A group with ties to President Donald Trump’s onetime judicial adviser is launching a new campaign to quash a raft of climate lawsuits against the oil and gas industry, calling the cases the “biggest risk” to President Donald Trump’s energy agenda.
The fossil fuel advocacy group American Energy Institute announced in a post this week on the social media network X that it is launching a website — ClimateDebateHistory.com — to combat the lawsuits from state and local governments, which the group called “coordinated lawfare from radical climate groups.”
The website is the latest effort by oil industry allies to call into question dozens of lawsuits filed by U.S. cities, states and counties seeking to hold Exxon Mobil, Chevron and other companies financially accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. A loss in the courts could put the industry on the hook for billions of dollars.
Climate litigation critics, including those with ties to judicial activist Leonard Leo, last spring mounted a campaign aimed at convincing the Supreme Court to block the cases. The high court declined.
On X, the institute has argued that the lawsuits rely on “convincing judges that 200 years of debate — everywhere from scientific labs to Congress to magazine covers to movie screens — simply didn’t happen.”
According to the latest IRS filings, the American Energy Institute received $125,000 in 2023 from the 85 Fund, a group in Leo’s network. The institute’s website shows that an affiliated trade group, the American Energy Association, includes as one of its founding members Liberty Energy, the fracking company started by Trump’s Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The institute did not return a request for comment.
Most of the climate liability lawsuits allege that the oil industry knew about the dangers of burning fossil fuels but failed to disclose those risks. The lawsuits also accuse the industry of seeking to undermine climate science.
The institute’s website states that its goal is to “highlight the fact that policymakers in the United States and around the world have been aware of the voluminous scientific research on these important issues and considered the difficult public policy questions relating to energy security, economic growth, and environmental protection that arise from these long-recognized risks.”
Kert Davies — who directs special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity, which supports the liability lawsuits — said the institute’s approach appears to be “part of the outside game trying to influence the courts in climate litigation, trying to create optics and narratives to influence the courts, the judges and the juries.”
He said it is curious that the institute last year questioned whether judges should receive continuing education on climate — but wrote on its new website that for decades, “scientists worldwide have studied the link between greenhouse gases and the climate.”
“It seems out of character for a climate denial organization to be teaching us about the history of climate science,” Davies said.
The institute’s website tracks debate over climate change in the news, government and pop culture, mirroring a 2022 court filing in which Chevron pointed to newspaper and magazine articles as well as TV and movie scripts to bolster its contention that the dangers of climate change have long been widely understood.
Both Chevron’s document and the institute’s website highlighted a script from a 1991 episode of the TV sitcom “Cheers” in which know-it-all postman Cliff Clavin warned his fellow bar patrons that “the entire East Coast is sinking” due to global warming.
Davies said the liability lawsuits don’t claim that oil companies and the public were unaware of climate change — but that despite internal studies, the companies “did nothing to add to that common knowledge, despite the fact they had vast internal knowledge.”
