When the U.S. Supreme Court returns in October, the first case the justices will hear could decide whether oil companies can be put on trial for the rising costs of climate damages. With billions of dollars and the industry’s public image at stake, the companies’ Supreme Court bid is just one front in a much wider crusade to escape the courtroom entirely.

As lawsuits against fossil fuel companies get closer to trial, a growing constellation of front groups and government officials with financial ties to fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, lawyers, and the companies themselves are waging multiple strategies to undermine the cases or completely immunize the oil industry from liability for climate change. 

The industry and its allies have lobbied Congress and state legislatures for immunity from the cases, persuaded the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) to sue states to block cases and state laws that could impose financial liability on the industry, attacked the climate science underlying the lawsuits, accused climate scientists of bias, scrutinized lawyers bringing the cases, and questioned the credibility of judges who engage with climate science education.

“All of their allies are fully mobilized. They really do sense that now is the time to go for the kill.”

With the industry’s power soaring under the Trump administration, midterm elections looming, and booming profits to spend, the campaigns to stop liability have reached a fever pitch. “All of their allies are fully mobilized. They really do sense that now is the time to go for the kill,”  said Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law and senior fellow for climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School. 

Since 2017, more than 30 cases have been brought by U.S. states, territories, municipalities, and tribal governments arguing that oil companies misled the public for decades about the climate risks of burning fossil fuels. These governments are asking courts for a variety of remedies, including making companies pay for a portion of climate adaptation costs, change their marketing practices, or fund public education on the link between fossil fuels and climate change.

Cases brought by Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, the Makah Indian Tribe and Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe, and Honolulu, Hawaiʻi are already in discovery, the pre-trial process where parties can gather evidence to make their case. Another case from the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, was allowed to move toward trial — but on October 5, oil companies ExxonMobil and Suncor will argue for the Supreme Court to stop the case and others from moving forward.  

“Once cases go into discovery and trial, the industry is really pushed onto its back feet and onto the defensive,” said Timothy Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University and expert in civil liability in the U.S. “The oil and gas industry is very eager to make sure that they don't get to that point. That’s why they’re pulling out all the stops.”

Shielding Big Oil from climate lawsuits 

The oil industry has prioritized legislation that could immunize them from liability entirely, and is counting on the current Republican trifecta in Washington to deliver.

Republicans in Congress are pushing legislation, backed by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and oil-funded state attorneys general, that would dismiss existing climate accountability lawsuits and block any new laws or lawsuits from seeking financial compensation from fossil fuel companies for the local costs of climate change. The legislation was introduced earlier this year, and is similar to a George W. Bush-era law that has since largely shielded the gun industry from lawsuits over gun violence.

The bill is slated for consideration by the full House Judiciary Committee at a markup hearing Wednesday, September 16. The GOP lawmakers sponsoring the House bill and its companion in the Senate have received more than $2 million from the oil and gas industry over the 2025-2026 election cycle, according to an analysis of OpenSecrets data.

Republicans have enacted five similar laws at the state level within the past year, in Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Louisiana. State lawmakers have also passed and introduced bills modifying public nuisance laws, which are used to make fossil fuel companies and other product manufacturers pay damages. Most of the laws were pushed by a network of groups connected to conservative billionaire Leonard Leo, an investigation by ProPublica found. 

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing corporate advocacy group, recently drafted an even broader model bill that explicitly gives oil companies “immunity from climate change claims,” including all civil and criminal charges. Industry backers suggest more state lawmakers should take inspiration from the bill and pass versions of it across the country. 

Persuading the Trump administration to fight states

One of the industry’s most powerful allies in the fight against lawsuits is the Trump administration. The Trump DOJ has taken what Joelle Lester, an expert in tobacco control law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota, described as “unprecedented” actions against state governments after oil executives raised their legal woes with the president. 

The DOJ sued Michigan and Hawaiʻi before they even filed their climate accountability lawsuits in an effort to preemptively stop their cases, but failed when their complaints were dismissed by federal judges. 

But the administration didn’t stop there: In May, the DOJ sued Minnesota just after its consumer fraud case against Exxon, Koch Industries, and API survived a motion to dismiss the case, clearing its way for discovery. A ruling in the DOJ’s case is now pending.

At a meeting last year between oil executives and the Trump administration at the White House, the CEOs complained about New York and Vermont’s recently passed climate superfund laws, which would make major polluters help states pay for disaster recovery and adaptation. Trump’s policy advisor Stephen Miller then texted then-attorney general Pam Bondi, telling the executives he was “on it,” reported New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

Less than two months later, the DOJ brought lawsuits against those states over their superfund laws. A federal judge struck down New York’s law last month, but its sponsor said the ruling will be appealed.

The administration is urging courts to rule for the companies, too. It filed an uninvited brief in support of Exxon and Suncor’s petition to the Supreme Court to intervene in Boulder’s climate case, and will argue alongside the oil giants on October 5. It echoed oil companies’ requests for the Maryland Supreme Court to dismiss three municipalities’ climate lawsuits, which the court ultimately did.

Although the DOJ “can bring resources to bear, they can’t force an outcome in court that they want,” said Lester.

Assailing climate attribution scientists

Another way to diminish the chances of success in the lawsuits is to attack the science at the heart of many of the legal claims and work to discredit the scientists.

Extreme weather attribution science, an accelerating field that examines the role of climate pollution in fueling specific disasters and links individual polluters to climate impacts, is important to several climate lawsuits, like one brought by Multnomah County over a 2021 heat dome that killed dozens of residents.

Industry allies are now coming after the scientists behind attribution studies. Republicans, fossil fuel-tied think tanks, and oil-funded groups targeted researchers from a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine working on a major climate attribution science report, accusing the scientists of bias in favor of climate litigation. An opposition research firm with connections to fossil fuel interests, Leonard Leo’s network, and the Trump administration escalated the effort by demanding hundreds of emails and documents from scientists through open records requests, leading two scientists to drop out of the panel.

The campaign is designed to dig up information to tarnish scientists’ reputation, and “in the process, intimidate researchers into silence,” said Christopher Marchesano, a senior attorney at the nonprofit legal advocacy group Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. In the past, private communications have been used to cast doubt on climate science and assail scientists’ integrity. 

Days after the National Academies ultimately published the report and noted the findings could be relevant to climate litigation, President Trump threatened to strip the institution of federal funding. The National Climate Assessment has also been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which appointed a climate science denier to write a new report after being warned that the old one was “frequently cited in climate litigation.”  

Attacking climate science education for judges

Industry allies are also attacking and curtailing judges’ access to scientific information they could rely on to decide some climate lawsuits — blocking information judges would need to make informed rulings. 

“Undermining science is something that a lot of industries, including, for example, the chemical industry in toxic torts, have traditionally done to try to sow doubt — not just among juries, but more importantly among judges,” said Lytton.

Although it is standard practice for judges to receive training or background on any scientific or technical matter they might hear in the courtroom, from AI to epidemiology and forensics, opponents of the cases claim that those who produce climate science education are seeking to improperly influence judges. 

After members of the oil-funded Republican Attorneys General Association and Trump accused the authors of a new climate science chapter in a peer-reviewed scientific reference manual for judges of bias, the National Academies and Federal Judicial Center removed the climate chapter from their manual.

Congressional Republicans also launched formal investigations into the nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and its Climate Judiciary Project, a program to educate lawyers on judges on climate science and its relevance to the law. Members of the House Judiciary Committee and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier are seeking financial records, communications, and other documents after a Leo-linked group claimed that ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.” 

Another group, the conservative Patriots Foundation, has sued the University of Hawaiʻi for emails from professors who they claim may have tried to influence Hawaiʻi judges ruling on climate lawsuits. Jason Torchinsky, the group’s attorney, works for Holtzman Vogel law firm, which is often retained by the Leo network.

Oil companies and affiliated groups have also questioned the objectivity of judges who have been involved with legal climate science education initiatives. Most recently, a coalition of conservative groups called for Justice Elena Kagan to sit out from hearing arguments in Boulder’s case, claiming she cannot be impartial because she wrote the foreword to the scientific reference manual that contained the disputed climate science chapter. The group has urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate Kagan. 

While one arm of the campaign tries to shut down judicial climate education programs and malign judges that interact with climate science, oil companies are linked to competing climate denialist programming: Exxon and Koch helped fund George Mason University’s Law and Economics Center (LEC), which runs a project called the Judicial Education Program that promotes climate skepticism to judges.

Scrutinizing lawyers involved in the cases

If efforts to attack the science fail, industry allies are also working to impugn the lawyers representing plaintiffs in the cases. 

One tactic has been to paint the lawsuits as a coordinated plot between plaintiffs’ lawyers and “dark money sources” for financial gain. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who is a sponsor of the Senate companion bill to the House’s federal immunity legislation, held a hearing last year accusing plaintiffs’ law firms of taking funding from China — though his office offered no evidence to support that claim, NPR reported. 

Just as industry allies have used records requests in an effort to tarnish scientists, they are using the same approach to dealing with lawyers. In 2023, Senate Republicans demanded information and financial documents from Sher Edling, a law firm representing plaintiffs in many of the climate cases, claiming they colluded with “radical activists” such as a professor from the UCLA School of Law to bring the suits. The officials published Sher Edling’s emails and documents, claiming that the lawsuits’ funding originates from “wealthy liberals, like George Soros” and the “green mafia.” 

Now, Congressional Republicans are issuing subpoenas for private depositions and demanding years of communications from plaintiffs’ lawyers for alleged links to ELI’s judicial climate science education program. Sher Edling told House Judiciary Republicans that any “real enterprise to ‘influence federal judges’ comes not from my client, but overwhelmingly from defendants and their lawyers on the other side.”

Government Accountability & Oversight — a group that has received funding from coal interests, including Murray Energy and the foundation of a coal CEO — also sued a law professor at the University of Michigan who worked pro-bono on climate superfund bills in an effort to obtain her emails with clients. 

Cutting the cases off at SCOTUS

At the Supreme Court, oil company petitioners Exxon and Suncor have asked the justices to avail them of having to face trial in Boulder’s climate lawsuit. The companies are arguing that the case is preempted by federal law, and should be thrown out. Twenty-five groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry have weighed in to support the companies’ arguments. 

The case could help determine the fate of similar claims to hold a wider list of oil companies accountable for climate damages. One of the nine justices who will decide the case’s fate, Justice Samuel Alito, holds more than $175,000 in fossil fuel investments — including in oil companies not named as defendants in Boulder’s case that could still be impacted by the ruling. 

“I think that’s the lesson from big tobacco — it’s possible.”

The conservative supermajority on the court could save the industry from “really catastrophic outcomes,” Paul Watkins, a lawyer from Leo-connected firm Fusion Law, implied at ALEC’s annual meeting in July. 

Like the oil industry, major tobacco companies deployed every possible strategy to head off liability when cases were nearing trial, said Lester, of the Mitchell Hamline School of Law. “There was no fight too small,” she said. 

A key crossroads the oil industry wants to avoid is internal documents being released to the public if the cases proceed. For tobacco, discovery in similar cases and later settlements transformed public understanding of that industry’s deception, Lester said.

“I think that’s the lesson from big tobacco — it’s possible,” Lester said. Despite the obstacles ahead for climate litigation, she is confident that there is hope for accountability: “We’re right on the science, we’re right on the law, we’re right about the morality of the behavior, and the only thing they have is money.”