-board, even while the public largely demands climate action, are helping to facilitate that silence.

As climate journalist Amy Westervelt writes, “Getting governments to take the action citizens want on climate requires closing the perception gap, something the media may have helped to create in the first place, but is also uniquely positioned to fix.”

Amazeen takes a similar stance, positioning climate change as just one of the major issues where the media has prioritized corporations over the public. “They’re squandering this opportunity” to help arm the people with the information they need to participate in democracy, she said.

While Amazeen maintained that media outlets should stop creating native advertisements altogether and “figure out how to keep [themselves] financially solvent without deceiving your readers,” she suggested that better standardization of required disclosures would at least help alleviate the problem. She also said outlets should be required to make their native ads available in a repository akin to Meta’s Ad Library. In the meantime, she is building her own repository for native ads promoting fossil fuel interests as part of her ongoing research into climate disinformation.

If you come across such an ad, you can deposit it into Amazeen’s repository here. Her book, Content Confusion, is available from the MIT Press.

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ExxonMobil has sued California over a pair of state laws that force big companies to disclose financial climate risks to shareholders and the full greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their businesses — arguing that the measures violate the company’s free speech. It’s the latest example of Exxon, the biggest U.S. oil company, wielding the First Amendment as both a shield and sword in court.

The California Climate Accountability Package, which passed in 2023, would make companies doing business in California disclose emissions that result from the use of their products — also known as “Scope 3” emissions. That category makes up the vast majority of emissions from the oil and gas industry, but companies including Exxon have fought to avoid making them transparent.

Exxon’s new lawsuit argues that by requiring it to account for the entirety of its emissions, the laws would force it to “espouse California’s preferred framing for issues of immense public concern” and to “describe its emissions and climate-related risks in terms the company fundamentally disagrees with.” The lawsuit asks a U.S. District Court to stop California from enforcing the laws.

The case targets the country’s only existing disclosure laws for greenhouse gas emissions, even as the federal government ends emissions reporting and required climate disclosures at the federal level. But it’s also part of a years-long trend of corporations using First Amendment arguments in an attempt to shield themselves from scrutiny and regulation, experts say.

“​​This is part of a long history of companies including Exxon trying to use the First Amendment to block regulation that they dislike,” said Amanda Shanor, an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who has chronicled some of those high-stakes efforts. “That’s not really how the First Amendment works or is supposed to work.”

The fossil fuel industry, in particular, has leveraged First Amendment arguments to repel criticism over their role in the climate crisis. In recent years, oil companies have claimed that lawsuits across the country accusing them of misleading the public about climate change violate their free speech rights. From Oregon to Massachusetts, the District of Columbia to California, Exxon has brought motions to dismiss states’ and municipalities’ climate deception lawsuits under anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statutes — laws that were developed to protect the free speech of press and civil society groups.

One of those motions, responding to lawsuits filed by the state of California and eight California municipalities, argues that oil companies “have long exercised their rights to participate in the public debate over which policies best balance the challenges posed by a changing climate and the world’s increasing need for energy,” and that “This lawsuit threatens Defendants’ continued participation in those debates.”

The law firm representing Exxon in that motion, O’Melveny and Myers, is the same as in the latest First Amendment lawsuit against California. The argument seeks to cast Exxon’s public statements on climate change as political speech, which concerns public policy and has stringent First Amendment protections, rather than commercial speech, which does not enjoy the same level of protections.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist and professor at Brown University and director of research at the Climate Social Science Network, who has co-authored briefs in support of climate deception lawsuits. “Their fallback defense is freedom of speech — ‘nobody ever said we have to be truthful.’”

Mobil Oil, now part of ExxonMobil, helped pioneer the idea of corporations as citizen-like entities with free speech rights in an effort to revive their reputation back in the 1970s. Exxon and Mobil backed other corporations’ First Amendment lawsuits, arguing that companies should be free to express their views on “matters of public concern,” including climate change. In Supreme Court cases like First National Bank v. Bellotti and Citizens United v. FEC, the idea of corporate free speech was expanded to usher in nearly unlimited corporate money in politics.

Still, none of oil companies’ anti-SLAPP arguments has been validated by judges. Under existing First Amendment law, Shanor explained, Exxon’s lawsuit against California’s disclosure laws should be very unlikely to succeed, too.

“Exxon is grasping at straws,” said Maggie Coulter, a senior attorney for the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Courts have already rejected companies’ weak arguments rebranding their greenwashing and misinformation as free speech.”

Exxon and other corporations could be hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court might eventually use such a case to alter the boundaries between political and commercial speech — or “change what the rules are in a way that will favor them,” Shanor said.

“You just keep throwing the same basic core argument up there, wave the flag of the First Amendment and say, ‘leave us alone.’ Kind of like holding up a cross to a vampire,” said Brulle. “Now they’re playing it out in California to try to build a record in the court.”

‘Disproportionate blame’ on Exxon

According to Exxon’s lawyers, California’s disclosure framework would place “disproportionate blame on large companies like ExxonMobil for being large.”

“ExxonMobil understands the very real risks associated with climate change and supports continued efforts to address those risks,” reads the complaint. Such frameworks “send the counterproductive message that large companies are uniquely responsible for climate change no matter how efficiently they satisfy societal demand for energy, goods, and services.”

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said that Exxon should “let the readers decide.”

“If Exxon doesn’t like California’s framing, it’s free to supplement it with its own framing and offer an explanation of why it thinks that one is better,” he said.

The company’s own framing hasn’t gone over well so far, at least with climate experts. Exxon is the top investor-owned carbon emitter in the world, according to the latest Carbon Majors database by researchers at the nonprofit think tank InfluenceMap, and one of the most profitable. But Exxon officials have often blamed the company’s emissions largely on the habits of consumers. In an interview with Fortune last year, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said that “the people who are generating the emissions need to be aware of and pay the price … for generating those emissions,” and referred to Scope 3 emissions as “essentially the emissions of our customers.”

Just before that interview, Exxon sued its own shareholders in an effort to block a proposal for the oil giant to limit its Scope 3 emissions. The lawsuit was dismissed, but not before shareholders revoked their proposal.

“What Exxon is asking for in this case is to say that shareholders should have no right to question companies on climate-related issues,” Danielle Fugere, president & chief counsel of shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, told ExxonKnews at the time.

Both that lawsuit and another last year brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against the California Air Resources Board, which also alleged California’s climate disclosure laws violated the First Amendment, were argued by law firm Gibson Dunn — a favorite of fossil fuel companies. The industry has also used the firm to pursue massive legal damages from their opponents, including this year’s nearly $667 million verdict against Greenpeace for its role in the protests against Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline.

Earlier this year, after California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of nonprofits sued Exxon for a “decades-long campaign of deception” about the efficacy of plastic recycling, Exxon sued them back under defamation laws — a clear example of a SLAPP, legal experts said.

Though climate deception lawsuits face growing attacks from fossil fuel allies and the Trump administration in the United States, they have seen recent successes abroad — a Paris Court just ruled that French oil giant Total’s advertising about “net zero” and leading the energy transition was misleading consumers. And over the last week, two new lawsuits have been brought against major polluters in the UK and Germany by victims of climate disasters. “I think that the evidence is pretty solid that Exxon and Mobil and all sorts of other folks knew all about climate damages and lied about it, and it’s just going to get more solid the more information we get,” said Brulle.

California officials said they would fight to uphold the disclosure laws, which could soon show up in other states, too. “These laws are about transparency,” said Christine Lee, a spokesperson for the California Department of Justice, in a statement. “ExxonMobil might want to continue keeping the public in the dark, but we’re ready to litigate vigorously in court to ensure the public’s access to these important facts.”

A Paris Court ruled Thursday that French oil giant TotalEnergies is misleading consumers with claims that it aims to reach “net zero” emissions and help lead the energy transition even while it makes plans to increase its fossil fuel production, marking the first time an oil company has been forced to remove such claims by a court of law.

By promoting its “ambition to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050” and “to be a major player in the energy transition” as it pursued new oil and gas projects across the world, Total misrepresented its environmental commitments in violation of European Union consumer protection law, the court ruled.

Total “deliberately made an environmental claim likely to mislead consumers, by leading them to believe that by buying its products or services, they were participating in the emergence of a low-carbon economy,” according to a translation of the court’s decision.

The French court ordered Total to cease those statements within a month or face a fine of 10,000 euros per day, and to display the court’s ruling on its website for 180 days.

The case, filed in 2022 by NGOs Greenpeace France, Friends of the Earth France, and Notre Affaire à Tous, is part of a growing global wave of climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. One of the biggest and fastest-growing categories of those lawsuits are cases relating to false climate or environmental advertising, according to a report by Oil Change International and Zero Carbon Analytics last year.

The groups filed the lawsuit after Total rebranded itself in 2021 as TotalEnergies and launched a campaign touting its new “carbon-neutral approach, together with society,” along with goals to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. But as of 2023, the company was the world’s second-largest developer of “carbon bombs,” or massive fossil fuel extraction sites, reported Le Monde. Total is still expanding its oil and gas operations and ownership of fossil fuel assets in Uganda, Namibia, Iraq, the United States, and elsewhere across the globe.

“By recognizing that Total’s communications mislead consumers, the French courts are finally tackling the impunity of fossil fuel greenwashing that Total had enjoyed until now,” said Justine Ripoll, a campaigner at Notre Affaire à Tous. “It sends a clear message: climate misinformation is not an acceptable business strategy. Citizens have a right to honest information, and fossil fuel companies must be held accountable for the reality of their activities.”

How the law can tackle greenwashing

The complaint cites Total’s advertisements on its website and on TV, radio, press, and social media to argue that the company’s claims of carbon neutrality by 2050 and role in the energy transition were based on omissions and misrepresentations of its fossil-fuel-driven operations. The court found that those claims “have manifestly substantially altered the economic behaviour of a normally observant and circumspect consumer whose choice, while still guided by price, increasingly incorporates the environmental qualities of the product or service.”

Other companies headquartered in the EU have begun to face similar judgments and regulatory actions for greenwashing. In Amsterdam, a court ruled last year that Dutch airline KLM misled consumers with vague claims about its environmental ambitions. The European Commission and EU authorities sent letters to 20 airlines advising them to avoid similar misleading claims. In 2023, a ruling in a lawsuit filed by a German NGO ​​Deutsche Umwelthilfe forced Total to stop advertising its heating oil as “CO2 compensated.” All but one of nine other concluded cases accusing oil companies of misleading advertising resulted in decisions against the companies or the companies removing their advertisements as of September 2024, according to Oil Change International’s report.

The NGOs that won this most recent judgment against Total also argued that the company’s promotion of natural gas and biofuels as part of the energy transition was misleading. But the Paris civil court found that those advertisements were not sufficiently linked to the sale of Total’s products to consumers. In a press release, Total noted those dismissed claims and said that the judgment did not target its advertising to consumers but rather statements on its website, which it promised to modify.

The ruling contrasted Total’s claims with reports from major scientific bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, which say continued investments in fossil fuel projects and increased oil and gas production are incompatible with carbon neutrality.

The decision comes alongside still-mounting evidence that fossil fuel companies have misled the public about the reality of their businesses. A study this month from researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona found oil companies contribute less than 1.5% to global renewable energy capacity, despite prior public commitments that they would be — as Total put it — a “major player in the energy transition.” With just 1.59% of its total primary energy generated by renewables, Total had the largest installed renewable energy capacity of the oil companies assessed in that study.

“One of the key reasons we’re not protecting [the climate] is that our information ecosystem is increasingly polluted,” said Jonathan White, a lawyer for ClientEarth, a legal advocacy nonprofit that filed a legal intervention in support of the NGOs. “The oil industry relies on this misleading messaging because consumers want a green energy provider, and they also use this narrative in policy lobbying, in statements to investors, in press engagements. The law can do something about that.”

What the ruling means elsewhere

In the EU, consumer protection cases are assessed under the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive — a consumer protection law with core rules that are implemented by individual member states. In September 2026, the EU will also implement new rules to protect consumers from greenwashing. The ruling against Total “sets a persuasive authority in the EU,” meaning it could influence decisions in other jurisdictions, said White.

The legal landscape is different in the United States, where the oil and gas industry has argued that its speech on climate change is protected under the First Amendment — and helped germinate the idea of corporate free speech preceding Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United — even as it chisels away at the First Amendment protections of its opponents. Courts have so far rejected that argument, and legal experts say misleading commercial speech is not protected.

“The U.S. First Amendment tradition often makes it much harder for courts to conclude that speech is deceptive, though of course that line can still be crossed,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment scholar and professor at Harvard Law.

Still, states and municipalities across the country have brought consumer protection claims against major oil and gas companies — some of which reference the companies’ more recent climate claims.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s climate deception lawsuit against major oil companies, for example, argues they are “Misleadingly promoting their companies as being in alignment with international goals to reduce carbon emissions and reach net-zero emissions, when in reality they are investing in maintaining and/or expanding their fossil fuel businesses.”

Oil companies are now asking Congress to pass legislation shielding them from such lawsuits. Over the summer, House Republicans attached a provision to a spending bill that would prevent the District of Columbia from using funds to enforce its consumer protection law against “oil and gas companies for environmental claims.”

Even in the United States, where protections for corporations are stronger, the ruling against Total is worth paying attention to, said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School.

“Some courts could be persuaded by the analysis that an oil company has crossed the line between ‘aspirational goals’ and outright deception,” Parenteau said. “If we had [a ruling] like that in the United States, it would be earth-shaking.”

Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, said the ruling sends a clear message to the fossil fuel industry.

“Deception has long been the weapon of choice for the oil and gas industry in its fight to avoid regulation, escape accountability, and keep the public hooked on its polluting products,” Reisch said. “This decision makes it harder for the fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis to falsely claim they’re solving it. Oil giants everywhere are on notice: science and the law see through industry disinformation. And the people will see them in court.”

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“I fundamentally believe we have a core role to play in the energy transition: the capabilities that we have, the scale that we bring, the insights, and everything else,” Ben Van Beurden, then the CEO of oil giant Shell, told Bloomberg in 2020. Shell should not be referred to as an oil company, he said.

Five years later, only .35% of the primary energy Shell produces comes from renewable sources — and the company contributes an even more miniscule fraction to renewable energy capacity across the globe, according to new research published yesterday in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The first-of-its-kind study shows that the world’s biggest oil and gas companies contribute less than 1.5% to global renewable energy — contradicting industry claims to be pioneers in the energy transition.

The study, conducted by researchers Marcel Llavero Pasquina and Antonio Bontempi at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, is the first to calculate the oil and gas industry’s share of renewable energy produced worldwide. The results — “that renewable energy remains a tiny part of the oil and gas industry portfolio” — are at odds with prior public commitments made by fossil fuel giants, the authors found.

Llavero Pasquina and Bontempi analyzed the world’s largest 250 oil companies’ ownership of wind, solar, hydro and geothermal projects according to data tracked by the NGO Global Energy Monitor. They found the oil industry’s renewable contributions to be “anecdotal” and their own diversification toward clean energy projects “negligible.”

“Our study questions the claim of the oil and gas industry to be ‘part of the solution’ to the climate crisis with empirical evidence,” the authors wrote.

None of the U.S. oil companies whose data was examined in the study — including Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental — have operating renewable assets, Llavero Pasquina said. (Although Chevron says it will use renewable energy to power some fossil fuel facilities, its first fully-owned wind farm for that purpose has been idling for years). Companies including Shell, BP, and Eni — who once claimed to embrace wind and solar energy, in contrast to their American counterparts — generated less than 0.5% of their energy from renewable sources.

The new research shows that “fossil fuel companies have done almost nothing to build a renewable energy future,” said Kelly Trout, research director at the advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International. “Their record of delay and decades of deceit make it crystal clear: fossil fuel companies are the biggest cause of the climate crisis, and their political power is the biggest barrier to solving it.”

“An unwavering focus” on fossil fuels

For years, oil and gas companies protested criticism about their emissions — and deflected scrutiny over their role in the climate crisis — by emphasizing that they were essential for the world to transition to renewable sources.

“As we transition, our oil and gas business will continue providing the energy the world needs, while funding our investments in wind, solar and other renewable energy sources,” then-president of BP America, David Lawler, told members of Congress during a 2021 hearing into the spread of climate disinformation.

But BP and other fossil fuel companies have since shed their renewable commitments, citing costs and “an unwavering focus on growing long-term shareholder value.”

“Our optimism for a fast [energy] transition was misplaced,” said BP chief executive Murray Auchincloss earlier this year in announcement of the company’s “fundamental reset” to expanding oil and gas production.

While backing away from its commitments to renewable energy and doubling down on oil and gas, fossil fuel giants have spent big to escape regulation and oversight. Oil and gas companies and trade associations have continued lobbying to weaken and kill policies to reduce emissions. In the U.S., the industry spent $219 million helping to elect a government that now reportedly provides “concierge, white glove service” to fossil fuel companies seeking fast-tracked permitting while blocking renewable projects. Last year, Exxon sued its own shareholders in an attempt to block a proposal for the company to limit its greenhouse gas emissions.

Fossil fuel interests funded disinformation about renewable energy that is now being used as justification to obstruct wind and solar deployment. Major oil companies have switched to claiming they will decarbonize their oil and gas operations with contested ventures like carbon capture and “renewable natural gas,” which have so far proved to be vehicles for increased fossil fuel production. The transition to renewable energy — which just outpaced coal for electricity generation, a new report found — is happening without them.

Still, fossil fuel companies have been invited to participate in global climate negotiations, sponsor and collaborate on academic research, and weigh in on governments’ policy decisions “on the basis that the industry is a key player in an energy transition,” said Llavero Pasquina, the study’s lead author. “This narrative has been swallowed by institutions around the world.”

The researchers hope their new study will change that.

“After decades of empty words, it is time for governments, universities and public institutions to recognize that the fossil fuel industry will always be part of the problem, not the solution to the climate crisis,” Llavero Pasquina said, adding that oil companies’ “contribution to the fight against the climate crisis should be judged solely by how much fossil fuel they leave in the ground.”

In the courts

The new study could be used as evidence in lawsuits that accuse major oil and gas companies of climate deception — including through advertisements and marketing claims about their role in the energy transition.

“Exxon’s failure to inform ordinary consumers that its touted clean energy investments comprise only a miniscule percentage of its expenditures — and that it intends to increase fossil fuel production and sales in the future — renders these advertisements materially misleading,” reads the most recent complaint, filed by the state of Hawai’i in May.

The new research “adds to the overall picture of deception by the oil companies” and “could influence a jury if it gets admitted” as evidence at trial, said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School.

The study also has “important implications for potential liability” under climate disclosure laws, like those soon to be implemented by California and already in place in the EU, which require companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions and climate risks, Parenteau said.

“There are not oil and gas subsidies,” Chris Wright, the top energy official for the U.S. government — which will now provide more than $34 billion a year in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry — told a room full of reporters and climate advocates last week.

Five days later, the Energy Department announced it would deliver $625 million in new subsidies to the coal industry after adding “Tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies” to an ever-expanding list of words its officials are banned from using.

Still, when Wright, the U.S. Energy Secretary and a former fracking executive, sat down for a live interview with New York Times’ David Gelles at Climate Week, he objected when Gelles said that the oil and gas industry enjoys massive tax incentives and publicly funded subsidies. “In the United States, oil and gas and coal are huge taxpayers, and don’t have any subsidies that I’m aware of, and I’ve been in the business for forty years,” Wright said.

Wright’s false claim was quickly amplified by industry allies denying that fossil fuels are propped up by government funding. “The idea that oil and gas receive disproportionately large subsidies is one of the most destructive lies told by the anti-fossil-fuel movement,” wrote Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” and founder of fossil fuel lobbying group the Energy Freedom Fund, in a Facebook post sharing the interview clip. “Good for Chris Wright to set the record straight.”

It was a perplexing assertion from Wright, the lead energy official in the Trump administration, which has allocated more than $4 billion in additional subsidies per year since coming into office, according to the new analysis by advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International (OCI).

OCI calculated fossil fuel production subsidies by adding up tax deductions, low-cost access to public lands, direct appropriations, and other financial backing from the federal government based on the definition of fossil fuel subsidies established by the World Trade Organization. The group found that subsidies had nearly doubled since the group’s last analysis in 2017, totaling an estimated 30,000% return on investment for fossil fuel companies. The new estimate is likely an undercount due to a lack of transparent government data, OCI said.

And it doesn’t include the new $625 million for the coal industry, including $350 million to revive or retrofit existing coal plants. “These funds will help keep our nation’s coal plants operating,” said Wright, days after he denied that such funds exist. Many coal plants across the country have closed as cheaper renewables and gas have replaced the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.

Why would the U.S. Energy Secretary claim to know nothing about fossil fuel subsidies?

Industry interests “know that it’s not a good look for our public money to be flowing massively to fossil fuel executives and investors and driving the climate crisis as opposed to actually supporting working people,” said Collin Rees, U.S. Program Manager at OCI and the lead author of the report.

The fossil fuel industry spent decades and millions of dollars lobbying for some of the subsidies it now receives, including for contested technologies such as carbon capture. Though carbon capture was sold to the public as a climate solution, companies now receive additional tax incentives under the Trump administration for “enhanced oil recovery” — or the process of injecting captured carbon into wells to access hard-to-reach oil reserves.

That’s not counting “implicit subsidies,” or the external costs taxpayers bear on top of energy prices — including from climate change and local pollution, according to the International Monetary Fund.

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, has been outspoken on what he calls the fossil fuel industry’s “free-to-pollute business model.”

“Nothing even comes close” to fossil fuel industry subsidies, Whitehouse told ExxonKnews in a statement. “As the corrupt Trump Administration destroys affordable, clean energy, it’s shoveling even more subsidies at the failing coal sector. That’s taxpayer money propping up an industry that turns around and charges those same taxpayers higher energy prices.”

Fossil fuel interests have denied or minimized external costs, too, though they are likely to increase exponentially as the federal government strips environmental and health protections surrounding oil, gas, and coal production. In a recent comment to the EPA encouraging regulators to revoke the scientific basis underpinning greenhouse gas regulation in the United States, the industry trade group Domestic Energy Producers Alliance argued that there has been “No increase in hurricanes globally; no U.S. flood correlation with [greenhouse gases],” and that “Food, water, wildfire, and drought data all show resilience and improvement.”

Genevieve Guenther, author of “The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It,” said she believes fossil fuel proponents want to hide the industry’s reliance on subsidies because it “undermines their narrative that the industry does not receive government assistance, but simply supplies a product that the public demands.”

On top of the subsidies granted by the Trump administration, fossil fuel companies enjoy specific tax benefits not available to other industries, including larger capital cost write-offs, deductions, and deferments.

“As we see in the actions of the Trump administration, the U.S. government tilts the playing field in favor of oil and gas,” Guenther said. “Their mantra is that fossil energy is ‘affordable’ energy, but the price of fossil fuels is subsidized by the public and their costs externalized on to the public. In fact, once it’s installed, clean energy is the cheapest energy in human history — without subsidies.”

Killing renewables: “the pro-freedom thing”

While denying the existence of fossil fuel subsidies, industry allies are claiming that clean energy sources are the true benefactors of government assistance — and working to strip what funding renewables did gain during the Biden administration.

“While a few narrow subsidies exist and should be eliminated, the real outlier in the tax code isn’t fossil fuel subsidies but the scale of preferential treatment granted to renewable energy technologies,” reads a June blog from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank funded by the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil, which has long advocated against climate action.

“If you can’t rock on your own after 33 years, maybe that’s not a business that’s going places,” said Wright at a press conference last week where he announced the cancellation of $13 billion in funding allocated for clean energy technologies.

Epstein, who recently lobbied Republicans in Congress to further eliminate tax incentives for renewables, claims to help politicians “do the pro-freedom thing on energy.”

Rees, of OCI, pointed out that it wasn’t until the last couple of years that renewables “may have achieved something close to parity with fossil fuel subsidies, after over 100 years of fossil fuel subsidies.”

“The response was immediately to remove all of those subsidies to renewables and triple down on fossil fuel subsidies,” he said. “You want to talk about a free market — that’s what Trump and the GOP chose to do once it was finally something resembling a level playing field, if you ignore all past history.”

Even without subsidies, renewables will continue to be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels, the latest annual report from global financial advisory firm Lazard found.

Networks of fossil fuel front groups have orchestrated campaigns with local community groups to block renewable projects from getting off the ground, reports from Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab and the watchdog organization Energy and Policy Institute have shown.

Quid pro-quo

When Trump was campaigning for president, he offered to fill a wish-list for fossil fuel executives who spent big to help him win. The fossil fuel industry spent a total of $219 million to influence the 2024 election, including money given to Congressional candidates — and the benefits have paid off for all parties involved.

Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia, for instance, helped lead the addition of a credit for metallurgical coal production in the Republican megabill over the summer. Justice’s family owns Bluestone Coal, a company that stands to benefit from that credit, E&E News reported.

“There are some very explicit ways that they are helping themselves,” said Rees. “It is actually impossible to separate oil executives from the people making these decisions in government.”

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[Note: A correction has been made to reflect that coal companies have received greater subsidies in the past.]

This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.

A California bill now awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) signature would set a pathway to eliminate the state’s trailblazing moratorium on pipelines used to transport carbon dioxide. The fossil fuel industry lobbied to shape the Democrat-sponsored legislation, which could allow such pipelines to be constructed without strict distance requirements around communities and sensitive wildlife habitats — raising fears that leaks or ruptures of the asphyxiant gas could occur close to people’s homes.

The hazards of carbon dioxide pipelines became apparent in 2020, when a pipeline rupture outside the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, emitted a cloud of highly condensed carbon dioxide that suffocated residents and halted emergency vehicles as it displaced oxygen in the air. Emergency responders have since likened the incident to a “zombie apocalypse.”

By eliminating one of the country’s only carbon dioxide pipeline moratoriums and failing to include a safety provision that only states can take to insulate communities from these projects, advocates say California, a longtime climate leader, could be setting a dangerous precedent. Across the country, other states are grappling with a massive pipeline buildout bolstered by the Trump administration, which awarded the fossil fuel industry with increased tax incentives for carbon capture and withdrew pipeline safety regulations.

California’s 2022 moratorium was designed to stay in place until federal regulators “concluded” updated safety rulemaking on carbon dioxide pipelines. But those federal draft rules were rescinded by President Donald Trump earlier this year, and the rulemaking has been sidelined to a list of “long-term actions.” With more than a dozen carbon capture projects hanging in the balance, fossil fuel interests, including Chevron, the Western States Petroleum Association, and California Resources Corporation, lobbied state lawmakers for legislation that would allow such projects to move forward.

The new bill, sponsored by Democratic State Sens. Henry Stern and Jerry McNerney, instructs the state fire marshal to draft carbon dioxide pipeline safety rules by July 1, 2026, that are at least as protective as the ones previously drafted under the Biden Administration, triggering the state to lift the moratorium. The new regulatory framework would also require that new carbon dioxide pipeline projects be reviewed under the state’s environmental permitting law, among other requirements.

“If we don’t empower our state to impose safety standards with this bill, there will be no safety standards at all — the federal backstop has collapsed,” said Stern.

“After the federal government’s regulatory process stalled, from day one we worked closely with a broad group of stakeholders to develop this policy out of concern that the carbon pipeline regulations that could come out of this new Administration might simply be a rubber stamp for the oil industry to build pipelines however they wanted,” said California Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D), who sponsored the assembly’s version of the new carbon pipeline bill.

But the bill does not include a setback requirement — a required distance from “sensitive receptors” including homes, hospitals, and schools — which advocates have said is essential to protect people in the event of a leak or rupture.

Bill Caram, executive director of the advocacy group Pipeline Safety Trust, said he was disappointed that California didn’t set a better example for other states regarding carbon dioxide pipeline setback requirements. Federal regulators at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration don’t have the authority to enact such requirements. But states do, and it’s “one of the strongest tools they have to ensure that communities are safe from pipelines carrying these hazardous materials,” he said.

Nationally, carbon dioxide pipelines are being proposed primarily in rural, lower-income communities and Black neighborhoods, according to a study published in the May issue of Nature.

If industry pressure continues to dictate the terms of carbon capture and carbon dioxide safety legislation, more communities — many of them already beset by fossil fuel industry pollution — could see such pipelines in their backyards. And fossil fuel companies could continue branding their oil and gas operations as part of a “lower-carbon future.”

“We don’t think that there should be toxic waste pipes running through our communities,” said Dan Ress, staff attorney at the California-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. “We think [carbon capture] is being used to prop up the fossil fuel industry in a way that is very bad for climate, very bad for public health, and very bad for justice.”

Lobbyist Pressure Steers Pipeline Buildout

Environmental justice groups had advocated for a 3,200-foot setback, or “health protection zone,” for carbon dioxide pipelines in California, similar to the one the state has for oil and gas drilling. Oil producers in the state are currently challenging the drilling setback in court. Ress said oil lobbyists refused to compromise on any sort of setback during negotiations over California’s new pipeline bill.

According to sources inside the California legislature — who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the negotiations more freely — the industry would have opposed the bill if it included a required setback, so lawmakers prioritized mandating the safety regulations drafted under Biden, including safeguards for leak monitoring and emergency response protocols.

Oil interests, including Chevron, the Western States Petroleum Association, and California Resources Corporation have helped to defeat environmental legislation in the state before. Earlier this year, industry allies helped kill a bill that would have allowed victims of climate disasters to seek compensation from major oil companies. And oil lobbyists fiercely opposed another proposal to make major polluters pay into a fund designated for climate adaptation projects, which has since stalled.

California’s pipeline legislation does establish a two-mile emergency planning zone for carbon dioxide pipelines within which operators are prohibited from building if there are one or more “sensitive receptors” in the area, like schools, homes, and hospitals. But companies can skirt that ban if they present engineering models to local regulators demonstrating that “the risk of exposure to carbon dioxide is within an acceptable range.”

Sponsors of the legislation argued that those engineering models, which can help identify how carbon dioxide would travel in the event of a leak and inform routing plans, are a more appropriate safeguard than setbacks.

“I understand the desire to just pick a number around setbacks, but science is still evolving here, so we didn’t want to just lock in an arbitrary distance,” said Stern, one of the senate sponsors. “Instead, we’re giving communities a voice through a public process that otherwise wouldn’t exist to ensure these critical climate projects are done safely.”

But advocates say some local agencies have already demonstrated their willingness to expose communities to dangerous pollution from the fossil fuel industry, despite public outcry.

“For many of these projects that are in historically oil and gas towns, the counties have already determined the acceptable level of risk from oil and gas drilling that we know causes cancer and asthma and has left people exposed to pollution for decades,” said Isabel Penman, a California-based organizer at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch.

Newsom and some other state officials appear to be moving toward compromising with the oil industry, despite their previous aims to crack down on oil companies’ alleged price gouging and transition the state off fossil fuels. Over the summer, Newsom and Democratic legislators, including Stern, negotiated a plan with the industry to boost oil drilling in heavily polluted Kern County, citing concerns about gas prices. Newsom signed that bill this month.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is still advancing a climate deception lawsuit against major oil companies and a plastics deception lawsuit against ExxonMobil. He recently told an audience at Climate Week NYC, the world’s largest annual climate event, that additional lawsuits could follow.

Still, the line between lobbyists and state policy has been blurred: Some of the same lobbyists opposing carbon dioxide pipeline setback requirements on behalf of Calpine, California Resources Corporation, and other industry groups also worked as regulators between lobbying stints, according to lobbying data compiled by California advocacy nonprofit Consumer Watchdog. Those lobbyists, along with Chevron and Western States Petroleum Association, did not respond to requests for comment.

California Advocates Weigh In

Local organizers are particularly concerned about the unique risks of carbon dioxide ruptures and worry about relying on industry to properly monitor for leaks and provide equipment and training to under-resourced emergency departments. Breathing in highly pressurized carbon dioxide can cause unconsciousness, seizures, coma, and even death within minutes at high concentrations. Years after the disaster in Satartia, residents still reported symptoms of brain injury.

“We are very untrusting of the oil and gas industry to carry this out safely, because they’ve already had their infrastructure leaking for so many years,” said Ileana Navarro, a community organizer and air quality specialist with the Central California Environmental Justice Network.

Navarro works with communities in the San Joaquin Valley, which has some of the worst air quality in the country. She worries carbon capture could extend polluters’ social license to operate.

The fossil fuel industry has long sold carbon capture as a climate solution, and California officials are now promoting it as a cornerstone of the state’s plans to reduce emissions.

“California has established net-zero carbon emissions goals that include ambitious carbon removal targets,” said Assemblymember Petrie-Norris when explaining the importance of the new bill.

But growing evidence and internal oil industry documents and whistleblowers indicate that the technology is not an effective or substantial way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — especially as the industry increases production of climate-warming oil and gas in California and elsewhere.

One California carbon capture project, the Montezuma Carbon Hub, is proposing to expand to the Bay Area, where it could use a 45-mile pipeline to collect carbon dioxide from local refineries and power plants, including the Chevron refinery in Richmond and the Marathon refinery in Martinez. The carbon dioxide would then be stored underground near the Siusun Marsh in Solano County, according to the project application.

Earlier this month, a group of residents and advocates formed a coalition to oppose the Montezuma project.

“A leak of toxic concentrated carbon dioxide would be catastrophic to humans, wildlife, and our wetlands,” said Bonnie Hamilton, a pediatrician and longtime Solano resident with San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility, at the coalition’s launch.

“There Are Going To Be Failures”

California has effectively banned the use of captured carbon for “enhanced oil recovery,” a process that involves injecting captured emissions into wells to recover hard-to-reach oil reserves. But in other states, most carbon capture is used to facilitate more drilling — and will now receive additional tax incentives from Trump and Congress.

In places like Louisiana, already an epicenter of carbon capture deployment, that means more oil production and more carbon dioxide pipelines — which are being proposed closer than ever to communities in the state. One Exxon carbon dioxide pipeline recently approved by St. James Parish, Louisiana, would be built along the Mississippi River near primarily Black neighborhoods, 155 feet from the closest business and 355 feet from the nearest residence.

A different Exxon carbon dioxide pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, leaked last year while operators reportedly failed to monitor the facility, and many residents said they didn’t hear about the incident until checking social media. Earlier this month, Sulphur residents learned the company was planning to use eminent domain to run another such pipeline project directly through people’s property. After outcry from residents and legislators, Exxon withdrew its applications.

Louisiana legislators introduced bills earlier this year to require setbacks for carbon dioxide pipelines in the state, among other additional safeguards, but they failed to pass.

Illinois, the only other state besides California with a carbon dioxide pipeline moratorium, is also set to end its pause on July 1, 2026. South Dakota lawmakers this year advanced a similar moratorium, but amid opposition from the American Petroleum Institute and carbon capture company Summit Carbon Solutions, the bill failed to pass the Senate.

With federal safety rules on carbon dioxide pipelines eliminated and no replacements in sight, it will be up to states to keep communities safe, said Caram of Pipeline Safety Trust.

“You need strong safety regulations on how the pipeline is built and how it’s operated, but you also need strong routing and siting standards to ensure that communities are fully protected,” he said. “Because no matter how strong your regulations are, there still are going to be failures.”