Trump Turns to Courts to Shield Big Oil from Climate Lawsuits
The Trump administration is using federal courts to block state lawsuits targeting oil companies, arguing that climate regulation falls under federal—not state—authority.
- Multiple Democratic-led states have sued firms like ExxonMobil and American Petroleum Institute for alleged climate deception, but the Justice Department is actively intervening to stop these cases.
- Legal outcomes are mixed: some courts have rejected federal interference while others favor industry, highlighting an ongoing battle between state-level climate litigation and federal energy policy.
Donald Trump has denied, downplayed, or sought to reverse action on climate change through a combination of public rhetoric, the appointment of skeptics to key positions, and the dismantling of environmental regulations. As of 2026, his actions have included calling climate change a “hoax” or “scam,” withdrawing the US from global climate agreements, and systematically removing climate data from federal websites. (Natural Resources Defense Council)
Now his administration is turning to the courts to defend oil and gas companies against lawsuits by mostly blue (Democratic-led) states.
The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Monday to block Minnesota from moving forward with a long-running lawsuit seeking to hold ExxonMobil and other oil industry participants responsible for harms caused by climate change…
The Justice Department’s latest lawsuit took aim at a lawsuit that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed in 2020 during Trump’s first term against Exxon, Koch Industries and the American Petroleum Institute.
That lawsuit accuses the defendants of fraud and of violating state law by misleading Minnesotans about the climate-change consequences of using fossil fuels. The defendants deny wrongdoing and have been fighting the case for years.
In announcing Monday’s lawsuit, the Justice Department cited an executive order Trump signed last year directing it to take action to stop the enforcement of state laws and lawsuits that burden the production of oil and gas.
“President Trump promised to unleash American energy dominance, and Minnesota officials cannot undermine his directive by mandating that their woke climate preferences become the uniform policy of our nation,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement.
The Justice Department argues that through its lawsuit, Minnesota is seeking in violation of the U.S. Constitution to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which are the exclusive domain of the federal government.
At least 15 other states brought similar lawsuits, including Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island, states the Associated Press.
“The American people deserve a Department of Justice that fights for us, and it's a tremendous shame that Trump's DOJ would rather sell us out to Big Oil,” Ellison, a Democrat, said.
The American Petroleum Institute said when Ellison sued in 2020 the action was baseless.
AP notes The administration in February revoked a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, the most aggressive move by the Republican president to roll back climate regulations. The rule finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare.
ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) has a long history of both studying climate change — a misnomer because the warming is not a change, it’s been going on for 21,000 years — and questioning the scientific evidence for it.
A 2015 investigation by InsideClimateNews found ExxonMobil, currently the eighth largest oil company by revenue, was aware of climate change as early as 1977, before it became a public issue.
A 2015 article in Scientific American stated:
This knowledge did not prevent the company from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking…
Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.
In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimateNews interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.
A spokesman for ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its earlier statements were so stark, let alone conclusive.
“We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” Allan Jeffers told Scientific American.
But the magazine goes on to say that One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty.
Meanwhile, the lower courts are fighting back against perceived federal intervention in state court processes.
In mid-April, a federal judge dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit seeking to stop Hawaii from suing fossil fuel companies in state court over global warming.
Targeted companies include BP (LSE:BP), Chevron (NYSE:CVX), ExxonMobil and Shell (LSE:SHEL) for allegedly selling products the companies knew would warm the Earth.
In January, a different federal judge threw out a similar suit that sought to block Michigan from suing major oil companies, Reuters reported.
The Center for Climate Integrity goes deeper into both cases, stating that Hawaii’s case, filed just hours after the Trump administration’s preemptive attempt to block it, seeks to make the companies pay for damages caused by “a decades-long campaign of deception to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change.” Michigan’s, filed earlier this year in federal court, accuses the “fossil fuel cartel” of driving up costs for consumers by conspiring to block cleaner and cheaper energy sources in violation of antitrust laws.
Also in mid-April, the US Supreme Court handed a win to oil and gas companies fighting lawsuits over coastal land loss and environmental degradation in Louisiana — a red (Republican-led) state.
As reported by News 15, The unanimous procedural decision gives the companies a new day in federal court after a state jury ordered Chevron to pay upward of $740 million to clean up damage to the state’s coastline, one of multiple similar lawsuits. The companies were backed by the Trump administration and argued that the case belongs in federal court because they began oil production and refining during World War II as U.S. contractors. Louisiana’s coastal parishes have lost more than 2,000 square miles of land over the past century.
SCOTUS currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, with the six appointed by Republican presidents (including three appointments by Trump) and three by Democratic presidents.
By Andrew Topf for Oilprice.com
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