The Climate Litigation Swindle

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.

In this piece, an exclusive excerpt from a forthcoming City Journal piece, Heather Mac Donald exposes the absurdity of climate litigation, showing how plaintiffs can blame companies around the world for alleged environmental distress. In addition to shining light on these pseudoscientific lawsuits, Mac Donald warns that allowing these cases to continue could seriously undermine the rule of law.

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While the Trump administration has ended for now the federal regulatory war on traditional energy, a litigation war has quietly gathered force. Cities and states are suing American fossil fuel companies for the alleged climate harms those jurisdictions claim to suffer.

The first multibillion-dollar judgment against the industry could unleash a cascade of similar rulings. Leading climate litigator Benjamin Franta estimates that the potential liability runs into the trillions of dollars.

The effect on the American economy would be dire. But equally catastrophic, from a philosophical standpoint, would be the damage to rationality itself. The causal claims behind the climate-change lawsuits insult reason, repudiating the hard-won gains of the Western empirical tradition.

The plaintiffs in the more than three dozen climate suits filed in the United States read like an honor roll of progressive localities: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Maine, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, among others. Their targets include some of the great industrial concerns of the modern age — ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell.

So far, the cases have turned on questions of jurisdiction. The defendant oil and gas companies have argued that the city and state plaintiffs are violating the constitutional limits on their power, since they are trying to regulate economic activity outside of their borders. For a while, this argument worked. Judges in Delaware, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and elsewhere tossed climate-change suits out of court on the grounds of federal preemption. But then the defensive wall was breached. Several federal appeals courts and the state supreme courts of Colorado and Hawaii ruled that the global warming suits could continue. Once those trials begin, the plaintiffs’ causal claims will come to the fore.

Every suit blames a particular set of companies for a particular set of climate harms in a particular locality. But one can accept the broad outlines of climate change theory and still reject the plaintiffs’ core causal claims.

Global warming allegedly results from a century and a half of cumulative CO₂ emissions from industrial activity. When trillions of CO₂ molecules accumulate in the upper atmosphere, they affect how heat escapes into space. That means the planet’s atmospheric energy balance is global, not set by any one city or state’s emissions. One CO₂ molecule is indistinguishable from another and cannot be traced to its point of origin.

Yet the climate suits are startlingly precise in pinning responsibility for a locality’s purported climate disasters. An international case provides an almost parodic version of the logic in climate litigation. In 2015, a farmer in the Peruvian Andes sued Germany’s largest electric utility provider for allegedly causing the glacier outside the farmer’s village to melt. We were meant to believe that CO₂ emitted from the utility’s German facilities could be identified and tied to a particular diminishing ice pack in Peru.

While a German court ultimately threw out the case on jurisdictional grounds, it allowed the causal illogic to stand, and it has since been widely replicated. In 2020, 16 Montana youths, aged five to 22, sued the state of Montana, claiming that it had destroyed their prospects for a normal adult life and had inflicted climate-related trauma on them.

Because Montana licensed fossil fuel operations without considering their global warming impacts, argued the plaintiffs, additional CO₂ was emitted in the state. That local incremental CO₂, in turn, caused global warming in Montana, which harmed the 16 children and young adults. In 2023, the judge in Held v. Montana found the state liable for the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries, which included, the judge declared, the increased risk of dying, chronic despair, damage to the liver and kidneys, impaired physical and cognitive development, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and broken bones.

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The causal claim in Held v. Montana is absurd. Global warming is not a local phenomenon. Moreover, even if the extra CO₂ purportedly generated by Montana’s regulatory negligence could be geotagged and traced to the state, it would be trivial compared with the cumulative emissions of every other global source over decades.

The climate bar has adopted an additional causal claim. Oil and gas companies allegedly concealed what they knew about climate change, the plaintiff cities and states assert, and that concealment — amounting to corporate fraud and deception — caused heat waves and forest fires in their jurisdictions.

An ongoing case in Hawaii, Honolulu v. Sunoco, illustrates the reasoning behind this consumer fraud gambit. According to the city and county of Honolulu, over a dozen fossil-fuel producers and marketers caused flooding and erosion in Honolulu by failing to disclose what they allegedly knew about climate change. “But for Defendants’ conduct” in withholding that knowledge, claim the plaintiffs, “the City would have suffered no or far fewer serious injuries and harms than it has endured.”

We will leave aside, for the moment, the truth of the claim that the defendants possessed secret knowledge about global warming. We will also set aside the suspension of disbelief required to accept the argument that a failure to communicate something was the “but-for cause” of rising sea levels. 

Even on its own terms, Honolulu’s argument is fantastical. Here, one must reintroduce the concealed causal link (CO₂) whose absence in the complaint is merely a verbal trick. Data on Honolulu’s energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions are not readily available, but Hawaii’s were about 18 million metric tons in 2021; Honolulu’s share would be maybe half that. The International Energy Agency estimates that fossil fuel combustion produced about 36.3 billion metric tons of CO₂ globally in 2021. Hawaii’s emissions thus represented about 0.05% of the global total; Honolulu’s, maybe 0.025% of the global total.

Yet we are to believe that a 0.025% reduction in global emissions — the result of a hypothetical cessation of Honolulu’s fossil fuel consumption — would have prevented the city’s alleged global warming injuries.

If the causal claims strain credulity, the factual premises are scarcely stronger. The consumer fraud suits now underway all assert that oil and gas companies possessed early, unique knowledge about climate change, which they concealed from an ignorant public and policymaking class for decades. Instead of warning the world about the dangers of fossil fuels, the firms stressed uncertainties in climate models and funded research that critically examined what the New York Times calls the “settled science of climate change.”

But the fuel industry had no monopoly on climate speculations. The federal government has been reporting on anthropogenic global warming since 1965. Since then, warnings in the media about CO₂ emissions have only grown more dire, without having the slightest effect on consumer behavior.

The use of smartphones and AI, jet travel to conferences and vacations, routine reliance on Amazon Prime and food delivery apps, heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, the near-universal consumption of bottled water — all these accoutrements of modern life show no sign of abating in Honolulu or in any of the other communities now suing the sources of their lavish consumer lifestyles.

The explosion of climate litigation is about expropriation and hatred. These lawsuits do nothing to advance the cause of arresting anthropogenic climate change. Sixteen of the top 20 CO₂ emitters in 2023 were state-owned foreign companies, with China dominating. Seven of the top 20 were coal companies — six of them Chinese, with the seventh in India. Private American oil and gas companies account for only a small share of global emissions.

The litigation war on the oil and gas industry reflects the parasitism, entitlement, and ingratitude that now characterize modern Western societies. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is emblematic. Its billion-dollar philanthropic portfolio exists because of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Rockefeller’s advances in refining, pipelines, transport engineering, and petroleum chemistry transformed the world. Yet today, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund bankrolls efforts to sue Standard Oil’s corporate descendants into submission, if not bankruptcy.

The alternatives to fossil fuels championed by climate litigators are not viable replacements today and will not be for the foreseeable future. Solar and wind power were largely irrelevant during the deadly snow and ice storm that struck a 2,000-mile swath of the United States in January 2026. Without coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, millions more Americans would have lost heat and running water. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is a reminder of how essential oil and gas are to nearly every aspect of the world economy.

The Western concept of impersonal causation once undergirded both experimental science and Anglo-American tort law. The belief that causation was regular and measurable enabled the rational control of nature. The legal requirement that a defendant’s unreasonable act actually caused a plaintiff’s injury restrained the human impulse toward vengeance. In the 20th century, however, tort law increasingly shifted from assigning liability for fault to extracting wealth for redistribution by loosening traditional causation standards and weakening the idea of personal responsibility.

Climate litigation takes that earlier erosion of causation to a new level. If judgments against Big Oil are allowed to stand, they will set precedents for wider assaults on private enterprise and the rule of law.

For now, the best hope for halting the raid on Big Oil’s social and economic capital lies in an appeal before the Supreme Court challenging a climate suit out of Boulder, Colorado. At the heart of every such climate case lies a philosophical travesty that reflects a deeper decline in rational thought.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author.