Why is the federal government suing US states to protect oil companies?

States across the country are doing something the fossil fuel industry has spent decades working to prevent: taking fossil fuel companies to court. 

Dozens of states, cities, counties, and tribes have sued major oil companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP — alleging that the companies knew for decades that their products would cause catastrophic climate harm and misled the public about it. These climate deception cases were brought under state consumer protection and fraud laws, in state courts, by government officials accountable to the people they say were deceived. The plaintiffs say the deception encouraged their continued purchase and use of damaging products and cost their communities billions — in climate adaptation, infrastructure strain, and the rising costs of dealing with climate impacts they weren’t prepared for. 

These are not novel or radical claims. Suing powerful corporations under state consumer protection law is a longstanding tool of accountability — the same one state attorneys general used against the tobacco industry in the 1990s and against opioid producers and retailers 30 years later. 

But the fossil fuel industry, working alongside the federal government, is now engaged in a coordinated effort to take that tool away. Oil companies are trying to push these cases into federal court, while the Department of Justice has begun suing states to stop some of the cases from proceeding at all. 

Why are climate deception lawsuits such a threat to oil companies?

For an industry accused of misleading the public for decades, lawsuits pose a serious threat. Lawsuits mean discovery — the process by which plaintiffs compel defendants to hand over internal documents, emails, and research records. It means depositions of executives under oath. It means decisions made in private becoming evidence in public. And it means potentially huge settlements/judgments.  For example, Big Tobacco is still paying billions of dollars every year to most states. The timing of the federal lawsuits suggests the industry and its allies know exactly what is at stake: the DOJ sued Minnesota less than a month after Minnesota's highest court cleared the state's deception case to proceed to discovery. 

The tobacco and opioid precedents help explain why the industry is fighting so hard to prevent these cases from reaching discovery. State attorneys general sued these health-harming industries for misleading the public, and discovery revealed internal documents that changed public understanding of what those companies knew and when. The settlement agreements that followed required the industries to pay billions to the states over the following decades and to materially restrict how they market and promote their products. Climate accountability cases threaten a similar outcome.  

The oil industry's response has not been to defend the cases at trial. It has been to ensure trial never comes. That strategy is being pursued on two fronts. The fossil fuel industry has worked to get the question to the Supreme Court, where a single ruling could limit these cases to federal court, where they think they have a better shot at getting them thrown out. And the federal government, acting in parallel, is suing the states bringing the cases — asking federal judges to find that state attorneys general cannot enforce their own consumer protection laws against oil and gas companies. 

Why the fossil fuel industry wants the Supreme Court to hear a climate lawsuit

For five years, the companies named as defendants have fought to move these cases out of state courts and into federal court, where they hope to have a better chance of convincing the court that these cases are not about consumer deception but the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. 

They have mostly lost. Five separate federal appeals courts have ruled that the cases belong in state courts, applying state law. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to review those rulings — until February 2026, when it agreed to hear an appeal in Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. 

A ruling for the industry in Boulder could require these cases to be prosecuted in federal court exclusively.  That is precisely why the industry pursued it.  

Why is the Department of Justice suing states over climate lawsuits?

The second front opened in 2025. Following an executive order from the White House, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed five federal lawsuits — against New York, Vermont, Hawaii, Michigan, and most recently Minnesota — asking federal judges to issue court orders blocking state attorneys general from pursuing their cases because they infringe on a uniquely federal domain. 

The move is unusual on its own terms. The argument the DOJ is making — that federal law preempts these state cases — is normally a defense and has been raised by oil companies in each of their quests to remove the state actions to federal court. It is not normally a cause of action the federal government brings against a state. It is an extraordinary use of federal litigation: the federal government suing states to stop them from suing in their own courts. 

The DOJ's central claim is that Minnesota is really trying to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions — an area solely reserved to the federal government. But Minnesota's complaint is rooted in state consumer protection law. It does not try to regulate how much carbon a company can emit. It seeks damages for alleged deception.  

The DOJ’s strategy has been unsuccessful so far. At least two of the earlier federal suits — against Hawaii and Michigan — have already been dismissed.  

What happens if the federal government and oil companies succeed?

If the federal government succeeds in one of these cases, the companies could be effectively immunized for their decades of deception and face no accountability.  Additionally, some of the documents that discovery would produce never see the light of day, and the costs that flow from the alleged deception stay with the communities bearing them. 

What's at stake is bigger than these cases. It's whether states can still use their own laws to hold powerful corporations accountable when those corporations are accused of deceiving the public — about any product, in any industry. That principle is among the most foundational in American law. Two coordinated efforts are now under way to take it from them. 

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