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climate lawsuits
Congress, Don't Shield Big Oil From Accountability
As city leaders from across the US gather this week to discuss our collective priorities, let’s reaffirm our commitment to protect access to the courts for all our communities.
Nov 18, 2025
As local leaders from across the country gather in Salt Lake City this week for the annual National League of Cities conference to advocate for the interests of local governments, the challenges of protecting and preparing our communities for the future are clearer than ever. Local governments and their taxpayers are being stretched thin. Between the rising cost of living, increasingly severe weather disasters, escalating maintenance costs, and other expenses, local leaders like us in Colorado, Wisconsin, and beyond are having to make tough decisions about our priorities—and the last thing we need is to have the tools at our disposal taken away from us.
And yet, there is a campaign in Congress right now that aims to do just that.
Goliaths of industry, including pesticide and oil companies, have been lobbying Congress for legal liability shields that would block communities from holding them accountable in court for any of their bad actions. No matter your politics, we should all agree that it’s dangerous and wrong to hand any industry a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card.
Bayer, the maker of Roundup, is asking Congress to put an end to the lawsuits the megacorporation is facing for the health harms its product has caused for years—and some lawmakers are actually pushing legislation that would do so.
Broad legal shields for entire industries would not only threaten local governments’ ability to pursue accountability, but also violate a core value of our justice system.
Similarly, lobbyists for oil and gas companies are lobbying federal lawmakers for a legal shield that could effectively put the fossil fuel industry above the law and block dozens of state and local lawsuits the companies are currently facing for deceiving the public about how their products’ fuel climate change. Municipalities in Colorado, one of our home states, are among the communities demanding that Big Oil companies pay their fair share of the climate costs taxpayers are now facing to adapt to an increasingly severe climate. Like tobacco and opioid companies, fossil fuel companies have long known their products were dangerous, but pushed disinformation to cover up the evidence and protect their profits, while our communities pay the price.
Plainly, our right to access the courts is under attack. Local leaders understand the power that comes from being able to access the courts, which is why the National League of Cities—which represents more than 2,700 cities across the country—has a standing commitment to oppose any federal legal shield that would undermine municipalities’ authority to bring affirmative litigation.
These attacks on our right to access the courts cannot stand. Broad legal shields for entire industries would not only threaten local governments’ ability to pursue accountability, but also violate a core value of our justice system. When bad actors lie to the public and cause harm in our communities, the legal system is supposed to serve as a fair venue—where arguments and evidence are considered—but that system is not possible when you take away our ability to present arguments and evidence at all.
Imagine if Big Tobacco or opioid manufacturers had secured legal immunity from Congress—communities decimated by cancer and addiction would never have been able to fund treatment centers and public health campaigns without first filing accountability lawsuits only made possible through access to the justice system.
As city leaders from across the US gather this week to discuss our collective priorities, let’s reaffirm our commitment to protect access to the courts for all our communities and speak with one voice across party lines to ensure that our congressional representatives do the same.
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'Time to Make Polluters Pay': Study Ties Fossil Fuel Pollution Directly to Deadly Heatwaves
"We're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms," said one campaigner.
Sep 11, 2025
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature establishing "that the influence of climate change on heatwaves has increased, and that all carbon majors, even the smaller ones, contributed substantially to the occurrence of heatwaves," is fueling fresh calls for fossil fuel giants to pay for the deadly impacts of their products.
With previous "attribution studies," scientists have generally looked at single extreme weather events. The new study, led by Sonia Seneviratne, a professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, is unique for its systematic approach—but that's not all.
"Past studies have mostly looked at emissions from people and countries. This time, we're focusing on the big carbon emitters," explained lead author Yann Quilcaille, a postdoctoral researcher in Seneviratne's group, in a statement.
"We are now at the point where we recognize the serious consequences of extreme weather events for the world's economies and societies—heat-related deaths, crop failures, and much, much more," he said. "People are concerned about who contributed to these disasters."
The researchers found that climate change made 213 heatwaves from 2000–23 "more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed." They also found that global warming since 1850-1900 made heatwaves 2000-09 about 20 times more likely, and those 2010-19 more likely.
"Overall, one-quarter of these events were virtually impossible without climate change," the paper states. "The emissions of the carbon majors contribute to half the increase in heatwave intensity since 1850-1900. Depending on the carbon major, their individual contribution is high enough to enable the occurrence of 16-53 heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible in a preindustrial climate."
Anybody surprised? Emissions from 14 fossil fuel giants drove 213 major heatwaves since 2000, making >50 deadly ones 10,000× more likely and adding up to +2.2°C increased intensityAll while knowing the impact of GHG emissionsCorporate negligence =Human costwww.theguardian.com/environment/...
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— Ian Hall (@ianhall.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 12:37 PM
While the study highlights the climate pollution of "14 top carbon majors," including the governments of the former Soviet Union, China (coal and cement), India (coal), and the companies Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Shell, Pemex, and CHN Energy, Quilcaille said that "the contributions of smaller players also play a significant role."
"These companies and corporations have also primarily pursued their economic interests, even though they have known since the 1980s that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming," the researcher added.
In a review of the study for Nature, climate scientist Karsten Hausten from Germany's Leipzig University pointed out that "Quilcaille and colleagues' results, as well as the attribution framework that they have developed, provide a tool to continue the legal battle against individual companies and countries."
"This study is a leap forward that could be used to support future climate lawsuits and aid diplomatic negotiations," he wrote. "Finally, it is another reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric will not make climate liability go away, nor will it reduce the ever-increasing risk to life from heatwaves across our planet."
Hausten was far from alone in recognizing how the new research could contribute to climate cases. Jessica Wentz, senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, pointed to the International Court of Justice's landmark advisory opinion from July that countries have a legal obligation to take cooperative action against the global crisis.
"Initially, when a plaintiff needs to show that they have standing in a case, they have to allege that they have an injury that is traceable to the defendant's conduct," she told CBC, suggesting the new study will help establish that connection.
"The methodologies that underpin these types of findings can also be used in more fungible ways to look at not only the contributions of the carbon majors, but presumably you could use a similar approach to start looking at government," Wentz said.
Christopher Callahan, a scientist at Indiana University Bloomington who has published research showing that economic damages from rising extreme heat can be tied to companies such as Exxon, said that "this study adds to a growing but still small literature showing it's now possible to draw causal connections between individual emitters and the hazards from climate change."
"There is a wealth of evidence now that major fossil fuel producers were aware of climate change before the rest of the public was and used their power and profit to undermine climate action and discredit climate science," he said, adding that it is "morally appropriate" to hold companies accountable for the emissions of their products.
Callahan also gathered some of the relevant research in a series of posts on Bluesky, noting that on the same day that this new study was published, another team "quantified the thousands of heat-related deaths in Zurich, Switzerland that can be attributed to climate change—and showed that dozens of these deaths are due to the emissions from these individual firms."
"Together, this science—and the broader attribution science that preceded it—are building a clear scientific case for climate accountability," he concluded.
Several US states and municipalities in recent years have launched lawsuits and passed legislation designed to make Big Oil pay for driving the deadly climate emergency—and earlier this year, drawing on an essay in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, an American woman filed the first climate-related wrongful death suit against fossil fuel companies.
In a Wednesday statement to The Guardian about the new study, Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said that "we can now point to specific heatwaves and say: 'Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.'"
"When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn't have happened otherwise," she added, "we're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms."
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Trump Is Trying to Spook States out of Suing Big Oil—Why They Shouldn’t Back Down
Given the shakiness of the administration’s lawsuits, what really matters is whether state and local officials have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats.
May 14, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten any institutions that could check his administration’s ongoing drive toward authoritarianism, there’s been a stark contrast in responses to his mob boss-style attacks. Some targets—like Harvard, which vowed to fight Trump’s assault on universities, or the law firm Perkins Coie, which recently scored a judicial win holding Trump’s actions against the firm unconstitutional—have seen their stature in their respective fields skyrocket,. Others—like Columbia University or the law firm Paul Weiss, which both immediately folded at the first sign of aggression from Trump—have been publicly, and perhaps permanently, tarred as feckless cowards.
This contrast between courage and gutlessness appeared once again earlier this month in response to Trump’s latest dictatorial salvo: an all-out assault on behalf of the fossil fuel industry against state and local efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for deceiving the public about climate change.
Right now, 1 in 4 Americans live in a jurisdiction that is fighting to put Big Oil companies on trial for their climate lies and make them pay for the catastrophic damage they knew decades ago that their products would cause. The fossil fuel industry concedes that it faces “massive monetary liability” in these cases, and has been growing more and more desperate to stop plaintiff communities from having their day in court. In the last few years Big Oil has asked the Supreme Court to block these cases on five separate occasions. Recently, industry front groups tied to Leonard Leo ran a pressure campaign pushing the court to take up the issue.
Making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.
But the court has denied Big Oil every time, and so fossil fuel companies have had to shift to Plan B: asking the man they spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing to fulfill his end of the quid pro quo. The Wall Street Journal reported that oil executives asked Trump during a White House meeting for legal help against the cases, and their lobbyists are pushing congressional Republicans to include legal protections for the fossil fuel industry “in a coming Trump-endorsed bill.”
In his typical oligarchical style, Trump has gone all in to protect his corporate backers. On April 8 Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to “take all appropriate action” to stop states that have “sued energy companies for supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” And this month the Department of Justice filed a series of lawsuits attempting to prevent Hawaii and Michigan from pursuing climate litigation.
We’ve become so inured to the extreme misconduct of this administration that it’s often hard for any new scandal to stand out. But it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the staggering corruption of this new broadside on the rule of law.
Trump is taking unprecedented action on behalf of an industry that understood decades ago that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “great irreversible harm,” “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges,” and “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Instead of warning consumers about this existential threat, they waged a massive disinformation campaign to prevent the public from understanding the dangers of climate change. They made trillions of dollars from this deception, leaving regular Americans to pay the price.
And regular Americans certainly have been paying that price. They’ve been paying in higher insurance costs driven by the “violent weather” that Big Oil companies knew their products would cause. They’ve been paying in homes, businesses, and livelihoods lost in climate-driven “deluges.” And in far too many cases they’ve been paying with their own “suffering and death.” That is why many of the communities hit hardest by these disasters have sued—under the same long-established state laws used to hold Big Tobacco and opioid profiteers accountable—to force the companies responsible for global warming to contribute at least something to the often devastating climate costs that right now are falling entirely on the shoulders of regular Americans.
Trump, of course, doesn’t care about regular Americans experiencing, in his words, “supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” His concern is limited entirely to his Big Oil donors, who are terrified of having to defend their climate lies to a jury composed of the people they screwed over.
Unfortunately for Big Oil, we live in a federalist system of government that does not allow a president to unilaterally block a state from pursuing valid state-law claims in state courts. Indeed, legal experts seem to agree the suits filed by the administration against Hawaii and Michigan are “shockingly flimsy.”
That doesn’t mean Trump’s legal maneuvering isn’t a potent weapon, however. As we’ve seen with Trump’s assault on universities and law firms, the goal of these attacks is not winning in the courtroom. It’s all about intimidation—which means that what really matters is whether state and local officials have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats.
Some leaders are demonstrating that they have that backbone. On May 1, Hawaii ignored the DOJ’s specious lawsuit and became the 10th state to sue Big Oil. As Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez said, “The state of Hawaiʻi will not be deterred from moving forward with our climate deception lawsuit. My department will vigorously oppose this gross federal overreach.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had a similar response: “Donald Trump has made clear he will answer any and every beck and call from his Big Oil campaign donors… I remain undeterred in my intention to file this lawsuit the president and his Big Oil donors so fear.”
Sadly, not all local leaders have demonstrated such courage. Shortly after the DOJ announced its suits against Hawaii and Michigan, Puerto Rico voluntarily dropped its 2024 case that sought to make fossil fuel companies pay to help protect the commonwealth’s infrastructure against stronger storms, sea-level rise, and other damages fueled by climate change. The Leonard Leo-linked Alliance for Consumers, which days earlier called on Puerto Rico’s governor to help kill the case, crowed that the dismissal would allow consumers to “take comfort in knowing the things you buy for your family will still be there, at the store, when you need them”—an Orwellian message for the millions of Puerto Ricans who were unable to access basic goods for months following the climate-driven catastrophe of Hurricane Maria.
A spokesperson said the commonwealth dropped its case, which was brought under a previous administration, because Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón wanted to “be aligned with the policies of President Trump,” which is “to support the burning of fossil fuels [and] the protection of oil companies.” As a result, her constituents will be condemned to a future of escalating climate disasters that they—and not the polluters most responsible—will have to pay for.
But maybe the contrast between Puerto Rico’s humiliating supplication and Hawaii and Michigan’s courageous stands can help inspire other local and state jurisdictions to refuse to bend to Trump’s future threats. After all, making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.
When the history books are written about this lawless moment, the collaborators—the Columbias, the Paul Weisses, the González-Colóns—will not like how posterity remembers their cowardice. But leaders who rise to the occasion, who refuse to surrender to Trump’s protection racket, and who continue fighting to make polluters pay will be able to take pride in their place on the right side of history.
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