Oil industry allies are quietly targeting a field of climate research that could cost fossil fuel companies billions of dollars.
In the crosshairs is a forthcoming report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that will examine research into the ways corporate climate pollution is intensifying natural disasters.
The conservative offensive could weaken the report’s perceived credibility at a time when it threatens to raise the legal jeopardy facing Exxon Mobil and other energy giants that are accused of contributing to fatal catastrophes in dozens of lawsuits, according to lawyers and scientists tracking the cases.
The heightened scrutiny — which involves a secretive opposition research group scouring scientists’ emails — has prompted two people to leave the 15-person panel tasked with producing the report. The findings are expected to be released as soon as this month, according to three people who were granted anonymity to speak about the panel’s work.
“The goal is to keep attribution science out of court. We see a pattern of that,” said Alice Hill, a former federal prosecutor and California state judge who worked on climate policy in the Obama White House, referring to the conservative effort. “And what is the ultimate reason for that? To shield the fossil fuel companies from liability.”
The offensive against what’s known as extreme weather attribution comes as scientists have improved methods for determining how climate pollution from sources like cars and power plants are leading to stronger and longer disasters, such as heat waves and hurricanes. The burgeoning field produces studies showing how corporate giants are supercharging specific catastrophes. Previously, scientists were unable to determine whether a single weather event had been worsened by human-caused climate change.
The scientific strides stand to send shock waves through the energy sector. The studies are sporadically being used to help build climate liability cases against oil and gas companies. But lawyers, scientists and insurers expect them to increasingly appear in court filings.
The commercial stakes are enormous. A 2022 analysis from a financial industry forum found that fossil fuel companies could face cumulative losses of “over $100 billion in the most severe litigation outcome,” citing data from the consulting company Verisk Analytics. Since then, more than a dozen new climate liability cases have been filed, including one lawsuit that is seeking more than $51.5 billion in compensation related to a deadly heat wave.
The climate lawsuits being pursued separately by cities, states and tribes represent one of the sharpest risks facing oil, gas and coal companies during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to legal experts. Trump has directed his administration to fight the lawsuits, but many of the cases have continued. Now the National Academies report could play an outsize role in the suits by adding legitimacy to the field of attribution science.
In addition to collecting hundreds of emails and other documents from researchers involved in the National Academies report, the effort to find information that could be used to discredit attribution science is being pursued by Republicans lawmakers, think tank analysts allied with energy companies and offshoots of the industry itself.
Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin, chair of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, expressed concern about the report in a letter sent to the National Academies in April, saying it “will likely influence significant litigation and policy decisions.”
The National Academies defended the work of the panel, which is made up of academics and federal scientists who have been working on the analysis for more than two years.
“We are following our normal, rigorous processes, including peer review, to independently conduct our study on attribution of extreme events, and will release it publicly when that process is complete,” spokesperson William Kearney said in an email.
The conservative offensive includes at least nine open records requests sent to public universities where some panel members work, according to documents obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. They were submitted by Argus Insight, an opposition research firm founded in 2023 by White House aides from Trump’s first term and a former Axios reporter. The firm has a history of gathering materials that legal experts say could be used to weaken climate liability lawsuits targeting fossil fuel companies by making scientists wary of engaging with the litigation.
Argus sought the internal communications of the panel’s chair and other members. The firm also requested potential emails the panelists might have exchanged with academics and lawyers who are developing legal strategies that could force oil, gas and coal companies to offset the growing economic toll of climate change.
The obscure panel has faced online criticism from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, and other groups bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry. On the day of its first meeting in 2024, AEI scholar Roger Pielke Jr. published a Substack post accusing the National Academies of engaging in “stealth advocacy in support of climate litigation.”
AEI spokesperson Brady Africk said its scholars’ views “are drawn from their own expertise and research, and we protect their ability to work independently.” Pielke told POLITICO’s E&E News that he was calling “things like I see them.”
Argus did not respond to questions for this story but has previously defended its use of public records by arguing that taxpayer-supported academics should have nothing to hide.
Origins of the attribution panel
The National Academies was established by Congress in 1863, during the Civil War, to provide advice to policymakers on complex scientific topics.
It previously examined extreme weather attribution science a decade ago. That review found strong evidence that human-caused climate change had worsened heat waves and cold spells. It may have also increased the likelihood of extended droughts and storms with heavy precipitation.
The new panel was launched in 2023, when the National Science Foundation provided the National Academies nearly $100,000 to study attribution science. The panel’s other sponsors include NOAA, the Bezos Earth Fund and the Heising-Simons Foundation charities, and the investment banker Robert Litterman.
“It is critical to improve capabilities to assess and forecast future extreme events and identify strategies to better communicate this science with the public,” NSF said in the funding announcement. “The study will help decision makers and other stakeholders assess the extent to which extreme weather events can be attributed to climate change, identify priorities to improve scientific capabilities, and may inform legal and financial consequences.”
The announcement called for the National Academies to recruit and vet a committee of experts — a process that took more than a year. The goal was to produce a report within three years.
The Bezos Earth Fund declined to comment. NSF, NOAA, the Heising-Simons Foundation and Robert Litterman didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The panel held a private orientation meeting on Nov. 4, 2024. That was the same day Pielke, the AEI scholar who posts on Substack as The Honest Broker, published an item suggesting that the little-known panel couldn’t be trusted.
Pielke observed that two panel members worked with either the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group, or the World Weather Attribution Consortium, an academic collaboration that analyzes the impact of climate change on natural disasters. He noted that the leaders of both groups had publicly supported climate litigation.
“Is it appropriate to include such legal advocates on a [National Academies] study committee focused on evaluating and legitimizing the information that they produce in support of the litigation that these advocates are involved in? Of course not,” Pielke wrote. “The failures of scientific integrity here are profound, obvious, and completely out in public.”
His post drew sharp reactions from inside the National Academies.
“Ugh,” wrote Colorado State University atmospheric science professor James Hurrell, the panel’s chair, after it was forwarded to him by Elizabeth Eide, a top official in the National Academies who oversaw the work of the panel. (Hurrell’s email was later obtained by Argus via an open records request. E&E News got the note from the university by requesting copies of the documents Argus had received.)
Eide was requesting a meeting to discuss “both the points in the blog and what our next steps may be.”
Hurrell and Eide declined to be interviewed for this story. Kearney, the National Academies spokesperson, explained the request this way: “We regularly discuss public comments on our committee nominations.”
Pielke’s issues with the panel were quickly highlighted by Government Accountability & Oversight, a fossil-fuel-funded group that opposes climate lawsuits. On its Climate Litigation Watch website, the group described Pielke’s post as a “devastating expose.”
Since 2020, Government Accountability has received at least $1.5 million from the foundation of Joseph Craft III, the CEO of the coal mining firm Alliance Resource Partners, according to an E&E News review of tax records.
Government Accountability didn’t respond to requests for comment but wrote a blog post criticizing E&E News for reporting on its activities. This is the “latest installment of Reporters Against Open Records Laws,” the unbylined post said.
The think tank that Pielke works for, AEI, also has connections to the fossil fuel industry. AEI doesn’t disclose its donors, but tax filings from other groups show that it received $120,000 in 2024 from the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade association, and $300,000 in 2021 from the Craft foundation.
API declined to comment. Craft and Alliance didn’t respond to questions.
Legal and scientific advances
The effort to cast doubt on the National Academies comes at a moment of growing legal pressure on fossil fuel companies.
The industry, in response to the climate lawsuits by states and municipalities, has used venue and procedural arguments in court to stall or prevent the cases from reaching trial — tactics that have largely worked so far. The companies have also convinced the Supreme Court to review their argument that federal law bars the lawsuits.
Trump’s reelection has been a mixed blessing for the fossil fuel industry, which strongly supported his campaign. While his administration has rolled back pollution regulations and opened more federal lands and waters for drilling and mining, it’s also imposed tariffs that make it more expensive to produce fossil fuels and launched a war in Iran that some analysts believe will speed the global transition to renewable energy.
In the courtroom, Trump has been a more dependable ally. His administration has sought to preempt states from filing climate lawsuits and filed motions supporting the oil industry. The president has also halted federal efforts to track the most expensive natural disasters and moved to shut down the nation’s top climate research center.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans and a number of red states are pushing legislation to give the fossil fuel companies immunity from climate liability litigation.
As the climate cases grind onward, the science of extreme weather attribution is rapidly evolving. Before the field got its start two decades ago, scientists weren’t sure it was possible to quantify the influence of climate change on individual weather events.
Today, researchers can conduct attribution studies in nearly real time that calculate how much global warming affected the likelihood, or intensity, of a natural disaster. Some studies have calculated the proportion of damages that are attributable to greenhouse gas emissions.
That makes attribution science a potentially formidable tool in climate litigation — as the field’s critics and supporters both acknowledge.
Attribution science has appeared in several high-profile climate lawsuits. It’s the cornerstone of a 2023 complaint filed by Oregon’s Multnomah County against more than a dozen major fossil fuel companies. The county, which is home to the state’s largest city, Portland, is seeking $51 billion for damages and funding to prepare for future disasters following a record-shattering heat dome in June 2021 that killed 69 people.
The lawsuit cited a study published in the event’s aftermath in the scientific journal Earth System Dynamics, which found that the dayslong heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate pollution released by fossil fuel companies. Temperatures soared to 116 degrees Fahrenheit — 40 degrees above average.
“But for carbon atmospheric pollution, the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have not occurred,” the lawsuit said.
Those declarative statements, when bolstered by reputable scientists and studies, might move juries, legal experts say. But only if plaintiffs’ lawyers are allowed to make them in court, where judges are empowered to act as scientific gatekeepers. Under the so-called Daubert Standard, judges consider factors like whether a scientific theory has achieved widespread acceptance before allowing it to be used in a trial.
“The National Academies of Sciences is obviously a very respected institution, so their report would carry sway among judges and others” if it draws stronger links between emissions and some types of natural disasters, said Hill, the former judge who is now an energy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
“It could be a huge factor in liability lawsuits against the fossil fuel companies,” she added, “because you can get the fingerprints of who caused the harm.”
‘Undermine’ industry accountability
At the first public meeting of the National Academies panel, on Nov. 14, 2024, Georgetown Law professor Monica Sanders resigned because she feared that conservative groups and the incoming Trump administration would “go after” the panel, she said in an interview with E&E News earlier this year. A disaster law expert, she previously served as a Republican staff attorney on the House and Senate homeland security committees.
“My reasons for leaving were related to my being a practicing attorney and not wanting to expose the committee’s work to unwanted (maybe targeted) FOIA or discovery requests,” Sanders added in an email, referring to the federal Freedom of Information Act. At the time, she was consulting on an international climate case, and Sanders feared her legal work could be compromised if she became entangled in open records disputes. Before stepping down, Sanders said that she had warned panel leaders about those risks.
Panel members attended closed meetings in December 2024 to discuss sections of the report and how they would gather information for the review.
Then on Jan. 2, 2025, an oil industry website called Energy in Depth published a blog post that echoed Pielke’s assertions about Delta Merner, an academic at the Union of Concerned Scientists who at the time was a panel member. The National Academies panel is “staffed with activists seeking to take down the oil and gas industry,” the post said.
Merner was removed from the panel on the same day, according to the National Academies webpage and two people with knowledge of the decision who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Merner declined to comment. (Albert Lin, a professor of environmental and natural resources law at the University of California, Davis, joined the panel at the end of January 2025.)
Energy in Depth is a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, an oil lobbying group. IPAA spokesperson Jennifer Pett Marsteller said in a statement that Energy in Depth has for several years “noted the significant concerns raised by leading researchers about conflicts of interest in attribution science.”
Now, Republican lawmakers have asked the National Academies for details about the group’s activities, shortly before its report is expected to be released.
“Publicly available information suggests a troubling pattern in which members of the Attribution Committee, who lead [the National Academies’] review of the alleged human causes of climate change, are affiliated with nonprofits that support climate accountability lawsuits, raising the appearance of impropriety and member bias,” said the letter sent by Babin, the House Science chair. (Despite his suggestion, there is scientific consensus that human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels — are responsible for overheating the planet.)
Babin’s campaign and political action committee have raised over $480,000 from the oil and gas industry since his first successful run for Congress in 2014, according to data from the transparency group OpenSecrets that was analyzed by E&E News. That represents more than 6 percent of his total fundraising over the same period. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The letter asked the National Academies to “provide all records relating to the establishment and membership selection of the Attribution Committee.” It was also signed by Republican Reps. Rich McCormick of Georgia and Scott Franklin of Florida, who chair the Science subcommittees on investigations and the environment, respectively. A spokesperson for the Science Committee and subcommittees didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The National Academies said it looked forward to addressing Babin’s concerns.
Legal experts were shocked by the amount of attention that’s being directed at a single scientific panel.
“I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this before,” said Dave Jones, a former counsel to the attorney general in the Clinton administration who later served as California’s insurance commissioner, referring to the pressure being applied on the National Academies. “It’s unusual that this particular committee is being targeted.”
The conservative push is “trying to undermine efforts to hold the oil and gas industry accountable and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Jones, now the director of the University of California, Berkeley’s climate risk initiative.
‘Discredit the scientists’
Soon after the panel was formed, Argus researcher Allan Blutstein began filing open records requests for communications between its members and National Academies officials.
It’s unclear who hired Argus to investigate the researchers examining the links between major sources of climate pollution and specific disasters. Argus says it has “helped multiple Fortune 100 companies position themselves for success in litigation,” according to an undated pitch deck previously reported by E&E News.
The firm’s known clients include the Republican National Committee, the office of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and the reelection campaign of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). Argus has provided its political clients with research, consulting services and reference materials, spending disclosures show.
In at least one case — involving Hurrell, the panel chair — the National Academies sought to limit the amount of information released to Argus.
“Since Professor Hurrell serves on the Committee solely in his individual capacity and not as an employee of the university, we believe that any records [he] sent or received as a member of the Committee should not be considered records subject to” the Colorado Open Records Act, wrote Marc Gold, an attorney at the National Academy of Sciences, in a November 2024 email to a Colorado state official. “Committee deliberative records are considered to be confidential records of the NAS.”
Gold did not respond to a request for comment.
Some committee members were unaware of the extent of the outside scrutiny. Kevin Smiley, a professor of sociology at Louisiana State University, said he only learned that his emails had been searched and turned over to Argus after being contacted by a reporter. His research focuses on social inequalities and environmental change.
Argus filed three requests in November 2024 for Smiley’s communications with other committee members, the National Academies and the climate litigation-focused law firm Sher Edling, according to a log of LSU records requests obtained by E&E News.
Blutstein, the Argus researcher, received hundreds of pages of internal material, some of which provided slides, briefing books and other details from closed briefings. One meeting agenda, for instance, included a “guiding” question about how the study could “contribute to the application of attribution science” in litigation. (E&E News obtained the same materials by filing a request for the records obtained by Blutstein.)
Documents like that, history suggests, could be used to attack the credibility of the report and its authors. In 2009, hackers released a trove of emails from researchers at Britain’s University of East Anglia that skeptics of global warming incorrectly described as containing evidence that scientists had conspired to manipulate climate data. Blutstein didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Records obtained by Argus haven’t featured prominently in climate liability litigation, according to lawyers and groups involved in the cases. But that could change if the lawsuits proceed to arguments about their underlying merits, when the trustworthiness of climate experts could be contested, lawyers said.
Argus and its allies are “looking for something in a personal email they can take out of context,” said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who successfully sued two conservative bloggers for defamation. “The objective is to intimidate and seek to discredit, and set an example for other scientists who might think of speaking out about the science and its implications.”
Contact Corbin Hiar on the encrypted messaging app Signal at corbinhiar.80.
