It’s a rare occurrence for a private lawyer to be hauled before a congressional committee and be deposed. But in the sharply political world of climate and energy litigation, Roger Worthington is no ordinary lawyer.
A champion among environmental activists and a villain to the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, the ambitious attorney’s latest gambit — representing Multnomah County, Oregon, in a $51 billion lawsuit that accuses the oil and gas industry of contributing to a heat wave that killed 69 people in 2021 — has landed him in the hot seat before the House Judiciary Committee.
The 65-year-old, who made his name taking asbestos manufacturers to court, will be questioned Wednesday by Republicans who are investigating what they say are efforts to influence judges overseeing climate lawsuits, like the one brought by Worthington’s firm and two others on behalf of the county that includes Portland.
His appearance — ordered by congressional subpoena — is the latest flash point in a high-stakes legal and political battle over a swath of lawsuits brought by more than two dozen city and state governments seeking to hold oil and gas producers financially accountable for climate change. The industry has warned that the lawsuits could cost it tens of billions of dollars. House and Senate Republicans have filed legislation to wipe out the litigation.
Blocking the lawsuits has emerged as one priority for the Trump administration amid its broader effort to stifle climate initiatives. The Department of Justice has filed unsuccessful lawsuits to block climate cases brought by Hawaii and Michigan, as well as derail a lawsuit by Minnesota. And the Supreme Court this fall is poised to hold oral arguments on the industry’s bid to quash the cases.
Worthington took center stage from the moment Multnomah County commissioners announced the launch of the landmark climate lawsuit in June 2023 in front of a Portland courthouse.
“They’re in the business of extracting carbon from the earth, converting it into a gas form and polluting our sky, and we have to pay the price,” Worthington thundered as he joined — and out-talked — the elected officials. “No more, not here, not now.”
It’s not the first time he’s taken on corporate polluters. He dragged asbestos manufacturers into court for over 20 years, earning more than $1 billion for clients who were dying of cancer. That shaped his outlook for the climate case, which he warned “wasn’t going to be easy.” The fossil fuel industry, he predicted, would “fight like the dickens” to protect itself.
Three years later, as he arrives in Washington for the closed-door grilling, his words are prescient in ways he and the team of attorneys — which includes veterans of tobacco and opioid litigation — say they never imagined: With lawmakers scrutinizing an attorney in an active case that Republicans have opposed politically.
It prompted Worthington to accuse lawmakers of “throwing Big Oil a bone they can chew on” by demanding he appear before them. GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee with jurisdiction over courts, said people who assert that the committee is doing the oil industry’s bidding are “full of shit, and you can quote that.”
Lawmakers “want to hear the truth,” Issa said. “It’ll be under oath, and we expect that we’ll either have a ‘Take the Fifth’ or we’ll get, we hope, the truth.”
Worthington’s friends say he’s up to the task.
“They say you’re honored by who your enemies are,” said Matt Bergman, who has known Worthington since 1997 when he was setting up his own asbestos litigation firm. “The fact that Roger is being excoriated, disparaged and called to testify speaks to the risk and the threat his legal advocacy presents to established power.”
For Worthington, the case is the latest adventure in a life of uncommon adventures. He worked at an Exxon Mobil oil refinery during a summer break from college. He founded Worthy Brewing in Bend, Oregon, a brewpub that boasts a “hopservatory” with a 16-inch Ritchey-Chrétien telescope. He has a current gig as a hops cultivator. And he runs the Worthy Garden Club, which oversees a regenerative farm, native plant gardens and offers classes for wannabe green thumbs.
Worthington has been an unapologetic supporter of Democratic candidates for more than a decade. He’s contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates in Oregon, such as Sen. Ron Wyden. He also gave $2,000 to Susheela Jayapal, one of the county commissioners who authorized the climate lawsuit and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House in 2024. Her sister, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), is a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Worthington pledged $1 million to plant 1 million conifers in Oregon wildfire recovery zones. He’s an avid cyclist who still competes — and met his current law partner, John Caron, through bike racing in the 1990s.
Worthington and the rest of the legal team — which includes Thomas, Coon, Newton & Frost and Simon Greenstone Panatier — are newcomers to climate litigation.
Most of the earliest climate cases were led by nonprofit environmental groups and attorneys general in mostly Democratic cities and states, along with the law firm Sher Edling. The San Francisco-based firm was co-founded by Vic Sher, a former president of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, now Earthjustice, and Matt Edling, an environmental litigator.
Sher Edling has also been a target of congressional Republicans. An attorney representing the firm in May told Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee that any effort to influence judges “comes not from my client, but overwhelmingly” from oil companies and their lawyers.
Personal injury attorneys and law firms like Worthington’s that specialize in exposing corporate wrongdoing began entering the climate field in 2023, with observers noting they had the means to finance expensive and lengthy litigation. The three law firms that represent Multnomah County are doing so on a contingency basis and won’t see a dime unless they win.
The county is seeking $51.5 billion, most of it to upgrade infrastructure and public health services to “weatherproof” it from future extreme weather events.
Bergman said he and Worthington, after decades of asbestos work and amassing personal fortunes, were looking for “something that would be everlasting, that would be a legacy.”
Bergman took on social media, representing families who say their children have been harmed by the platforms. He won a landmark verdict in March with a ruling that found Meta and Google legally responsible for harm caused to young people.
Worthington’s “passion,” Bergman says, “was the environment.”
It prompted Worthington to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to environmental causes, including climate change research. That included a gift to the University of Oregon Law School to support the work of Mary Wood, whose scholarship was the legal foundation for Juliana v. United States, a landmark youth-led climate lawsuit that came to a close in 2025 when the Supreme Court rejected it.
Mealtime science
Worthington said his interest in science was forged at the dinner table.
His stepfather worked as a radiation biologist for NASA and helped collect data that led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which has been credited with saving the ozone layer by banning the use of chlorofluorocarbons.
It’s the science that prompted a judge in the Multnomah climate case to publicly rebuke Worthington last October. It also ensnared him in the congressional inquiry.
The dustup began after oil and gas companies in July 2025 filed a motion to strike Multnomah’s lawsuit, arguing it violated their right to free speech.
The county responded with documents to bolster its claims that the industry had engaged in deceptive advertising. But Chevron hit back, accusing Worthington of committing a “fraud on the court” and asking a judge to disregard two climate studies used by county experts.
Chevron argued the studies should be tossed out because Worthington had prepublication access to one scientific paper, which the company said had become “litigation-focused” over time. Chevron also asserted that Worthington had failed to tell the court he had helped fund the other paper.
The second paper, which researched how “anthropogenic climate change contributes to wildfire particulate matter and related mortality in the United States,” cited “partial support” from Worthington in the acknowledgments. But the tie-in was not reported to the court.
The company also pointed to editorials Worthington wrote in local papers in support of the lawsuit, identifying himself as a brewery owner, not as an attorney in the case.
The omissions, Chevron argued, were not isolated incidents, “but part of a broader pattern confirming the lack of disclosure is intentional.”
Circuit Judge Benjamin Souede declined to strike the studies, but scolded Worthington for a “gobsmacking failure” to alert the court to his involvement in the study.
“What has been achieved by this knowing hiding of the ball is beyond me,” the judge said. “This is simply not an appropriate way to practice law in the courts of the state of Oregon.”
Chevron did not comment about Worthington to POLITICO. But Ted Boutrous, a lawyer who represents the company, said the Multnomah lawsuit should be dismissed “because it asserts claims that are far beyond the reach of state tort law,” by focusing on global emissions.
In 2017, when Worthington came across a letter from more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries calling for action to avert irreversible damage to the planet, he reached out to William Ripple, a professor at Oregon State University who organized the petition. They set up a speaking tour with scientists and politicians.
“That’s been my paradigm,” Worthington told POLITICO in a recent interview. “That’s how I did it with asbestos. That’s why I’m doing it with climate. I want to bring in the best scientists who offer empirical data and apply it to sound methodology to generate reliable results with the margin of error and confidence interval, and then provide that data to policymakers.”
But with climate policy at a standstill in Congress, he said, “now it’s time for a jury to listen and weigh the evidence and make a final decision on whether the defendants that we named in our case are liable for damages arising from their campaign to deceive and mislead and distract, delay and disinform.”
The fossil fuel industry and its allies have targeted the science that factors into many of the climate lawsuits for nearly a decade. Attribution science can show how fossil fuel companies supercharge extreme weather, but the industry claims that the growing field exists solely to propel litigation. The legislation being considered by Congress to bar climate lawsuits also seeks to discredit the science, declaring that it lacks credibility.
POLITICO reported last month that a secretive opposition research group is filing public records requests and scouring scientists’ emails in an effort to weaken the credibility of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on attribution science that’s scheduled for release Thursday.
The article came two years after POLITICO reported that Argus Insights, the same conservative research firm, was filing requests for documents related to the Multnomah lawsuit. Worthington, who along with a number of scientists were among the targets, said then that the effort was a “blatant and shameless form of intimidation and harassment.”
At least one of the scientists whose emails were requested by Argus — Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at the University of Oxford — was referenced in Chevron’s complaint.
Chevron’s motion also noted that Worthington’s website featured a prepublication version of a judicial climate education “module” used by the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project — a legal education organization that allies of the oil and gas industry and Republicans have targeted. It’s now a focus of the congressional inquiry involving Worthington on Wednesday.
Chevron said the appearance of the ELI module raised “significant questions as to whether the law firm is engaged in an effort to prejudice the courts more broadly in its client’s and litigation allies’ favor.”
The county, though, said it did not submit anything from ELI into evidence and said Worthington is not a member of ELI. It also said he has not been a speaker at its programs or attended an ELI event.
The county called it “even more puzzling” that Chevron raised “serious concerns” about ELI when a number of firms involved in defending the companies raise money for ELI.
It noted among the legal firms sponsoring an ELI dinner were Perkins Coie, which signed Chevron’s motion, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, counsel for ConocoPhillips.
The Chevron complaint was not the first time Worthington’s legal tactics have faced scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal in 2013 probed whether efforts by Worthington and other asbestos lawyers to financially support cancer doctors and secure clients crossed ethical lines.
Worthington, who has said he has given $1 million to medical research and created the nonprofit Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation, dismissed the suggestion he was seeking to boost his firm through contributions.
“I’ve given back. If that’s a crime, I’m guilty as hell,” Worthington told the newspaper.
Enter Congress
This time, the stakes are higher. The congressional inquiry, led by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Issa, is focused on how the Worthington & Caron website came to feature a paper on climate attribution science by Michael Wehner, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Wehner did not return a request for comment.
The paper ended up being the prepublication version of a judicial climate education “module” used by ELI, the educational organization. Republicans have accused ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project of trying to sway judges to favor the challengers in the climate lawsuits.
Issa noted oil production is a regulated, legal business and if companies are doing something wrong, it should be addressed.
“On the other hand, the backdoor harassing [of] oil and natural gas companies is costing the consumer,” he told POLITICO in a recent interview. “So it’s about costing the consumer that we’re looking into.”
Since Republicans began targeting the group in 2023, ELI has maintained that its programs provide judges with tools to manage scientific and technical evidence.
ELI told POLITICO this week it has “worked diligently” to cooperate with Congress “and provide information that dispels any misunderstandings” about its Climate Judiciary Project. The group said it “does not participate in litigation, coordinate with any parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case.”
Worthington got a copy of the paper — “Drawing the Causal Chain: The Detection and Attribution of Climate Change” — by talking to the scientist who was working on it.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told POLITICO in a recent interview that the ELI investigation follows a GOP pattern of using the committee to attack adversaries.
He called it an “outrageous abuse of power” to go after groups “simply because they are convenient political targets for MAGA.”
Worthington, who grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, moved with his parents to Houston, where he attended high school. It was at the University of Texas at Austin where he earned a law degree — and developed a keen interest in science, said Melinda Taylor, who teaches law at UT and has known Worthington since eighth grade.
Worthington was so taken with a biology class and the professor, he endowed a professorship at the school in 2002.
“He wants to learn as much as he can about every subject that he’s interested in, and he’ll do that by tracking down experts and digging,” Taylor said.
