Carly Phillips is a research scientist with the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) recently agreed to hear arguments in Boulder v. Exxon and Suncor, a case that could decide whether communities harmed by climate change can hold polluters accountable in state court.
Originally brought against the fossil fuel giants in 2018 for their decades of disinformation and other contributions to the climate crisis, the case points to a wide range of challenges the Boulder community is facing due to a changing climate, including unprecedented flooding, prolonged drought, extreme heat conditions, unreliable snow pack and worsening air quality.
In 2021, the Marshall Fire underscored the urgency of the case as Colorado’s costliest wildfire in history, destroying over a thousand homes in Boulder County and causing approximately $2 billion in damages.
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Lower courts have consistently recognized that state courts are the appropriate venue for state-law claims about deception and local damages. However, this Supreme Court decision could impact whether climate accountability lawsuits filed by states and municipalities across the country can move forward in state courtrooms.
While scientific evidence clearly shows that fossil fuel emissions are the primary driver of climate change and that industry actions, including a well-documented decades-long campaign of deception, have delayed climate action, this decision jeopardizes the possibility of that sound science being heard in court.
What is SCOTUS debating?
The legal question under consideration – whether such lawsuits belong in federal or state court – could shape the future of dozens of science-backed cases brought by US cities, counties and states that argue the industry long knew their products were driving climate change while they deliberately misled the public to boost their profits.
SCOTUS is no stranger to this question, having declined to intervene at least four times in previous, similar cases, instead allowing them to play out in state courts. The facts in these cases haven’t changed, nor have Justice Samuel Alito’s documented conflicts of interest.
What has changed, however, is the identity of the plaintiffs. In this case, his former recusals have been preempted on a technicality and as a result, the court is now willing to reconsider a long-standing request for a federal accountability escape hatch.
Such procedural jousting and legal gamesmanship obscures Big Oil’s end game: to evade accountability by ensuring the scientific evidence in these cases never has its day in court.
Attacks on science extend across all three branches
Attacks on science during the Trump administration are nothing new – from withdrawing from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and promoting a sham report commissioned by the Department of Energy to repealing the Endangerment Finding, trying to discredit attribution science, and undermining judicial education. But this recent decision clarified precisely what’s at stake in the ongoing battle for a livable climate.
The science underpinning these cases is clear, robust and consistent. Yet the fossil fuel industry and its political allies are doing everything in their power to neutralize threats by neutering science, even as communities face the costly and sometimes deadly consequences of the sector’s products.
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The fossil fuel industry and their trade groups are also lobbying to escape legal liability through the introduction of state immunity legislation and congressional intimations of a federal liability waiver should this procedural maneuver fail. These waivers, if signed into law, would grant fossil fuel companies immunity from both existing and future lawsuits, effectively eliminating access to justice and accountability for communities across the country.
If litigation does move forward in state court, attempts by industry allies to delegitimize science itself are already obstructing judicial access to robust scientific information and riding the wave of Big Oil’s decades-long disinformation campaign.
One of the most flagrant examples of this strategy took place last month, when the Federal Judicial Center – the independent research arm of the federal counts, responsible for educating judges on complex scientific issues – removed its entire chapter on climate science from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence in response to pressure from attorneys general aligned with industry interests.
Evading accountability through all means necessary
This is not about judicial neutrality or substantive debate over research methods that have been developed over decades and reviewed and revised by countless scientists. Rather, these attacks on science function as another layer of Big Oil’s already comprehensive insurance policy to protect their profits and power at the expense of people already reeling from the impacts of their products.
The broader goal of a multi-pronged approach to change venues, legislate immunity and erase access to scientific information isn’t to win on the merits, but to ensure no merits are ever considered. No trial. No day in court. No consideration of the scientific facts that Big Oil knew about the severe harm its products would cause and chose to lie at the expense of global climate stability and local communities’ lives and livelihoods.
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Should their attempts to legislate immunity flounder and their procedural maneuvering fail to yield dismissal or relocation to federal court, they will nonetheless have obstructed access to reliable, scientific information through decades of their own disinformation.
Courts and legislatures need access to the best available evidence. Obstructing facts limits pathways to justice and only serves the interests of the powerful, polluting few.
Climate science is not on trial, but it is under siege. As long as Big Oil can delay, distort, and deny, they win – no matter what the evidence shows. The public deserves well informed judges to make decisions grounded in data. Preserving access to science preserves access to justice.
The post As Trump’s attacks on science escalate, Big Oil moves to avoid legal accountability appeared first on Climate Home News.
As Trump’s attacks on science escalate, Big Oil moves to avoid legal accountability
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
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None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation
The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines