Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) speaks during an Earth Day press conference on Capitol Hill calling for passage of a windfall profits tax on Big Oil. Credit: Screen shot from recording of the event on April 22, 2026.

Last month, Republicans in Congress unveiled a legislative proposal that would shut down efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in fueling the accelerating climate crisis. The bill’s champions described it as a move to “defend American energy” and protect U.S. energy and national security. But critics say that it would shut the courthouse doors on Americans and communities harmed by climate pollution and would effectively place Big Oil above the law.

Introduced by Representative Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act” would, if enacted, grant sweeping legal immunity to the fossil fuel industry, which is facing dozens of climate-related lawsuits and the prospect of billions of dollars in liabilities. The bill would make that liability risk go away, full stop. It would block any new climate lawsuits from being filed in federal and state courts and require that all pending suits against the oil industry be immediately dismissed. Climate superfund laws like the ones enacted in Vermont and New York, and all other versions of polluter pays legislation, would be prohibited. And the bill establishes, under a federal preemption clause, that regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is “governed exclusively by federal law,” potentially threatening most if not all state climate laws and related actions.

In short, it would shield Big Oil from accountability for the widespread death and destruction its products and conduct unleash – much like how the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shielded gun manufacturers from civil liability (though that law did include some exceptions; the fossil fuel immunity proposal has no exceptions).

Last year a group of Republican state attorneys general wrote to then-U.S. AG Pam Bondi explicitly encouraging her to recommend liability shield legislation that could “stop activist-funded climate lawsuits,” similar to the 2005 PLCAA. Earlier this year during a House Judiciary Oversight hearing, Hageman revealed that she was working on crafting such legislation, which the American Petroleum Institute had spent months lobbying for.

It is unclear whether this bill will get any traction. It has been referred to the Judiciary committees in both the House and Senate and has so far not seen further movement. Climate advocates who are closely monitoring it say that it will not be able to garner 60 votes in the Senate, so it would have to be sneaked into a reconciliation package or some other must-pass bill to have any chance of passage.

I reported on the bill in a story that ran this week in Sierra. The story was among the first news articles to report on-the-record statements from Democrats in Congress responding directly to the Republicans’ immunity proposal for Big Oil. Some of the statements in that article were condensed. But I wanted to provide the statements in full here, so there can be a more complete record of what Democrats are saying about this extreme bill (as climate journalist Emily Atkin accurately described it) to shield polluters from climate accountability. Additionally, I am including a few statements that were either reported by other news outlets or that were posted publicly on social media.

Responses from Democratic Senators

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is one of the leading voices in the Senate advocating for climate action and calling out fossil fuel industry corruption. Here is what he said about the immunity proposal:

“In the United States alone, the fossil fuel industry enjoys a $700-plus billion dollar per year pollute-for-free subsidy, the biggest in world history. Any idea that government is unfair to fossil fuel is ridiculous. Now they want not just to pollute for free but to operate outside the civil law, free of consequences. Everyone should be disgusted. It is a grotesque signal of the extent to which fossil fuel dark money influence controls Republican sock puppets.”

Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts is another stalwart climate champion. His response:

“Big Oil has long known of the danger it poses to our democracy and to our climate, and we need to protect our ability to hold these companies accountable. We shouldn’t be shielding Big Oil—we should be shielding communities from climate harm.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut had this to say:

“Big Oil should have to face the music for knowingly deceiving consumers about the impact of fossil fuels on our communities and environment. These companies are just taking a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook—attempting to skirt regulation and stop us from bringing enforcement actions against their specific industry. We do not need, nor should we ever have, any immunity for fossil fuel companies from litigation that seeks to hold them accountable.”

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who has sponsored a federal polluter pays climate superfund bill, said:

“While we’ve put forward proposals – like my Polluters Pay bill – to hold Big Oil accountable and make them pay for the harm their actions have caused to communities across the country, Republicans are hell-bent on doing the opposite. Republicans want to give Big Oil a license to pollute with impunity and leave it to taxpayers to pay the costs. This is exactly the kind of special interest grift that the American people are sick of. We should be requiring Big Oil to pay up – not shielding them from ever facing their day in court or being held responsible.”

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) speaks during a press conference announcing his Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act. Credit: Screen shot from event recording in September 2024.

New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have vowed to block the legislation, according to Newsday.

“This bill would slam the door on holding fossil fuel polluters accountable and shift the burden onto New Yorkers. Polluters should pay for the climate damage they caused, not taxpayers,” Schumer told Newsday in a statement.

Responses from Democrats in the House

The couple of House Democrats I reached out to or have seen public statements from are all part of the House’s Sustainable Energy & Environment Coalition. Former Congressman and Washington governor Jay Inslee, one of the co-founders of this coalition, has also been an outspoken opponent of attempts to shield Big Oil from climate accountability. In late March he briefed some members of Congress about the oil industry’s push to secure a liability shield. “I am playing the role of Paul Revere here. The British aren’t coming but the oil and gas industry is,” Inslee told members of the coalition.

Rep. Paul Tonko (NY-20), co-chair of the House SEEC, said this about the “Stop Climate Shakedowns” bill:

“Once again, Republicans are prioritizing polluters over our planet and the wellbeing of the American people. Shielding Big Oil from facing accountability for the damage they have caused is a slap in the face to the very concept of justice and to the countless who have been harmed by the fossil fuel industry. I’ll fight against this cruel bill that gives polluters a free pass. Any member of Congress who cares about accountability, our environment, and public health must do the same.”

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01), a vice-chair of the coalition, said this:

“It is abundantly clear that the priority of Republican lawmakers is to protect corporate polluters at the expense of people who pay higher bills, breathe dirtier air, and confront more climate-induced extreme weather events. Carbon emissions are contributing to disease and damaging the environment. Granting immunity to oil and gas companies is immoral and would further harm people across the country who are already burdened by surging electricity bills, higher property insurance, and unaffordable health care costs. The companies and individuals who created this crisis must be held accountable, and that means giving injured parties their day in court. I will do everything I can to block this legislation and any other attempt to create a liability shield for polluters.”

And Rep. Mike Levin (CA-49), also a vice-chair of the SEEC, had this to say:

“The Stop Climate Shakedowns Act is a bailout for an entire industry that spent decades lying to the American public about the damage its products were causing. They funded the science to understand that damage, they saw the projections, they spent millions burying it, and now they want Congress to guarantee they never pay a dime for the consequences. Fossil fuel companies are begging for a liability shield because they know they are guilty of breaking the law. I am firmly opposed to this bill, and I will fight to ensure that the communities bearing the costs of climate change retain every legal tool available to hold oil and gas corporations accountable.” (Levin also posted a video clip where he made some of these same remarks).

Rep. Dan Goldberg (NY-10) also posted a short video clip where he called out the Republicans’ fossil fuel immunity proposal:

“Right now, 22 state attorneys general from around the country are suing New York to overturn this [climate superfund] legislation. And worse yet, Republicans in Congress are trying to pass a law that would preempt it, yet again trying to come to the defense of Big Oil…We must stand up for the New York law that makes polluters pay for their pollution, not New York taxpayers.”

In March I reported for Inside Climate News on the brewing effort, at federal and state levels, to immunize polluters from climate liability. A federal liability shield bill had not yet been introduced, but a spokesperson for Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and House Judiciary Democrats said that they would oppose any immunity efforts:

“Fossil fuel companies are apparently continuing to lobby for legislation that would absolve them of any accountability for their role in endangering people’s health and safety. We rejected these efforts in 2020 and will continue to defeat them if they are proposed in the future.”

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Chicago, Illinois was the host city for the 2026 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. Credit: Dana Drugmand

I recently returned home from Chicago where I attended the 2026 Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference, an annual gathering of reporters and other professionals engaged in environmental work. It goes without saying that these are incredibly challenging times to be working in the environmental sphere; the same goes for working in the journalism field, which is currently in a state of turmoil. Working at the intersection of these two fields, then – being an environmental journalist – is doubly tough in this moment. The conference did not shy away from this reality.

Its concluding plenary session, for example, titled “Protecting Environmental Journalists, Protecting the Planet: Safety, Support and Resilience,” featured an important and candid discussion about some of the challenges – including emotional distress – facing journalists who cover the state of the planet. Rebecca Weston, co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America and co-founder of the CARES media initiative, highlighted a new report from the initiative that surveyed the emotional and mental wellbeing of environmental journalists. “In short: Many journalists who cover climate change and the environment are not fine. The survey found high levels of anxiety, stress, depression, and climate distress among the 188 journalists who responded,” the executive summary explains.

Another one of the panelists, Nepali journalist Kunda Dixit, discussed some of the broader trends affecting journalists like democratic backsliding and restrictions on press freedom. Protecting journalism, he said, is essential for protecting the planet.

Dixit authored a chapter speaking to that very message in a 2025 UNESCO report, World trends in freedom of expression and media development: global report 2022/2025. “Press freedom is under attack worldwide… In an era when support for traditional media is dwindling amid economic uncertainty, political pressure and techno-logical shifts, defending free, independent journalism must be recognized as a development priority,” UNESCO assistant director-general for communication and information Tawfik Jelassi writes in the report’s foreword. And as Dixit writes in his chapter: “As the triple planetary crisis endangers all life on the planet, the mass media’s capacity to draw attention to the urgency of the issues is seriously undermined by the crisis in journalism and in democracy itself.”

Today, May 3, is World Press Freedom Day, so it seems particularly appropriate to reflect upon this crisis in journalism generally and specifically what it means for climate and environmental journalism. And while the overall picture may seem grim, there are solutions or ways that the situation can be improved (like funding this work!).

Tip Jar (Pay what you can)

But first, the bad news (no pun intended). The journalism industry in general is going through a period of mass layoffs; nearly 10,000 journalists have been laid off in the past three years, according to a 2025 article in Nieman Reports. “CBS, CNN, NBC and other broadcasters cut newsroom staff,” Climate Rights International’s Felix Horne wrote in a February article in Climate Home News. Even the Guardian, he notes – which does some of the best news reporting especially on the climate crisis – “has acknowledged sustained financial strain and has reduced or consolidated reporting capacity in recent years.”

As newsrooms shrink, climate journalists are getting tossed aside. Mainstream news outlets have been eliminating or slashing their climate desks. “The Washington Post gutted its climate team amid a larger set of layoffs. So did CBS News… ABC News and NBC News also all but eliminated their climate teams,” Covering Climate Now, an initiative that aims to improve climate coverage worldwide, noted in its new white paper titled “A Burning House, A Quiet Media, a Silenced Majority.”

CBS News layoffs last October essentially eliminated the team that supported its climate news coverage. In axing these newsroom positions, CBS’s new pro-Trump chief executive David Ellison “has effectively told CBS News it’s no longer responsible for keeping the public informed about climate change,” climate reporter Emily Atkin wrote in her HEATED newsletter. (Atkin recently brought one of those ex-CBS News journalists, senior climate producer Tracy Wholf, on board with HEATED to produce podcasts).

In early February, The Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos) nixed most of its climate journalists – more than a dozen altogether – as part of a round of mass layoffs that affected nearly one-third of the company with hundreds of journalists losing their jobs. “The climate team was one of many casualties,” climate journalist Sammy Roth (formerly with the Los Angeles Times) wrote in his Substack publication Climate Colored Goggles. “But the sad loss of another dozen jobs only adds to a sad trend of legacy media organizations pulling back from climate coverage, even as global warming accelerates.”

“We hear a lot about people who are being laid off, about people who are moving out, people who are being squeezed out. And to be frank, the picture’s not good right now,” Covering Climate Now’s Kyle Pope said during a webinar last December. “A lot of climate journalists are losing their jobs at a very difficult time for journalism in general.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently announced a deep downsizing, slashing jobs that will shrink the newsroom to just under half its current size.

Unsurprisingly then, news media coverage of climate change is decreasing. Climate coverage declined globally by 14 percent in 2025 compared to the prior year, and was down 38 percent from its peak in 2021, according to CU Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory. In the U.S., climate change coverage by the big broadcast networks has fallen by 35 percent, the Covering Climate Now report, which was released during the SEJ conference in Chicago, notes.

Newsroom staff cuts are of course one reason for this decline in climate coverage. Corporate and billionaire owners of mainstream news outlets are largely silencing reporting on the climate crisis, prioritizing profits over the public’s right to know. As Covering Climate Now wrote in its February 19 Climate Beat newsletter: “The people who own much of the world’s media do not regard coverage of climate change to be in their economic interest. As a result, the rest of us are left in darkness.”

This is part of a bigger trend known as “climate hushing,” where political leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump refuse to talk about the climate problem, except (in the case of Trump) to deny that it’s happening. “That denial has emboldened others — in business, in politics, and in media — to downplay the climate threat,” the Covering Climate Now report states.

Climate has also fallen off the news agenda given the “firehose” of other news items to report on any given day. Trump’s chaos and “flood the zone” strategy has the effect of overwhelming the news media and distracting coverage away from issues that really matter.

What is happening to our planet and its critical life-support systems matters. The journalism industry is in turmoil and climate and environmental coverage is declining at precisely the time when the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution is rapidly worsening. The science is clear that we are in the midst of a climate emergency. And mitigating it at a level that our civilization can survive, as Covering Climate Now’s Mark Hertsgaard said during a recent webinar discussing the new white paper, requires phasing out fossil fuels. The climate story, and the stakes, are “literally that existential.”

Support Independent Climate Journalism

This is important and meaningful work. But, like any public service, it needs support to be able to survive and thrive. “We need journalism funded as critical infrastructure,” journalist Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, said during the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2026 Doomsday Clock Announcement virtual panel earlier this year.

Ressa warned that the rise of Big Tech, AI and social media threatens democracy and truth itself, noting that a “predatory, extractive business model is corrupting our shared sense of reality.” She echoed the call to support independent journalism.

“Independent platforms, newsletters and Substack writers now produce some of the best climate coverage anywhere. They matter deeply,” Climate Rights International’s Horne wrote in his February commentary piece. “Supporting climate journalism is an investment in truth, accountability and a livable planet for our children and future generations.”

Truth, accountability, and a livable planet are the essence of what drives this newsletter, One Earth Now. It is journalism that tells the truth about the climate emergency, and covers actions and efforts to hold accountable the powerful interests that are fueling the fire. The title reflects the urgency of this fight for a livable Earth, the only planet that all of humanity and all living beings collectively call home.

There are lots of climate newsletters out there, many of them on Substack, so it is not easy to build a readership in an increasingly crowded space. I value each and every one of my subscribers, and I understand that a lot folks are likely not in a position financially to pay for a subscription right now. But paid subscriptions are what really makes a difference for me and other independent journalists on Substack. It is literally what allows us to keep going.

Lack of funding is probably the biggest challenge and constraint on doing this work. Reader support through paid subscriptions certainly helps. But greater institutional or philanthropic funding is also needed. “We think that funders could make more support available for journalists covering climate and environment. Funders should prioritize supporting climate and environmental journalism now, particularly given the urgent nature of the issues,” Gabi Mocatta, senior research fellow in climate science communication at the University of Tasmania and lead researcher on a 2024 report called Covering the Planet: Assessing the State of Climate and Environmental Journalism Globally, said during an October 2024 webinar discussing the report.

That’s really the bottom line (again, no pun intended). Speaking during the recent April 16 webinar discussing the new Covering Climate Now report, SEJ executive director Aparna Mukherjee echoed the call for more financial support for this critical work: “Fund environmental journalism and climate coverage.”

Tip Jar

Santa Marta, Colombia. Credit: J@YGS via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

In the Colombian port city of Santa Marta, a landmark global climate conference in underway with discussions around phasing out fossil fuels front and center on the agenda. Co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands, the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels marks, as Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative founder and chair Tzeporah Berman put it, “a historic moment.” With global fossil fuel energy markets in disarray and scientific warnings that planetary heating is accelerating, the need to work out an exit strategy away from reliance on oil, gas, and coal has never been greater. And now, for the first time, countries and stakeholders who understand this and are committed to the transition to cleaner, more sustainable alternatives are coming together to begin to lay the groundwork to make that transition happen.

“Everyone coming to Santa Marta agrees that the transition away from fossil fuels must happen. The key question now is how do we make it succeed, and how do we accelerate it?” Stientje van Veldhoven, minister of climate policy and green growth for the Netherlands, said during a public briefing on the conference last month.

So what exactly is this conference in Santa Marta, why is it so significant with everything else that is happening in the world (wars, cost of living crisis and inflation, etc.), and what can we expect will come out of it?

One Earth Now is a 100% reader-supported publication - no billionaire backers or corporate owners here. And we just turned two years old! Launched on Earth Day in 2024, this publication is dedicated to covering the most important story of our time, and to telling the truth about the climate emergency. If that mission resonates with you, please consider supporting this vital work by upgrading to a paid subscription. Thank you!

All About Implementation

Colombia and the Netherlands announced their plan for the first international conference on the just transition away from fossil fuels during the COP30 UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil last November. The annual UN gatherings are supposed to be the forum where the world discusses how it will tackle the defining challenge of our time – the climate emergency – but swarms of fossil fuel lobbyists and petrostates have largely prevented any meaningful dialogue on addressing the root cause of the problem. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia, for example, blocked the adoption of plan for phasing out fossil fuels at COP30, despite more than 80 countries backing calls to develop such a roadmap. The UN climate conferences are run under UN rules of consensus, meaning that any decisions made require unanimity, which allows one country or a small handful of them to obstruct proposals that have majority support.

The conference taking place right now in Santa Marta is not following UN rules, specifically for that reason. According to Covering Climate Now executive director Mark Hertsgaard, the decision to not adhere to UN rules is one reason why this conference could be a “game changer.”

It is the first international convening of its kind aiming to discuss the nuts and bolts of how to transition away from fossil fuels. According to the conference website, its objective is to “initiate a concrete process through which a coalition of committed countries, subnational governments, and relevant stakeholders can identify and advance enabling pathways to implement a progressive transition away from fossil fuels creating sustainable societies and economies.” In other words, it’s all about implementation.

“The conference is not a negotiating space,” said Daniela Duran, head of international affairs of the Ministry for Environment and Sustainable Development for Colombia. “We are seeing Santa Marta as a dedicated platform for implementation.”

The participants represent what has been referred to as a “coalition of the willing.” There will be no skeptics or obstructors. Fossil fuel lobbyists are not allowed in the door.

Nearly 60 countries are taking part in this historic conference. They include both fossil fuel producers and fossil fuel importers, and large and small economies. The host country of Colombia is a fossil fuel producer; Santa Marta, the host city, is a hub for coal exports. Canada, Australia, Norway, and Nigeria are some of the other producer countries that are participating.

Other stakeholders represented include scientists and academics, civil society, Indigenous leaders, subnational governments, and businesses.

The conference is taking place from April 24 to April 29. During this time there are several sub-conferences and gatherings happening, designed to engage specific stakeholder groups. On April 24-25, climate scientists and energy transition experts are leading an academic dialogue discussing concrete pathways for advancing a fossil fuel phaseout. As Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a leading Earth system scientist, told global media platform We Don’t Have Time in an interview, “It will be an independent, international panel with energy experts doing updated pathway analysis on what needs to be accomplished sector by sector, country by country, from now until 2030. But also focusing on mapping policy options.”

There is also a People’s Summit happening on April 24-26 where civil society organizations are huddling to discuss their visions and demands, which will be communicated to state delegates in an Assembly of the People on April 27.

The final two days, April 28-29, will be the high-level segment featuring country delegates and government ministers engaging in dialogue with representatives from academia and civil society.

Three thematic pillars are guiding the discussions. First, how to overcome economic dependency on fossil fuels. Second, transforming fossil fuel supply and demand. And third, strengthening international cooperation and climate diplomacy.

“The conference can be a turning point where a coalition of doers or coalition of the willing takes steps towards ending new licensing for fossil fuel exploration, addressing fossil fuel subsidies while protecting the most vulnerable, and working toward a managed transition away from fossil fuel production and consumption,” Natalie Jones, senior policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said during an April 21 media briefing ahead of the event.

“Fossil Fuel Dependence is a Trap”

The Santa Marta conference comes at a particularly fraught time geopolitically, and when international diplomacy and the international rule of law are under incredible strain.

“The United States and Israel have waged an illegal war against Iran, and the consequences have been felt around the world. Not just the erosion of the rule of international law, but also economic impacts far beyond the Middle East, showing why a just transition to renewable energy is now a security imperative,” Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and founding member of The Elders, said during the recent media briefing.

The Iran war and closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created what the International Energy Agency says is the biggest disruption to global oil supply in history. This has driven up prices at the pump and, since so much of our economies are built around oil and gas, costs on most other things are also rising.

“I don’t know that we could put it into any clearer terms that fossil fuel dependence is an economic liability and a growing security risk,” said Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub.

“This global energy crisis that we are facing today with its price shocks and geopolitical instability painfully proves our point on a devastating scale - fossil fuel dependence is a trap,” Maina Talia, Minister of Home Affairs, Climate Change and Environment for Tuvalu, said during an April 9 webinar hosted by Climate Home News.

The conference of course was already planned before the US and Israel started bombing Iran sparking a global fossil fuel crisis, but the conflict only further illustrates the urgency of charting a course away from volatile fossil fuels.

“At a time of escalating military conflicts and mounting planetary crises, it has never been more urgent to move off fossil fuels than it is today,” Nikki Reisch, director of the Climate and Energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a statement. “Continued dependence on oil, gas, and coal is a colossal vulnerability and a growing liability that only deepens human suffering.”

A Scientific Imperative – And a Legal Obligation

The need to transition away from fossil fuels is firmly grounded in science. And the science is very clear. As Covering Climate Now’s Hertsgaard explained: “There is no dispute, zero, within the scientific community that humanity must phase out fossil fuels rapidly if we are going to limit global temperature rise to an amount that our civilization can survive.”

In a 2024 paper published in the journal BioScience, for example, top climate and Earth systems scientists warned that we are facing “a global emergency beyond any doubt” and a “dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.” The top priority, they said, should be rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use.

Last year in a review published in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change, scientists issued another urgent warning that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are driving interlinked crises threatening human health, biodiversity, ecological integrity and the stability of our planet. “The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity and lead author of the study, said in an accompanying statement. “Oil, gas and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past.”

That is why the discussions happening currently in Santa Marta matter. The science tells us that phasing out fossil fuels is an urgent necessity. It is also a matter of justice and a legal obligation.

The International Court of Justice – the world’s highest court – affirmed this in its historic advisory opinion on climate change issued last July. The court clarified that all countries are required under multiple sources of international law to protect the climate system, including by addressing the core drivers of greenhouse gas emissions – fossil fuels being at the top of the list. The court even suggested that continued fossil fuel activities, like licensing, production and consumption, and subsidizing, could be considered “internationally wrongful acts.”

“Breaking free from fossil fuels is no longer just a political obligation. It’s a legal one, because of the ICJ’s advisory opinion,” Robinson said.

She and over 250 other legal experts signed an open letter, released on the opening day of the conference, explaining the legal foundations for a fossil fuel phaseout. The signatories argue that the phaseout is not optional, but rather legally mandatory.

“The phaseout of fossil fuels is not just scientifically necessary to prevent catastrophic and irreversible harm to the climate system, all peoples and ecosystems; it is legally required,” the letter concludes.

“Courts and tribunals around the world have articulated States’ significant legal obligations to address climate change. States can only meaningfully address climate change by phasing out fossil fuel energy sources. Thereby, States are legally required to transition away from fossil fuel use. It’s as simple as that,” said Paul Rink, associate professor of law at Seton Hall Law School and one of the letter’s signatories.

A Critical Starting Point

Once the conference in Santa Marta wraps up on April 29, what happens next? Will the discussions and momentum carry forward into other spaces and upcoming climate conferences? Will the “coalition of the willing” expand to include even more countries, and will any pledges or commitments announced during the event translate into real action?

That all remains to be seen. What we do know is that the main outcome of the conference will be a published report summarizing the key points and input gathered. Organizers also intend for there to be a second conference to take place hopefully next year, to build upon the groundwork laid during this initial gathering.

What the Santa Marta conference represents, therefore, is a starting point. There is no expectation that all of the thorny issues will get resolved in a matter of days. The transition away from fossil fuels is complex, and it is hard. But progress has to start somewhere. As Bastiaan Hassing, the Netherlands representative for climate policy and green growth, explained during a recent Covering Climate Now press briefing about the conference: “This is hopefully the start of a longer running process where we can get together in an atmosphere where we don’t negotiate, but talk about what we can do together to speed up this transition.”

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Credit: Tony Webster via Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0

Jenny Sebold, a single mother of three children, put her “whole heart and soul” into renovating a space in downtown Montpelier, Vermont that she turned into a clothing store and flower shop called Rebel Heart Collective. On July 11, 2023, unusually heavy rains caused the Winooski River that runs through Vermont’s capital city to overflow its banks, inundating the community with several feet of water. This extreme flooding episode, Vermont’s worst in nearly a century, impacted much of the state, drowning homes, farms and small businesses. As Sebold described: “It was devastating.”

The trauma and hardship did not end once the flood waters receded. Sebold’s shop remained closed for over seven months, and during that time she had to make some difficult choices and sacrifices since the shop was her sole source of income. “I had to often wake up in the morning and decide, am I gonna feed myself today, or am I going to send my kid off [to hockey camp] to support his dream?” Sebold said during a 2024 press conference featuring stories of extreme weather survivors. “Meanwhile the rich oil execs get to keep making piles of money. It’s wrong. They’ve got to be held accountable and help rebuild the communities that have been impacted.”

Like Sebold, Roishetta Ozane is a single mom who has directly experienced climate-intensified disasters. As a resident of Sulphur, Louisiana, her community is choked by fossil fuel and petrochemical industry pollution, making the air toxic to breathe. Those same industrial facilities generate greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate emergency, manifesting in the form of superstorms, extreme floods, deadly heat and wildfires, and other damaging impacts. In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, two major hurricanes hit southwestern Louisiana, displacing Ozane and her six children from their home. “Climate-induced disasters, such as tornadoes and hurricanes, caused by fossil fuel companies’ pollution and negligence cannot go unnoticed any longer,” Ozane said. “It is high time we hold these companies accountable for their actions and demand that they pay for the climate crimes they have committed.”

Extreme weather survivors across the U.S. are echoing these calls for major polluters to be held accountable and to pay for the damage that stems from their fossil fuel products and activities. These calls come as climate disasters continue to ravage communities across the country, in red states and blue states alike. But while the physical reality of climate change doesn’t care about partisan politics, the policy response in terms of whether and how to address it is unfortunately divided along partisan lines. That is the case not just with regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (climate mitigation), but also with climate adaptation and accountability initiatives.

Vermont, for example, passed a groundbreaking “climate superfund” law in 2024 that aims to make large fossil fuel producers help pay for some of the climate adaptation costs incurred by the state. The 2023 floods compelled state legislators to act with urgency in passing this first-in-the-nation polluters pay law. New York followed by enacting its own version, and nearly a dozen other states (most with Democrat-controlled legislators) have seen similar climate superfund bills introduced.

Louisiana, by contrast, is considering legislation that would shield the fossil fuel industry from any legal accountability for climate change harms. A bill called the Louisiana Energy Protection Act, which essentially prohibits liability for climate damage in the state, is working its way through the legislature. Similar bills are advancing in Oklahoma and Iowa, the latter of which is awaiting the governor’s signature. And Utah and now Tennessee have already passed climate liability shield bills into law.

Utah, where Republicans have a supermajority in the state legislature, became the first state in the U.S. to enact such a law last month – when the southwest region was literally baking under an extreme heat wave that scientists say would have been “virtually impossible” absent climate change.

“In Utah we’ve just had the warmest winter we’ve ever had,” Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, told me. “Salt Lake City normally has 34 inches of snow fall on the valley floor in an average winter. This year we had 2.5. We have virtually no snowpack in our mountains. Temperatures have been on and off 25 to 30 degrees above average for this time of year.”

Moench said the state lawmakers’ passage of a bill that immunizes polluters from facing any legal consequences for climate change damage is an outrage. “The bottom line is, at a time when we need to be doing absolutely everything we can to avert catastrophe, instead of calling the fire department, they’re pouring gasoline on the fire.”

Utah does not currently have any climate liability lawsuits filed against industrial polluters, nor has it seen any climate superfund bills introduced, but the new law does foreclose the possibility of any of this litigation or legislation in the future in that state. Tennessee, which enacted its climate liability shield law on April 16, did have a superfund bill introduced, though it did not see much traction in the Republican-controlled legislature. Iowa is poised to become the next state to immunize polluters – including agribusiness and ethanol producers – from climate accountability, and there is also no imminent liability threat to these companies in that state. But climate advocates are concerned that the trend still sets a dangerous precedent at a time when climate impacts are becoming increasingly harmful and costlier as time goes on.

“Forty years from now it’s going to be so much more severe. And if they are able to pass this legislation now, that means there is no recourse for future generations who will experience so much worse,” said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director with the Make Polluters Pay campaign.

At the national level, Republicans in Congress have just introduced legislation that would put an end to all attempts to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for the climate emergency that it played a large part in causing. Representative Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) announced on Friday that she has filed a bill called the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026” that “shields America’s energy producers” from what she refers to as “leftist legal crusades”, primarily climate liability suits and superfund laws. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Budd (R-NC), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) are sponsoring a companion bill in the Senate.

DiPaola said this federal immunity bill is a “sweeping attempt to rig the system for some of the most powerful companies in the world at the expense of everyone else.”

“Across the country, communities are facing rising costs from extreme weather, higher insurance premiums, and strained public budgets. At the same time, evidence continues to show that major oil companies knew about the risks of their products for decades and misled the public. Lawsuits and climate superfund laws are about making sure those costs don’t fall entirely on taxpayers,” she explained. “What this bill would do is shut all of that down. It would dismiss ongoing cases, wipe out laws passed by states, and tell Americans they no longer have the right to take these companies to court. And not because the companies are innocent, but because they are powerful.”

“Such corporate impunity would twist the knife of the climate crisis that is already directly harming people across the country,” Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “Congress must not capitulate to wealthy special interests. Communities deserve the right to hold polluters accountable for the deadly and costly harms they are causing.”

The liability shield bills at the state and federal levels are part of a larger, escalating campaign by the fossil fuel industry and its political allies to put an end to all climate liability initiatives and to evade any and all accountability for their role in driving climate breakdown. And the campaign might ultimately end up succeeding to some degree, at least here in the U.S.

The climate superfund laws in Vermont and New York are currently tied up in legal challenges that are likely to take years to resolve, with the Supreme Court having the final say. Bills in other states to make polluters pay, meanwhile, have mostly stalled.

And the fate of climate liability lawsuits seeking damages under state law is more uncertain than ever now that the Supreme Court has decided to intervene in one of the cases at the request of the oil company defendants. The court is expected to hear the case (filed by Boulder, Colorado against ExxonMobil and Suncor) during its upcoming term later this year, on the question of whether federal law precludes state law claims pertaining to global GHG emissions and climate change. If the court rules in favor of the oil companies, it could be the end of many of the climate cases against the industry and potentially the climate superfund laws as well.

According to James May, distinguished professor of law at Washburn University Law School, such a negative ruling has become even more likely now with the court issuing a decision on Friday in favor of oil major Chevron in another case about coastal environmental damage to Louisiana parishes (their equivalent of counties). One of these parishes has already won a $745 million verdict against the company in state court, but that is now in question as the Supreme Court ruled that these coastal damage lawsuits should be moved to federal court, which is seen by industry defendants as a friendlier venue.

Whether it is coastal environmental degradation in Louisiana or climate-related damage in communities across the country, the operations and business model of the fossil fuel industry inflict real harm and steep costs – impacts that the industry has long known about, but has deliberately chosen to lie about and externalize in order to inflate its profits. The question now is whether it will ever be held accountable and forced to pay for the mess it has caused, or whether it will continue to enjoy complete impunity.

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Hugues Falys, a peasant farmer from the Belgian province of Hainaut, speaks outside the courthouse on March 18, 2026. Credit: Eric de Mildt

During the summer of 2022, record-breaking monsoon rains dumped massive quantities of water that submerged entire fields and villages across Pakistan. The unprecedented, “biblical-style” floods inundated roughly one-third of the country and displaced millions of people; 33 million Pakistanis were affected by the disaster and more than 1,700 lost their lives, while 2.2 million homes were damaged or destroyed.

The province of Sindh, a predominantly agricultural region, was hit especially hard. The floods submerged 4.8 million acres of farmland and wiped out more than a year’s worth of crops. “That was a very big tragedy for us,” Abdul Hafeez Khoso, a Pakistani farmer from the Sindh province, said during a virtual press conference last October. “Our crops were destroyed, and agriculture is the main source of income for people living in the villages,” he explained.

With crops destroyed and market access disrupted, the floods triggered a food crisis since the Sindh province accounts for nearly one-quarter of Pakistan’s agricultural output. Farmers were pushed into debt or poverty, and the impacts continue to be felt to this day.

“Three years on, recovery remains incomplete. Many communities continue to struggle with displacement and economic hardship,” said Dr. Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed, chairman of HANDS Welfare Foundation, a Pakistani humanitarian organization.

Smallholder farmers whose livelihoods are deeply tied to the environment are on the frontlines of the climate emergency. From extreme flooding to scorching heatwaves and devastating drought, the impacts of a rapidly warming planet are undeniable for farmers who literally make their living off of the land. They are facing rising hardship with damaged crops and fields, sickened or dead livestock, and increasingly unpredictable and erratic weather patterns that threaten their operations and make it difficult to plan around. And with damages mounting, some farmers are looking to the law in the hopes that it can be leveraged to make major carbon polluters and fossil fuel companies pay compensation for climate-related losses and adaptation needs.

Khoso said the flooding disaster was clearly linked to climate change, which is happening largely due to “big companies” that are “damaging the environment.” Now, he along with 38 other farmers from Sindh are turning to the courts seeking some relief and accountability from several of these big companies.

In December the 39 Pakistani farmers filed a lawsuit in Germany against two of the largest generators of carbon pollution in that country – the energy utility company RWE and the cement producer Heidelberg Materials. The farmers are seeking partial compensation for their losses stemming from the 2022 floods.

Their case builds upon a landmark climate lawsuit brought by a Peruvian farmer and mountain guide, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, against RWE that tested the question of whether a corporation that has historically been a significant contributor to the carbon emissions driving climate change – the so-called ‘carbon majors’ – can be sued by an individual suffering from climate-related damage in another country. The German courts say the answer is yes. Lliuya’s case was ultimately dismissed last year because the evidence of an imminent flood risk to the plaintiff’s home wasn’t strong enough, but the court did affirm the principle that major polluters could be held liable for their contributions to climate change.

In the new case brought by the Pakistani farmers, the damage has already occurred, so the evidence of harm might be strong enough to overcome dismissal.

“For [these farmers], damage caused by the climate crisis means destroyed crops, homes, and livestock, declining yields, poverty, debt, and losing dignity,” Karin Zennig, climate policy officer at medico international – an NGO supporting the farmers’ case – said during an online briefing held in January. “The Pakistani farmers are opening now a new chapter in the fight for climate justice.”

Belgian Farmer Takes Oil Giant to Court

In Belgium, Hugues Falys practices ecologically sustainable farming in the Hainaut province. Since 1993 he has cultivated vegetables, strawberries, cereals, and legumes and raised grass-fed livestock for organic beef production. A “pioneer of the agroecological transition,” Falys has experienced firsthand the impacts of extreme weather such as heatwaves and drought. Scorched pastures have left him having to source feed from elsewhere for his livestock, while heat stress has also reduced yields for his cash crops. In recent years he has had to downsize his herd to adapt to decreased forage production.

With support from NGOs FIAN, Greenpeace Belgium, and Human Rights League, Falys brought a lawsuit two years ago against the French multinational oil company TotalEnergies. Dubbed “the farmer case,” the suit aims to hold the company responsible for its role in contributing to the climate crisis. It is the first lawsuit of its kind in Belgium and part of a growing wave of climate accountability litigation worldwide targeting the carbon majors. In bringing the legal action, Falys is seeking compensation for damages he has suffered; he is also asking the court to order TotalEnergies to implement a credible transition plan that includes sharp cuts to its greenhouse gas emissions and a swift phase out of its oil and gas production.

The court held hearings late last year, and in March it issued a ruling on a preliminary procedural matter, finding the case to be justiciable (able to be handled by the judiciary). The court held off on deciding the merits of the case for now, since a court in France is due to rule on a similar case against TotalEnergies in June. Still, the decision allowing the case to advance was a positive sign for Falys.

“The court recognizes today that agriculture is directly affected by the climate crisis, that farmers are its victims (8 out of 10 farmers in Belgium are suffering from climate change), and that the justice system has a role to play in holding those responsible for this crisis accountable,” Falys said in a March 18 press release, commenting on the court’s ruling. “Things are starting to change!”

The Belgian court is expected to issue its decision on the merits in September.

Major Flooding Threatens Small Farms in Vermont

Meanwhile, farmers and other stakeholders in the U.S. state of Vermont are now awaiting a decision from a federal court about whether Vermont’s landmark Climate Superfund Act is constitutional and can survive legal challenges, at least for now. The court held a hearing on Monday, March 30 in which the plaintiffs challenging Vermont’s law – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute along with 24 Republican state attorneys general plus the Trump administration – argued that the state law conflicts with federal law and runs afoul of the Constitution. The plaintiffs want Vermont’s superfund law – which the legislature passed (with tri-partisan support) in 2024 – to be overturned by the courts.

Vermont’s law is the first law of its kind in the world that holds the world’s largest fossil fuel producers strictly liable for their climate pollution and requires them to help pay for climate adaptation costs in the state. It is grounded in the “polluter pays” principle and modeled after the federal Superfund program that authorizes regulators to charge polluters for clean-up costs associated with remediating hazardous waste sites. But this is the first time that the concept has been applied to climate change.

State lawmakers in Vermont quickly passed the climate superfund bill in just one legislative session, spurred into action after the state experienced its worst flooding in nearly a century in July 2023. Heavy downpours caused rivers to overflow their banks, inundating the capital city of Montpelier and temporarily submerging farms and villages across the state.

Intervale Community Farm in Burlington, for example, lost 99 percent of its crops during that summer flood. The 55-acre organic farm is situated within a floodplain, so some flooding is expected. But typically in the past the floods would occur outside of the peak summer growing season and would be more manageable. The July 2023 floods destroyed $200,000 worth of crops, according to farm manager Andy Jones.

The following year, in 2024, major flooding occurred once again on the same day in July, inundating the Intervale Community Farm and neighboring farms in the area. As Jones wrote in a declaration filed last year with the court: “These floods threaten the farm’s survival.”

Flooding at Intervale Community Farm in July 2023. Credit: Intervale Community Farm

Small farmers all over the state are already struggling to make a living with increasing economic pressures, and climate change further compounds the stressors, Grace Oedel, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT), explained.

“This marketplace of consolidation and corporate ownership of the food system means it’s really hard to survive already. And then layer onto that just climate devastation caused by extreme, erratic weather events that are increasingly common. Those are the conditions we are facing in Vermont, which is part of why we need a climate superfund,” Oedel told me.

“We know that over the last couple years of the floods, climate impacts caused at least $60 million in losses to Vermont’s farms,” she added. “Farms are going out of business. For some farms, climate impacts along with the rising land costs they face are creating a really depressed economic situation. And we need, for long-term food security, farms to be able to survive.”

NOFA-VT has intervened as a defendant backing the state in the court cases challenging Vermont’s climate superfund law. Oedel told me that the organization’s member farms “are very affected by the climate crisis” and want to see Vermont’s law be upheld, because the funding it would secure could help the organic farming community as it tries to adapt to a climate crisis that it did not cause.

“Every year on our farm we make significant infrastructure investments to protect our crops, and every season we face significant crop-destroying challenges from weather extremes: frosts, excessive heat damage, wind, tornadoes, flooding, soil saturation, and overall impossibly hot work conditions,” Scott Greene, a farmer at Singing Cedars Farmstead, a vegetable and livestock farm in Orwell, Vermont, said in a statement following the March 30 court hearing.

“Farmers globally have been, and will continue to be, enormously impacted by the climate crisis,” Oedel said in the statement. “We know what’s behind the worsening extreme weather affecting our farms, and it’s fair for fossil fuel companies to bear some of the cost of critical climate adaptation projects.”

Further Reading

Check out my latest published articles:

“As Vermont Defends Its Law to Make Fossil Fuel Firms Pay for Climate Adaptation, the Bill Is Already Coming Due” (co-authored with Nathaniel Eisen), Inside Climate News, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05042026/vermont-defends-climate-superfund-law/

“Affordability and Race Play a Major Role in Whether People Live in Nature-Deprived Areas,” Sierra, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/affordability-and-race-play-major-role-whether-people-live-nature-deprived-areas

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In 2024 the state of Vermont passed a groundbreaking new law modeled after the federal Superfund program that holds major fossil fuel producers liable for their past greenhouse gas emissions and requires them to help pay for climate change adaptation projects in the state. The law was the first of its kind and its passage marked a breakthrough for climate accountability efforts. New York then followed Vermont’s lead and passed a similar law just months later. As One Earth Now previously reported in its debut article, this strategy of using state legislation to hold Big Oil financially accountable for the devastating and costly impacts of the climate crisis it largely (and knowingly) created could be a real game changer.

Now, two years after Vermont enacted its landmark Climate Superfund Act, the law is facing its first major test in court. On March 30 a federal district court judge will hold a hearing at the federal courthouse in Rutland, Vermont addressing motions in two related legal challenges to Vermont’s novel statute. One of the challenges was filed at the end of 2024 by the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute as representatives of big oil companies. Twenty-four Republican-led states have joined this suit as intervenor plaintiffs. The other challenge was brought last year by the Trump administration. Both cases broadly assert that the climate superfund law is unconstitutional and precluded by federal law, and both aim to have it stricken down immediately before Vermont proceeds further with implementing it.

Next week’s hearing will address the challengers’ request for a swift judgment on the contested legal issues in their favor – called a motion for summary judgment – as well as Vermont’s ask for the same (cross motion for summary judgment) and the state’s bid to dismiss or toss out the suits. It will then be up to the court to decide whether or not the Climate Superfund Act survives, at least for now.

The stakes are significant on both sides of this battle. Should Vermont ultimately lose, it would mean that the state’s taxpayers and residents continue having to foot the entire bill for responding and adapting to climate disasters. It would also likely mean the end of similar climate superfund laws or proposals in other states. Fossil fuel polluters would enjoy continued impunity and exorbitant profits while the costs of climate-fueled extreme weather balloon and further burden already-strained municipal and state budgets. If the fossil fuel industry and its allies lose this fight, then companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and others would be subject to billions of dollars in liability under not only Vermont’s law but other states like New York’s too.

Legal experts say this litigation will take years to play out, and it could very well end up before the US Supreme Court. The initial challenges and arguments made before the district court are just round one, and whichever side loses is almost certain to appeal. If Vermont wins this first round, though, it may encourage other states to push forward with passing their own versions of climate superfunds. Nearly a dozen other states have seen such bills introduced, and many of them are surely watching Vermont’s legal battle closely.

In Massachusetts, for example, climate activists are continuing to rally grassroots support behind the state’s proposed climate superfund bill that will be refiled next session after legislators – perhaps wary of expected legal challenges – quietly sent it to study (killed it) last month. One of the lead sponsors of the bill, state representative Steve Owens, explained during a legislative hearing last September that this is an especially important time for states like Massachusetts to advance climate accountability and resiliency policies given the backsliding happening at the federal level. “We have the opportunity,” he said, to enact legislation “that fuels the movement to hold companies accountable and fund climate adaptation efforts at the same time as the federal government is rolling back policies that would combat climate change and leaving us to deal with the costs and the public health externalities ourselves.”

The question of who shoulders the costs of responding and adapting to the climate crisis is at the heart of this legislative approach and the litigation that will determine whether or not it succeeds.

“The costs of climate change are real, and are currently being born by taxpayers,” Vermont state representative Amy Sheldon said on the House floor two years ago as the legislative body contemplated passing the climate superfund bill. “It’s only fair that the companies that have made tremendous profits at our expense help clean up the mess they knowingly made by paying their fair share.”

“The fossil fuel industry’s polluting products are damaging our climate and our communities, and its attempt to avoid accountability is an insult to Vermonters,” said Elena Mihaly, vice president at Conservation Law Foundation’s Vermont office. “The Climate Superfund law protects Vermont’s families and businesses who are forced to shoulder the skyrocketing costs of storm damage, recovery, and climate adaptation. It’s time for fossil fuel corporations to stop escaping responsibility for the cost of climate adaptation—communities shouldn’t be left to pick up the tab alone.”

Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) along with the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) are backing the state defendants as intervenors in the legal challenges to the climate superfund law. “Our community has been enormously impacted by the climate crisis,” said Grace Oedel, executive director of NOFA-VT. “And we are committed to defending this law that will help so many of our farmers and community members navigate these extreme challenges.”

Vermont certainly anticipated that it would face lawsuits upon enacting its climate superfund law. “We studied this pretty carefully, and we relied on legal scholars’ commentary and some of them testified as witnesses. Our own legislative counsel certainly weighed in,” Vermont state representative Martin LaLonde told me during an interview in 2024 after the law passed.

“I’m a lawyer by training and worked at the Department of Justice in the Environment & Natural Resources division for 12 years,” LaLonde added. “So I was also able to on my own evaluate our defenses. And we feel pretty good about that. Are we ultimately going to win? That’s hard to tell.”

The industry groups, states, and Trump Justice Department suing Vermont over its law say that it is unfairly and unconstitutionally punitive and would effectively function as a regulation on energy producers and on global greenhouse gas emissions. “Vermont’s Superfund Act attempts to usurp the power of the federal government by regulating national and global emissions of greenhouse gases, violating federal law in multiple ways,” the US government argues in its complaint. The plaintiffs also claim the climate superfund law, by forcing fossil fuel companies to pay, will hamper oil and gas production and raise energy costs for consumers.

“Vermont’s flagrantly unconstitutional statute threatens to throttle energy production, despite this Administration’s efforts to unleash American energy. It’s high time for the courts to put a stop to this crippling state overreach,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the DOJ’s Environment & Natural Resources division said last September in a press release.

Vermont counters by saying that its climate superfund law is an exercise of its traditional state authority to protect its citizens and raise revenue. The state argues its law creates a cost recovery mechanism and does not regulate emissions, nor is it punitive. And allegations about potential economic impacts beyond Vermont are entirely speculative at this point, Vermont notes, arguing the legal challenges are premature since the state is still several years away from issuing payment demands to fossil fuel companies.

The hearing next week is also expected to address the challengers’ federal preemption argument – basically that the federal Clean Air Act’s authorization of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions means that states cannot regulate or impose liability on such emissions. But the Trump EPA in repealing the greenhouse gas endangerment finding is now disclaiming its regulatory authority for controlling greenhouse gases from motor vehicles. As CLF and NOFA-VT point out in a recent filing with the court, that position from the Trump administration “contradicts its litigating position in this case.” The Trump DOJ responded by claiming there is no inconsistency in its position, and that federal preemption under the Clean Air Act still applies to state laws pertaining to global greenhouse emissions. Whether the court will be persuaded by that claim remains to be seen.

And it remains an open question as to whether large fossil fuel corporations – the so-called ‘carbon majors’ responsible for generating the majority of industrial carbon emissions that are causing the climate crisis – will ever be held accountable for the damages wrought by their products’ emissions, at least in the US. The climate superfund laws enacted in Vermont and New York are an attempt to bring about some accountability, but their fate in the courts right now is uncertain.

There is also a growing backlash to climate accountability efforts as the fossil fuel lobby and its political allies look to leverage all three branches of government to shield the industry from any legal liability. Utah just became the first state to enact a law prohibiting liability for climate damages; similar liability shield legislation is advancing in at least four other states. And Republicans in Congress are working on draft legislation that would block state and municipal climate lawsuits against Big Oil as well as state climate superfund laws.

But if one thing is clear, it is that the escalating costs and impacts of the climate crisis are not going away. “It’s going to be unaffordable for Vermont to be able to deal with the consequences of climate change,” LaLonde told me. “And this [climate superfund] will help us to be able to afford to have that resilience.”

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Credit: Dana Drugmand

In New England, two commercial-scale offshore wind farms reached important milestones on Friday in a significant step forward for clean, renewable energy at a time when the conflict in Iran is upending global energy markets and exposing once again the painful costs of fossil fuel dependency.

Revolution Wind, a 704-megawatt offshore wind development located roughly 15 miles off the Rhode Island coast, began delivering power to the grid for the first time on March 13, according to an announcement from the developer Ørsted. The project, now over 90 percent complete, is designed to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of more than 350,000 homes across Rhode Island and Connecticut. It is expected to strengthen grid reliability by bolstering supply at a time of rising demand, and the power will be delivered under a fixed price, 20-year contract with utility companies. A preliminary analysis from Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection estimates that the project, once fully operational, will save ratepayers up to $500 million per year in wholesale energy costs.

“This project is key to diversifying our energy supply and lowering utility costs for families and businesses,” Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont said in a statement.

“As we’ve seen from the harsh winter we’ve had, and the impacts to fossil fuel prices as a result of the Iran war, having diverse sources of stable, reliable power that both perform strongly in the winter and are insulated from geopolitical events is beneficial to Connecticut ratepayers,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “These first power deliveries are an important milestone, with greater benefits yet to come as the project heads to completion and full operation later this year.”

Also late on Friday, workers completed the finishing touches on construction of Vineyard Wind – an 806-megawatt offshore wind project located about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. The project is designed to power the equivalent of 400,000 homes across Massachusetts. Some of the project’s 62 turbines had already been generating power, and as WBUR notes, the completion of construction “is a milestone for the project and the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has faced years of economic and political headwinds.”

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey applauded the news of the project completing construction, saying in a statement (as reported by WBUR): “The affordable, homegrown power it delivers to Massachusetts residents and businesses will bring costs down as President Trump throws global markets into disarray.”

As Trump wages a new war in the Middle East that is having severe consequences for global oil markets – the International Energy Agency labeled it the “largest supply disruption” in the market’s history – he has also effectively waged war here at home against renewable energy, especially wind power. His escalating attacks on wind energy culminated in a blanket stop work order issued in December on five offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast, including Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind as well as Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind offshore of Long Island, New York and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off the Virginia coast. All five projects sued the administration over the move and won preliminary relief that allowed construction to resume.

Now the projects are reaching key operating and construction milestones. The Virginia project, which at 2.6-gigawatts would be the country’s largest yet, is slated to start generating initial power by the end of this month, according to the project’s developer.

In November I had an opportunity to see an offshore wind project up close – South Fork Wind, the first fully operational large-scale offshore wind farm in the US located south of Rhode Island adjacent to the Revolution Wind project. The 132-megawatt project has been delivering clean power to the Long Island grid for more than a year now, and performance data shows that it is working splendidly, particularly during the cold winter months when wind speeds tend to be highest. In January, for example, South Fork Wind reported a capacity factor of 52 percent, which is on par with New York state’s most efficient gas plants. And during January’s Winter Storm Fern, Vineyard Wind, which was partly operational, had a 75 percent capacity factor according to reporting by Canary. “America’s two utility-scale offshore wind farms performed as well as gas power plants and better than coal in January,” the news outlet said.

In short, offshore wind works.

But the Trump administration is not giving up in its bid to quash this clean power source. It continues to claim that offshore wind poses a national security risk. This unexplained risk was the primary justification the administration used for its blanket stop work order. In commenting on the Revolution Wind project’s milestone of its first delivery to the grid, White House spokesperson Taylor Rodgers told the AP that the administration “looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue.”

“No Embargoes on the Wind”

While the Trump administration points to vague, supposedly classified national security concerns in its war against wind energy, Trump’s inexplicable and illegal war in Iran only further demonstrates that it is actually fossil fuels – not renewables – that pose the greatest threat to global and national security, including energy and economic security.

“Fossil fuels fuel wars,” Nina Lakhani, global climate justice reporter for Drilled, said during a recent press briefing on the topic of the Iran war and climate change. The US Department of Defense (rebranded under Trump as the “Department of War”) is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world. And if the global military sector - which the US represents nearly 40 percent of spending – were a country, it would be the fourth largest emitter of planet-heating pollution in the world, responsible for approximately 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

These emissions, as Covering Climate Now’s Mark Hertsgaard explained during the briefing, “drive deadlier heatwaves, droughts, storms and other impacts that wreck livelihoods, that destabilize economies, and spur migration. And all of that makes armed conflict more likely.”

In addition to climate pollution that military operations unleash, the Iran war – like Russia’s war on Ukraine – is disrupting global energy markets and causing price spikes on everything from fuel to fertilizer and food.

As the climate action group 350.org notes: “The price of crude oil has already risen 20% this year, and is expected to spike even more now. In 2022, energy and food price shocks triggered by the war in Ukraine pushed over 70 million people into poverty in the space of only three months, according to the United Nations Development Program.”

“Once again, families will pay the price through fossil fuel-driven inflation: higher fuel costs, rising energy bills, and more expensive groceries as a consequence. All because of a system tied to a volatile, conflict-driven industry,” 350.org managing director Olivia Langhoff said in a statement. The group says these price shocks should serve as a wake-up call on the urgency of transitioning away from volatile fossil energy and toward more affordable and secure renewable power.

“Renewable energy provides home-grown power that remains secure and affordable regardless of geopolitical shocks,” Langhoff said.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a similar message, calling on countries to accelerate the energy transition as a matter of security.

“The turmoil we are witnessing in the Middle East makes it evident that we are facing a global energy system largely tied to fossil fuels, where supply is concentrated in a few regions and every conflict risks sending shockwaves through the global economy, particularly to the most vulnerable people,” Guterres said in his statement.

“Homegrown renewable energy has never been cheaper, more accessible, or more scalable,” he added. “The resources of the clean energy era cannot be blockaded or weaponized. There are no price spikes for sunlight and no embargoes on the wind.”

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Chevron corporate offices in Houston, Texas. Credit: Jonathan McIntosh via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Amidst all of the other terrible things happening in the US and beyond – a new war in the Middle East, federal immigration agents terrorizing communities, the collapse of democratic checks and balances – the climate crisis marches on. A new study warns that the heating of the planet is accelerating, with the rate of global temperature rise over the past 10 years registering as the highest since instrumental recordkeeping began in 1880. As Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study, wrote in a social media post, the analysis “shows that global heating is significantly gathering speed. Our efforts to overcome fossil fuel addiction should do the same.”

Just as drug companies and cartels profit from people’s addiction to their products, fossil fuel companies have built a business model around our society’s dependency on what they are producing. “Taylor Sheridan’s hit West Texas oil show ‘Landman’ opens with an oil industry crisis manager, played by Billy Bob Thornton, tied to a chair as he negotiates with a Mexican drug cartel. To save his life, he describes the scale of his business. Oil, he says, is as addictive to the world order as drugs are to people,” journalist Antonia Juhasz writes in a January New York Times piece about the Paramount TV show and the ugly reality of the oil and gas business that it depicts.

“America’s fossil fuel dependency is not an inevitability or a lost cause,” Juhasz argues, adding that the “obstacles to transitioning off fossil fuels are political, not technical.”

The fossil fuel industry is one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful industries on Earth, and it is using its vast profits and grip over politicians to protect its business interests, climate change consequences be damned.

But the industry is facing mounting pressure. Calls for accountability and efforts to make climate polluters pay are continuing. Big Oil’s legal risk has not subsided. At the same time, renewable energy has for the most part become cheaper than fossil fuels, and the energy transition is well underway. At the international level, some countries will be gathering at the end of April to finally begin to discuss charting the course away from fossil fuels. Together, these initiatives and trends represent a direct threat to the “Big Carbon cartel” that remains the biggest obstacle to addressing the climate emergency with the urgency that science demands.

Ongoing Accountability Efforts

In the US, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against major oil and gas companies and their chief trade associations seeking accountability for climate damages or for misrepresenting climate change risks and solutions to consumers and engaging in other deceptive behavior to stymie climate action. Municipalities and states have been at the forefront of bringing these suits under a range of legal theories, from nuisance and trespass, to consumer fraud and racketeering. While industry defendants have been successful in getting some of the cases tossed out (most of those dismissals are being appealed), other suits were advancing towards trial and new ones are being filed.

The most recent lawsuit against Big Oil was brought by the state of Michigan in January, alleging violations of federal and state antitrust law. Michigan’s case is less about climate damages and more about alleged marketplace manipulation and anticompetitive conduct – essentially arguing that big oil companies colluded to suppress competition from electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies. “Defendants have conspired with each other to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy and maintain their dominance in the energy market. They have done so as a cartel,” Michigan asserts in its complaint.

It is too early to know whether this case will go anywhere, but one climate law expert said that it has considerable potential and that it stands apart from other climate suits brought against the industry. “Renewable energy is central to the fight against climate change, and this suit alleges that the companies have stood squarely in the way. Michigan has opened up a whole new battleground in the climate fight,” Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change at Columbia Law School, told me. He said he thinks the case could also be insulated from a forthcoming Supreme Court ruling on the question of whether federal law bars all state law climate change claims. “As an antitrust case, it is based on entirely different theories than the rest of these cases,” Gerrard explained.

The litigation and the potential for liability that it presents is enough of a risk that big oil companies are disclosing or acknowledging it in their annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In Chevron’s latest 10-k filing, for example, Chevron states: “there can be no assurance that the cases will not have a material adverse effect on the company’s results of operations and financial condition.”

In addition to bringing lawsuits, some states are adopting or considering legislation that would directly impose liability on large fossil fuel producers and require them to help pay for climate change adaptation costs. Vermont and New York enacted so-called climate superfund laws in 2024. A handful of other states have seen analogous bills introduced. Most recently, Minnesota unveiled its legislative proposal to make big polluters pay.

“We can’t continue forcing average, hardworking Minnesotans – family farmers, small business owners, and working families – to subsidize climate damage created by multinational corporations who have made billions of dollars in the fossil fuel industry,” Minnesota state representative Athena Hollins said at a March 4 press conference. “The cost of inaction is staggering,” she continued. “But the cost of accountability is fair. Our bill says clearly, the era of privatized profits and socialized damages is over.”

Calls for climate accountability and initiatives to hold big polluters liable extend beyond the US. In Europe, for example, several oil majors are facing lawsuits aiming to make them pay for climate damage or to align their business with global goals for curbing planetary heating. The French oil company TotalEnergies recently was put on trial in the city where the Paris Agreement was created. As I reported for Inside Climate News, the case, if successful, would set an important precedent for corporate accountability that could have ripple effects far beyond France.

Renewable Energy Surge

While the fossil fuel industry continues to face legal risks in various jurisdictions around the world, it is simultaneously grappling with the economic risk that renewable energy – namely solar and wind – are now able to outcompete it on price. As the veteran climate writer and activist Bill McKibben often says, we “live on a planet where the cheapest way to generate power is to point a piece of glass at the sun.” The rapid surge in the availability and affordability of clean energy around the world, McKibben points out, is the “one big good thing happening on planet Earth.”

China is leading the world in renewable energy and is well on its way to becoming the first ‘electro-state.’ And even in a country like the US that seems to be going backwards in terms of doubling down on the dirty energy of the past, there remain some (faint) bright spots. After Trump’s Department of the Interior tried to block five offshore wind farms being built along the US East Coast, for example, courts have allowed construction to resume. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project – which will be the country’s largest to date – is now expected to begin generating electricity this month.

At a smaller scale, the concept of plug-in or ‘balcony’ solar appears to be gaining in popularity across the US. Bills to facilitate consumer adoption of these systems have been introduced in 28 states plus Washington DC. The aim is to open up access to solar power to people who otherwise would be shut out, such as renters and low-income individuals or families.

There is still a long way to go to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with cleaner alternatives, but the good news is that the transition is happening. Whether it will happen fast enough to stave off the worst impacts of an overheating planet, however, remains an open question.

First Global Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels is Coming Up

At long last, there is an initiative underway at the international level to directly confront the elephant in the room and to discuss and coordinate a plan of action for breaking away from its addicting stranglehold. The first global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels will be held in Santa Marta, Colombia from April 24 to April 29.

The conference, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, is intended to open up a space for dialogue and planning amongst stakeholders who already agree that a transition away from fossil fuels must happen. After 30 years of UN climate diplomacy that has largely failed to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown, this initiative aims to tackle the primary underlying cause of the climate emergency head-on.

Organizers discussed what to expect from the event during an online briefing on March 5. First, in terms of who will be participating, it will be academics and scientists; civil society and nongovernmental organizations, Indigenous Peoples, youth, etc.; and ministers and governments from the national and subnational levels. Second, it is designed to be a conference of implementation, not negotiation, discussing concrete solutions and actions to advance the transition. Third, the main outcome will be a report, to be presented to the presidencies of the COP30 and COP31 UN climate conferences. And finally, a second conference, to be held in 2027, will build upon the momentum from this initial conference.

“Everyone coming to Santa Marta agrees that the transition away from fossil fuels must happen,” Stientje van Veldhoven, climate minister for the Netherlands, said during the briefing. “The key question now is how do we make it succeed, and how do we accelerate it.”

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The US Supreme Court building. The Court has decided to weigh in on Big Oil’s attempt to skirt climate accountability.

Last week I wrote about how the Trump administration is trying to sabotage global climate action, actively working to try to stop other countries from adopting measures to respond to the climate crisis. At the same time, the administration is shutting down all federal avenues for climate action. The Environmental Protection Agency’s repeal of its 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding, along with the repeal of all controls on greenhouse gas emissions that were based on the finding, essentially strips the nation’s top environmental watchdog of its primary tool, and underlying legal authority, to mitigate climate change. As environmental legal expert Bob Sussman said during a February 27 climate law briefing hosted by the Environmental Law Institute, the recission of the endangerment finding is “the last piece to fall into place in the administration’s across-the-board push to eliminate climate change as a focus of US policy domestically and internationally. And it follows other far-reaching actions such as the US withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement, and more recently the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

Given that context, state and local efforts to advance climate action and hold polluters accountable become even more important, climate advocates argue. But Trump and his Republican allies are also trying to shut these efforts down. Last year in April President Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting American Energy from State Overreach” that directed his attorney general to identify and “expeditiously take all appropriate action to stop” state and local lawsuits, policies, and practices that target or otherwise burden the fossil fuel industry. Just weeks after the order was issued, the Department of Justice brought lawsuits against the states of New York, Vermont, Hawaii, and Michigan challenging their climate liability laws and lawsuits that seek to make big oil companies pay for climate damages (though Hawaii and Michigan had not filed any lawsuits at the time the DOJ made its filings). The DOJ’s lawsuit against Michigan was recently tossed out by a federal court.

According to Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ is actively considering additional actions to implement Trump’s order cracking down on state and local climate policies. During a recent oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Bondi assured Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman that her department and the entire administration are committed to “using all available legal tools to stop” state and local climate initiatives. Hageman then announced that she is working with her congressional colleagues to “craft legislation tackling both these state laws and the lawsuits” that seek accountability from large fossil fuel companies – or, as she described it, that “could destroy energy affordability for consumers.” In other words, Hageman is working on legislation that would shield fossil fuel companies from liability and block both state climate lawsuits and climate superfund laws.

Such a liability shield was included among a list of recommended actions for furthering Trump’s directive in a June letter from 16 Republican state attorneys general to Bondi. In the letter, the state AGs recommended legislation that would stop “activist-funded climate lawsuits” through a liability shield, similar to the law that granted immunity from lawsuits for gun manufacturers.

Now, it appears that the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court is positioning itself to potentially immunize fossil fuel companies from state and municipal climate lawsuits. On February 23, the court agreed to take up a petition filed by oil companies Suncor and ExxonMobil in a case brought by Boulder, Colorado against the companies.

The case, initiated in 2018, claims that the oil company defendants misrepresented the climate change risks of their products and lied about climate science in order to stave off climate policies. This deceptive conduct, the suit argues, exacerbated damaging climate impacts like extreme heat, flooding, and wildfires. Through this legal action, Boulder is seeking to recover costs to help it respond and adapt to climate change hazards. In May of last year, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s denial of the defendants’ motions to dismiss, allowing the case to proceed towards trial.

In response to that ruling, Suncor and Exxon petitioned the US Supreme Court to intervene, in an attempt to derail not only this lawsuit, but all other climate-related suits brought against the fossil fuel industry. Over the past eight years, cities, counties, states, tribal communities, and individuals have filed dozens of such cases against major fossil fuel industry players. Many of these cases could be blocked if the Supreme Court agrees with Suncor and Exxon on the question of whether federal law broadly prohibits state law climate change claims.

In addition to this federal preemption question, the Supreme Court will be considering whether it even has jurisdiction to take up this case. The court added this jurisdiction question in its decision to grant the oil company’s petition. Alyssa Johl, vice president of legal and general counsel at the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), an advocacy group supporting efforts to hold climate polluters accountable, said that this indicates that “the justices do not agree whether the Court even has the authority to hear Boulder’s case at this time.”

“The Court should uphold what the Colorado Supreme Court and others have made clear: communities like Boulder have the right to seek accountability in their state courts when corporations have knowingly caused local harms,” Johl said in a statement.

While it is not yet clear whether the justices will decide that they do have authority to hear this case, the fact that they even granted the petition at all is not a promising sign for those who support climate accountability. The court denied a near-identical petition just a year ago in a different climate suit (filed by Honolulu, Hawaii against Big Oil). That denial was one of five instances where the justices have denied previous requests from oil companies or their political allies to intervene in cases against the companies since 2023, according to CCI. This time, however, the oil companies had even more political backing behind them, with amicus briefs urging the court to step in filed by the US Department of Justice, 26 Republican state attorneys general, and over 100 Republican members of the US House of Representatives.

James May, a distinguished professor of environmental and human rights law at Washburn University, told me that the court’s decision to finally accept the industry’s petition is a more impactful decision than even many legal experts realize. He warned that it “could be the beginning of the end of state-based climate claims, potentially of any flavor, statutory, common law, or constitutional.” If a majority of the justices rule in favor of the oil companies that federal law bars state law climate claims, it “potentially kills everything that the states can do” on climate, May told me.

Jean Su, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, had a similar view on the consequences of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Big Oil in Boulder’s case.

“You would have unshackled the oil and gas industry from major regulation, on both federal and state levels,” Su told me. “And that is extremely scary. It will be a Dante’s inferno.”

If Big Oil gets its way, there would be no meaningful regulation or accountability for climate change of any kind at any level – international, federal, or state and local. Trump and his political allies who are in the industry’s pocket are attempting to turn this aspiration of complete impunity into reality.

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Screen shot from recording of President Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly in New York in September 20205, when he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency this week delivered its most sweeping attempt yet to destroy US climate action with the agency publishing a final rule in the Federal Register that eliminates the so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) endangerment finding and repeals all GHG emissions controls on motor vehicles. The 2009 endangerment finding – a science-based determination that carbon dioxide and other GHGs that cause climate change endanger public health and welfare – served as the legal underpinning for EPA rules to rein in climate pollution from sources like vehicles and power plants. In terminating the finding, EPA is now claiming it lacks the legal authority to do anything about climate change – a position that environmental and public health groups and others are now contesting through court challenges.

The rollback, these groups say, is blatantly illegal, running afoul of the Clean Air Act and Supreme Court precedent; another petition from a group of children and young Americans argues that the EPA’s move is unconstitutional. And according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), it violates not just domestic law, but international law as well.

“As the world’s highest court made clear last year, all countries, including the US, must do everything in their power to prevent further climate harm. This decision does the opposite. It heightens the risk, sacrificing environmental protection and public health for industry profits and private interest,” said Nikki Reisch, climate and energy program director at CIEL.

In its historic advisory opinion on climate change, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said that all countries have obligations under existing law to protect the climate system. These obligations apply regardless of whether or not countries are parties to the UN climate change treaties – a clarification that is especially salient given that the US under Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and is even moving to exit the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Customary international law (while difficult to enforce) still provides a source of obligations that apply to climate change, the court said in its opinion.

Among those obligations is a duty to regulate industrial climate polluters. As the court stated: “A state may be responsible, where it has failed to exercise due diligence by not taking the necessary regulatory and legislative measures to limit the quantity of emissions caused by private actors under its jurisdiction.” In other words, a country may be in violation of its legal duty under international law by failing or refusing to regulate GHG emissions from private industry – precisely what the Trump administration is doing.

In refusing to regulate emissions, and also refusing to cooperate with other countries to tackle the climate problem as Trump abandons global climate treaties, the US is, as CIEL notes, defying its international duties.

“On the international stage, it cements this US administration’s position as an outlier and global pariah,” Reisch said.

But it goes even beyond that. Trump is not just attacking or shutting down climate science and policies here at home, and sidelining the US from international efforts to address this global threat. He and his administration are also actively trying to prevent other countries from adopting measures to respond to the climate crisis and to advance the clean energy transition. They are attempting to sabotage global climate action.

Just this week, for example, US Secretary of Energy (and former fossil fuel executive) Chris Wright rebuked the International Energy Agency for accounting for climate change in its energy outlook scenarios and threatened that the US would withdraw from the agency if it continued its climate focus. Following Wright’s remarks, the IEA omitted climate change from its list of priorities in a ministerial meeting summary document, Politico reported.

In another recent example, the Trump administration has reportedly been pressuring other countries to reject a Vanuatu-led draft UN resolution endorsing the ICJ’s landmark climate change advisory opinion. Vanuatu – a tiny Pacific Island nation threatened by rising sea levels – led the charge to get the UN General Assembly to vote on a resolution seeking the ICJ’s input on climate change. That resolution passed in 2023, and last year the court delivered its opinion in what many observers said was a landmark moment for climate justice. Now, Vanuatu is looking to take the next step by having the UNGA adopt another resolution that would welcome the opinion and start to translate it into “concrete multinational action.” The resolution would call on countries to take actions like adopting national climate action plans aligned with the goal of limiting global heating to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, and creating an international registry to record climate damage claims.

“The resolution attempts to turn the ICJ’s interpretation of key legal standards into a practical roadmap for state accountability which is likely to trigger political pushback from higher income high emitting countries wary of their historical responsibility and financial liability,” Candy Ofime, climate justice researcher and legal advisor at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

Perhaps no country is pushing back more aggressively than the US, which circulated guidance to its embassies and consulates abroad saying that it “strongly objects” to Vanuatu’s proposal, as the AP reported. The US argues the resolution poses a major threat to US industry, and it is urging other countries to demand that Vanuatu withdraw the draft proposal.

Climate and human rights groups are urging countries to support the resolution and to not succumb to the Trump administration’s bullying.

“Vanuatu and other Small Island States are facing existential threats from a climate crisis they did not cause,” said Brad Adams, executive director at Climate Rights International. “Countries around the world—all of whom are also facing the impacts of global warming–must stand with Vanuatu at the United Nations and oppose Trump’s bullying tactics.”

In October the Trump administration worked to defeat the International Maritime Organization’s proposed fees on emissions from the most polluting ships. As Noah Gordon, a fellow and researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes in a new piece published in Foreign Policy: “The U.S. State Department claimed the levies would have been the UN’s first-ever ‘global carbon tax.’ By threatening to impose tariffs on supportive countries and strip diplomats of visas, the United States was able to kill the measure.”

Gordon says that this example, along with others like the attempt to thwart Vanuatu’s UN resolution, suggest that the US under Trump has become a climate bully.

“Trump is using US power to scare other countries into reducing their climate ambition,” Gordon told me. “Europe, which relies on the US for defense and increasingly for gas, has been a big target. The White House has warned, for example, that Europe could face higher tariffs if it doesn’t walk back regulations like its Methane Regulation and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.”

“Tariffs, or the cancellation of trade privileges, are the main tool the bullies in the White House are wielding,” Gordon added.

Today the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs is illegal. But that might not stop Trump from continuing his strong-arming abroad.

“The Supreme Court decision to invalidate Trump’s [International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA] tariffs could complicate Trump’s plans there, though he could find other ways to implement tariffs without declaring a national emergency,” Gordon told me. “We should also expect the White House to make greater use of other tools, like visa bans on negotiators from insubordinate countries, withdrawing funding from institutions it perceives as too green or woke, like the IEA, or even threatening sanctions on countries that prefer to do business with China rather than buy US products that run on fossil fuels.”

Further Reading

Check out my latest published articles:

“Paris Court Holds Historic Climate Trial in Case Against TotalEnergies,” Inside Climate News, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19022026/paris-totalenergies-climate-trial/

“Environmental Groups Vow to Stop Trump’s EPA From Revoking the Endangerment Finding,” Sierra, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/environmental-groups-vow-stop-trump-s-epa-revoking-endangerment-finding

“Michigan Tries a New Legal Tactic Against Big Oil, Alleging Antitrust Violations Aimed at Hobbling EVs and Renewable Energy,” Inside Climate News, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15022026/michigan-alleges-antitrust-violations-against-big-oil/

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Credit: Edward Kimmel via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0

Earth is entering a period of unprecedented climate change and the risks that the planet could be heading towards a globally catastrophic “hothouse Earth” trajectory are less remote than most people realize, top climate and Earth system scientists say.

The assessment of the risk of proceeding along such a pathway of irreversible global heating – essentially a point of no return – was published on Wednesday in the journal One Earth. The analysis synthesizes scientific findings on climate tipping points, or Earth system elements that become destabilized and may unleash additional warming thorough self-reinforcing feedback loops if critical temperature thresholds are passed. Research suggests that several of these elements may be closer to destabilizing than previously thought.

Rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, boreal permafrost, and mountain glaciers and loss of parts of the Amazon rainforest, for example, suggest that that these Earth system features may already be destabilizing. As the study explains, “These processes could raise global temperatures, accelerate sea-level rise, release vast stores of carbon, and destabilize ecosystems. The precise threshold temperatures remain uncertain, but research shows that crossing one or more of these thresholds could trigger self-reinforcing processes that propel the Earth system onto a hothouse trajectory with long-lasting and potentially irreversible consequences.”

There is still a lot of uncertainty around the timing and precise nature of the risks of triggering these tipping points. But this uncertainty should not be an excuse for continued inaction or delay in mitigating the climate crisis, the scientists say. Instead, what is needed is an urgent course correction.

“Uncertain tipping thresholds underscore the importance of precaution,” said Christopher Wolf, study co-author and a scientist at the Oregon-based Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition. And while averting the hothouse trajectory won’t be easy, it’s much more achievable than trying to backtrack once we’re on it.”

Another concerning sign of destabilization, the scientists note, is that a key oceanic current system called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation appears to be weakening, which risks shifting tropical rain belts and drying out the parts of the Amazon.

“The AMOC is already showing signs of weakening, and this could increase the risk of Amazon dieback, with major negative impacts on carbon storage and biodiversity. Carbon released by an Amazon dieback would further amplify global warming and interact with other feedback loops,” said William Ripple, study lead author and a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University.

“We need to act quickly on our rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes,” Ripple said.

The study notes that current climate action and commitments are nowhere near sufficient and that some major economies are even pulling back when it comes to climate policies.

“Policy shifts in major economies may block progress on emissions cuts, threatening climate stabilization. The window to limit global temperatures below critical thresholds may be rapidly closing,” the scientists warn.

The assessment of the risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory follows a grim warning from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the world is now the closest it’s ever been to an apocalyptic doomsday scenario, as symbolized by the Doomsday Clock – which was revealed this year to be just 85 seconds to midnight. The doomsday scenario is essentially an assessment of the global risks to humanity from threats such as nuclear war, the misuse of biotechnology and artificial intelligence, and climate change.

Here is how the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists summed up the current outlook in terms of tackling the threat of climate destabilization:

“The national and international responses to the climate emergency went from wholly insufficient to profoundly destructive. None of the three most recent UN climate summits emphasized phasing out fossil fuels or monitoring carbon dioxide emissions. In the United States, the Trump administration has essentially declared war on renewable energy and sensible climate policies, relentlessly gutting national efforts to combat climate change.”

On Thursday, this war on climate policies will reach a new level as the Trump administration is expected to announce the finalization of its repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, a move that will eliminate the agency’s legal authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from sources like motor vehicles. The EPA issued the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare in 2009 based on a voluminous scientific record, which has only gotten stronger in the years since then. The finding was issued in response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and therefore the EPA must regulate them if it makes a finding of endangerment.

The repeal of the endangerment finding contravenes science, the law, and public opinion and lived experience of increasingly dangerous extreme weather and climate impacts. But it is in line with the position of President Trump that climate change is a hoax. Recall that Trump stood on the world stage at the United Nations General Assembly last September and literally claimed that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

Climate and environmental groups put out statements ahead of Thursday’s repeal blasting the move and vowing to challenge it in court. The Sierra Club said that Trump’s EPA head Lee Zeldin, with the stroke of a pen, “will formalize climate denialism as official government policy.” The organization said that it and its partners are “exploring all legal options in response, including litigation.”

“The Trump administration justifies this assault on science and our health by falsely claiming that U.S. climate-heating pollution doesn’t matter and that it lacks the authority to cut it,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Dan Becker. “That’s a lie, and any 6-year-old knows it’s wrong to lie.”

“Climate denialism will bleed the people dry,” 350.org executive director Anne Jellema said. “By giving Big Oil a license to pollute even more, the EPA is defying international law and piling more damage on communities in the US and around the world.”

“Removing EPA’s authority to limit deadly greenhouse gas emissions is as shortsighted as it is reckless,” said Sierra Club executive director Loren Blackford. “Communities will suffer as extreme weather continues to threaten us all, costs will continue to rise, and we will saddle future generations with a world that grows increasingly unlivable and endangers the life we know.”

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Sheringham Shoal offshore wind farm, a UK wind farm in the North Sea. Credit: NHD-INFO via Flickr (Photo by Harald Pettersen/Statoil), CC BY 2.0

As US President Donald Trump continues to try to shut down wind energy here at home while maligning it on the world stage, Europe is embracing the renewable energy resource as a key instrument for not only decarbonization, but energy security at a time of rising geopolitical instability.

Nine European countries plus the United Kingdom reached what is being called a “historic clean energy security pact” on January 26 to support the buildout of offshore wind in the North Sea and to turn the region into “the largest clean energy hub in the world.” The Hamburg Declaration, signed at the North Sea Summit in Hamburg, Germany, reaffirms a pledge to develop 300 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2050. And it includes a new commitment to deliver 100 gigawatts through “cross-border cooperation projects” that involve grid connections to more than one country.

According to an accompanying Joint Offshore Wind Investment Pact, governments will work together to help de-risk investments and work towards facilitating up to 15 gigawatts per year of offshore wind development between 2031 and 2040. The offshore wind industry in turn is committing to driving down the cost of electricity from offshore wind by 30% while mobilizing 1 trillion Euros in economic activity for Europe and creating 91,000 additional jobs.

Danish energy company Ørsted, a leading developer of offshore wind, called the deal a “giant leap towards powering Europe with renewable, reliable, and cost-competitive electricity.”

“By turning targets into turbines, the pact will boost European energy security, competitiveness, and decarbonization,” Ørsted said. “Today, 58% of EU’s energy is imported. With the pact to help secure 300 GW of offshore wind in the North Sea, the offshore wind industry – which already employs around 100,000 people across Europe – is set to help save Europe around EUR 70 billion on fossil fuel imports, cut electricity prices, and reduce European carbon emissions by 15%.”

The countries supporting this landmark offshore wind deal include Germany, Belgium, France, Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway, plus the United Kingdom.

European officials say the deal is a key step towards strengthening their energy security and reducing dependency on volatile fossil fuels, including imports that are controlled by authoritarian regimes, whether that is Russia or, now, the US.

“We are standing up for our national interest by driving for clean energy, which can get the UK off the fossil fuel rollercoaster and give us energy sovereignty and abundance,” UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in a statement.

Politico reports that the EU is now looking to reduce its reliance on imports of US liquified natural gas given Trump’s threats to take over Greenland.

“In these turbulent geopolitical times, Europe must stand strong and united — and choose independence,” EU Commissioner for Energy and Housing Dan Jørgensen said at the North Sea Summit. “That means doubling down on clean, safe, home-grown energy. It means building on our natural strengths, and few are greater than the North Sea and its vast offshore wind potential.”

By forging ahead with offshore wind in the North Sea, the EU and the UK are defying Trump. The US president has urged the UK to abandon its clean energy pursuits and instead double down on North Sea oil drilling. During his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump repeated his attacks on wind energy. “There are windmills all over Europe,” he said. “There are windmills all over the place, and they are losers.”

Having seen wind turbines up close myself, I would tend to disagree with that claim. As One Earth Now previously reported, the one fully operational, commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the US, called South Fork Wind, is performing exceptionally well. A handful of other offshore wind projects on the US East Coast are being built and due to come online soon, despite the Trump administration’s dogged attempts to try to stop them. Following a December order from Trump’s Department of Interior to halt construction on five offshore wind projects, courts have now allowed four of them to resume construction, and the fifth project could get the go-ahead from a court on Monday.

Trump can try to bully other countries into clinging to fossil fuels and can try to thwart the energy transition here and abroad, but he cannot stop it. In the US, the Energy Information Administration reports that utility-scale solar is the fastest growing source of electricity, and projects that the combined share of generation from solar and wind will rise from 18% in 2025 to 21% in 2027. In the EU, meanwhile, wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in 2025, according to Ember.

“The next priority for the EU should be to put a serious dent in reliance on expensive, imported gas,” said Beatrice Petrovich, senior energy analyst at Ember. “Gas not only makes the EU more vulnerable to energy blackmail, it’s also driving up prices.”

By committing to develop offshore wind in the North Sea, the EU could be starting to make such a dent.

Climate advocates praised the move.

“The Trump administration may be doing everything it can to keep the fossil fuel ‘rollercoaster’ going, but people are no longer buying tickets. Some European political leaders are beginning to recognize that energy security and economic stability won’t come from oil and gas, but rather, a renewable energy system that can lower electricity bills and can’t be switched off by dictators or disrupted by global conflicts,” said Clémence Dubois, 350.org global campaign manager.

“This isn’t just about switching energy sources” Dubois added, “it’s about ending a rigged system where fossil fuel companies pocket the profits and the public picks up the bill through higher energy costs, climate disasters, and government handouts.”

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A BP gas station in Michigan. The state has over 600 BP-branded gas stations, according to a lawsuit filed by the Michigan attorney general's office. Credit: F.D. Richards via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Story co-published with Climate in the Courts

Major oil and gas companies are facing a fresh lawsuit from a U.S. state contending that they conspired to stifle competition from renewable energy in a decades-long scheme to maintain their market share and inflate profits.

On Friday, January 23, the state of Michigan sued BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and their chief U.S. trade association the American Petroleum Institute (API). The lawsuit, filed in federal district court, alleges that defendants engaged in an “illicit conspiracy” to delay the transition to renewable energy and maintain market dominance of fossil fuels, in violation of federal and state antitrust laws. The case is the first of its kind to bring such antitrust claims against the fossil fuel industry in the context of the energy transition and the climate crisis.

It comes as communities across the country reel from escalating climate disasters and a mounting affordability crisis, and as state and local governments and individuals continue to turn to courts in efforts to hold fossil fuel firms accountable for their role in bringing about these impacts. Dozens of climate accountability lawsuits have been launched against companies like ExxonMobil over the last eight years, grounded in various claims ranging from classic nuisance and failure to warn, to consumer fraud and unfair competition, to racketeering. Michigan is now the eleventh state to file suit against Big Oil, but just the first to file charges under the federal Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. Michigan has also brought claims under the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act.

“By colluding to delay the energy transition away from fossil fuels, Defendants have deliberately imposed staggering external costs on Michigan and the people of Michigan,” the complaint argues. These costs include higher energy bills, economic damage, rising insurance premiums and lowered home values, and worsening climate impacts and public health costs.

Rather than focusing on climate change impacts and associated costs, the case is instead framed around alleged manipulation of energy markets and the consequences of corporate behavior that essentially locked in a fossil fuel-based energy system. This anticompetitive conduct, Michigan says, has resulted in constrained consumer choice in transportation and residential energy usage, and higher energy prices paid by consumers.

“By suppressing innovation and investment in renewable energy, EVs, and EV infrastructure, Defendants have reduced the production of renewable energy for transportation and home heating and cooling, raised prices for Michigan consumers, and caused the United States to fall behind China and other foreign markets in the race to pioneer cheaper and cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels,” the complaint asserts. Michigan says the big oil entities have ultimately operated as a cartel, working to suppress renewable energy and prevent rapid uptake of electric vehicles.

As detailed in the complaint, in 1979, internal Exxon studies found that renewables would need to supply at least half of global energy by 2010 in order to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. That same year, API established a CO2 and Climate Task Force to coordinate strategies and responses to scientific evidence linking fossil fuels to climate harms and to the threat of a large-scale transition away from fossil fuels.

Instead of warning the public about the climate change risks of fossil fuels and leading a transition to cleaner alternatives, Exxon and other defendants ultimately decided to abandon their own investments in clean energy. And they embarked on a campaign to stifle competition from renewables and to delay the energy transition in order to protect their market dominance, despite having full knowledge of the catastrophic climate consequences of unrestrained usage of fossil fuels, the suit contends. The complaint goes on to explain the tactics employed to advance this scheme, from squashing EV and solar panel technologies, to limiting investments in clean energy, influencing university research, and disseminating misinformation about the viability of renewable energy.

And the scheme worked as intended. Fossil fuels today still dominate the energy mix, even as renewable solar and wind have become cheaper and account for the vast majority of new electric generation capacity. In Michigan, as in other states, consumers have limited options when it comes to energy sources used for electricity or heating. Options are also limited when it comes to fueling transportation. Electric vehicles are still a minority of the overall motor vehicle makeup, and public charging infrastructure is not widely developed or available. This is all by design, Michigan argues, in order to protect the profits and market share of the incumbent fossil fuel producers.

“Michigan is facing an energy affordability crisis as our home energy costs skyrocket and consumers are left without affordable options for transportation. Whether you own a home, a small business, or run a large corporation, rising energy and transportation costs harm everyone,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement.

“These out-of-control costs are not the result of natural economic inflation,” she added, “but due to the greed of these corporations who prioritized their own profit and marketplace dominance over competition and consumer savings.”

ExxonMobil and Chevron did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and BP and Shell both declined to comment.

API responded with a statement it has used repeatedly when asked for comment about the litigation against Big Oil. “These baseless lawsuits are a coordinated campaign against an industry that powers everyday life, drives America’s economy, and is actively reducing emissions,” said API senior vice president and general counsel Ryan Meyers. “We continue to believe that energy policy belongs in Congress, not a patchwork of courtrooms.”

The statement does not directly address the specific allegations, but rather deflects and misleads. The message that the oil and gas industry “powers everyday life,” for example, conveniently omits the role the industry plays in influencing demand and perpetuating dependency on its products. Renewable energy could be meeting most energy needs today were it not for the actions by major oil companies to sabotage their competition, as detailed in Michigan’s lawsuit.

Furthermore, the industry is not “actively reducing emissions,” especially when it comes to emissions associated with their products (called Scope 3 emissions), which comprise around 90% of a fossil fuel producer’s total value chain carbon emissions. According to new data from the Carbon Majors database, which calculates CO2 emissions (including Scope 3) for the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement companies based on production figures, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP all increased their emissions in 2024 compared to 2023. In 2024, Exxon emitted 677 million metric tons (MtCO2e), Chevron emitted 577 MtCO2e, Shell emitted 426 MtCO2e, and BP emitted 354 MtCO2e. In 2023, these figures were 562 MtCO2e, 487 MtCO2e, 418 MtCO2e, and 347 MtCO2e, respectively.

Michigan’s lawsuit, which is seeking damages and injunctive relief, comes after the Trump administration took action last year to preemptively sue the state over its expected but not yet filed lawsuit against major fossil fuel companies. Nessel had announced in 2024 that her office planned to pursue litigation against Big Oil over climate change impacts and sought proposals from outside counsel to assist in this work.

The Trump Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Michigan argued that the anticipated claim by the state, which was expected to center around climate harms, was preempted by the Clean Air Act – a federal law that authorizes the EPA to regulate air pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions (though Trump’s EPA is now arguing it lacks authority to regulate GHGs). But the lawsuit that Michigan actually filed has very little to do with greenhouse gas emissions or climate impacts.

As a press release from the AG’s office explains: What “started as an investigation into the financial impacts to Michigan from the fossil fuel industry’s persistent coverup and deception about climate change” instead “uncovered one of the most successful antitrust conspiracies in United States history.”

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Credit: C3S/ECMWF

Multiple climate monitoring services have reported that 2025 was the third hottest year on record globally, behind only 2023 and the current record-holder 2024. Over these last three years, global average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The level of long-term heating is now at about 1.4°C and could reach 1.5°C - the threshold that countries said in the Paris Agreement they would strive to not exceed – by the end of this decade, 2030.

This is not an anomaly but rather a clear sign of a rapidly warming planet, scientists say. The period of 2015 through 2025 has been the hottest ever recorded, with each of those eleven years being among the 11 warmest years yet.

“The fact that the last eleven years were the warmest on record provides further evidence of the unmistakable trend towards a hotter climate,” said Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “The world is rapidly approaching the long-term temperature limit set by the Paris agreement. We are bound to pass it; the choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences on societies and natural systems.”

Ocean heat in 2025 was also at record levels. And as World Meteorological Secretary General Celeste Saulo explained, “High land and ocean temperatures helped fuel extreme weather – heatwaves, heavy rainfall and intense tropical cyclones.”

The impacts of intensifying and more frequent extreme weather are becoming ever-more costly and severe. “Another year in the top three hottest on record, and communities everywhere are feeling it. Extreme weather isn’t rare anymore—it’s driving up food prices, insurance premiums, water shortages, and upending daily life across the globe,” Savio Carvalho, managing director for campaigns and networks at the climate action group 350.org, said in a statement.

Scientists say such impacts will only get worse absent urgent action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, which are primarily caused by burning fossil fuels.

“2025’s extreme events are another warning: human-caused climate change is intensifying, and without reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the risks to society and ecosystems around the world will get worse,” said Zachary Labe, climate scientist at Climate Central.

“The fact that the 1.5°C limit has been exceeded for an average three-year period means that everyone should be prepared for more adverse weather, especially heat-related extremes. Their number will continue to increase every year until we end our toxic relationship with fossil fuels,” warned Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at Leipzig University.

Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, said the latest climate data indicates a situation that is grim but not unexpected. “Whichever way you look at it, dangerous climate breakdown has arrived, but with little sign that the world is prepared, or even paying serious attention.”

McGuire called for more action “to stop every tonne of carbon being emitted, and prevent every fraction of a degree rise in the global temperature.” Not doing this, he warned, “will inevitably consign our children and their children – and countless generations down the line – to a hothouse hell.”

“It is hard to describe just how serious the risks to humanity are, as we rapidly take ourselves out of the climate our entire agriculturally-based civilization is based on,” John Marsham, professor of atmospheric science at University of Leeds, said in commenting on the latest data. “Impacts on ecosystems, and human food and water systems are rapidly escalating and we are risking a climate that, in my kids’ lifetimes, is almost as different from our natural climate as the last ice-age was, only hotter instead of colder.”

Marsham warned that this “will be catastrophic for ecosystems, human health, and our food and water systems.”

“We need people to call for urgent action,” he added, “and hold both politicians and the media to account.”

Indeed, with limited exceptions (such as The Guardian), the mainstream media tends to not treat the climate crisis as the emergency that scientists say it is. Media coverage that focuses only on political realities without communicating the scientific realities of climate change does a disservice to readers. As Mark Herstgaard, executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, writes in this week’s The Climate Beat newsletter, “gaming out the politics of climate change has to be weighed against what thousands of alarmed scientists have been saying for years: Civilization is hurtling toward irreversible catastrophe, and the only realistic escape route is to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”

The United States under President Donald Trump is doing the exact opposite, doubling down on the very fuels that are dangerously overheating the planet while aggressively trying to thwart clean energy, abandon all domestic and international efforts to address the climate problem, and dismantle scientific research and misrepresent climate science.

Last July the U.S. Department of Energy released a controversial report authored by five climate deniers with ties to fossil fuel interests that disputed the scientific consensus on climate change risks and downplayed the dangers of global heating. The report was widely criticized by the scientific community; more than 85 scientists submitted a detailed response arguing that the DOE report “misrepresents the state of climate science by cherry-picking evidence, exaggerating uncertainties, and ignoring decades of peer-reviewed research.”

Now, it appears that the Climate Working Group – the same group of contrarians that authored the DOE climate report – has been asked to work on the next National Climate Assessment, as E&E News reported. The National Climate Assessment is a Congressionally mandated climate report that synthesizes the latest science on climate change risks and impacts in the United States.

“In the past this was something that was done with a careful process involving federal government agencies, hundreds of independent scientists, lots of opportunity for public comment and comment from the National Academies. It was a rigorous process that led to its credibility,” Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director in the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me. She was one of the experts who had been working on the sixth NCA before the Trump administration ordered they all be dismissed. “[The administration] wants to come up with some trumped up version that essentially is designed to further their goal of not acting on climate and continuing to boost fossil fuels,” she added.

Trump’s EPA, meanwhile, is about to finalize its repeal of the endangerment finding – a science-based determination that the agency made in 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. That finding requires EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, so doing away with it effectively destroys one of the federal government’s primary tools to curb these emissions.

Trump is not just attacking climate action here at home. He is also trying to slow global efforts to tackle this threat. He is withdrawing the U.S. not only from the Paris Agreement, but from the overarching international climate treaty known as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

All of these moves may increase short term profits for fossil fuel billionaires, but will ultimately be harmful to ordinary Americans and people around the world as the climate crisis accelerates.

“The Trump administration is not simply refusing to face the realities of climate change we are experiencing, it is actively lying about the science and undermining our nation’s federal scientific resources. Acting like there’s no tomorrow by trying to force even more burning of coal, oil and gas will cost lives and make the Earth a harder place to live in the years to come. The administration is also abdicating any semblance of international leadership through its radical actions to increase heat-trapping emissions and drop out of global climate agreements designed to limit warming and help protect people and ecosystems,” Carlos Martinez, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.

“We have the technology and scientific knowledge to power the world through clean energy while also investing in climate resilience,” he added. “Clinging to an obsolete and dangerous fixation on fossil fuels will bring profits to a few and deprive billions of others on the planet of a secure and livable future.”

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Where do we go from here? Honestly my head is spinning with the news cycle developments over the last few days – from President Trump’s illegal military intervention in Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and his claims that his administration will be “running” the Latin American country, to Trump and his energy secretary’s brazen assertions that the U.S. and its big oil companies will be taking control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and selling this oil “indefinitely,” to Trump’s latest directive withdrawing the U.S. from dozens (66 in total) of international organizations, treaties and conventions, many of which we had been part of for decades like the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The latter move of abandoning scores of international conventions and UN organizations not only further isolates the U.S. during a time of rising geopolitical tensions, but also sends a chilling message of disdain for diplomatic and cooperative global governance. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, such governance has become “dominated by progressive ideology” including what he calls “climate orthodoxy” – a term echoing EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s phrase of “climate change religion.”

This rhetoric is of course ridiculous and even dangerous, as climate change is a grave reality that more and more people are experiencing in the form of extreme weather or rising food and home insurance costs. International courts have now recognized climate change as an emergency and an existential threat, one that must be addressed through global cooperative action. The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty was established precisely for that purpose. As the Union of Concerned Scientists explains, “Every nation in the world is party to the UNFCCC, which was adopted more than three decades ago and has been upheld by Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States alike.” No country has abandoned this bedrock climate treaty – until now. And since it was a Senate-ratified treaty, some legal experts say President Trump lacks the legal authority to unilaterally withdraw without Congressional approval. “Once the Senate has ratified a treaty, only the Senate can withdraw from the treaty,” said U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “This announcement is not just corrupt, it’s illegal.”

It comes on the heels of the Trump-led military operation in Venezuela to capture and abduct the country’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife and to seize control over the country’s oil resources. Legal experts and critics say the attack was patently illegal. “The Trump Administration has demonstrated again its disregard for international law, violating the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force,” said the American Society of International Law’s Executive Director Michael D. Cooper. “In the process, the Administration has also violated United States law, which at a minimum requires consultation with members of Congress before involving U.S. armed forces in attacks like the one the world has just witnessed,” he added.

“Donald Trump has, once again, shown his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law,” U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement. “Trump’s attack on Venezuela will make the United States and the world less safe. This brazen violation of international law gives a green light to any nation on earth that may wish to attack another country to seize their resources or change their governments. This is the horrific logic of force that Putin used to justify his brutal attack on Ukraine.”

In the wake of the attack on Venezuela, Trump has threatened to go after other countries such as Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland. And what’s to stop him? There is no global law enforcement institution.

With flagrant violations of international law on display – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US abduction of Venezuela’s leader – some experts are warning that the post-World War II international legal order now faces collapse. “What the world is witnessing now is the international rules-based order being stripped of whatever value it once had,” Jorge H. Sanchez-Perez, assistant professor at the University of Alberta, wrote in a piece published this week. In another commentary published the same day in the New York Times, Oona Hathaway, a professor of law and political science at Yale and president-elect of the American Society of International Law, similarly said that the international legal system “faces total collapse” in the wake of the U.S. action in Venezuela.

“President Trump’s decision to launch a secretive predawn military operation in Venezuela to grab President Nicolás Maduro is a blatant assault on the international legal order,” Hathaway writes. “The action threatens to end an era of historic peace and return us to a world in which might makes right. The cost will be paid in human lives.” Her piece is titled “The Great Unraveling Has Begun.”

This is all happening against the backdrop of a climate system that is also unraveling, with profound consequences for humanity and all life on Earth. In the 2024 state of the climate report, leading climate and Earth system scientists warned that we are “brink of an irreversible climate disaster” and are “experiencing abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.” They note that the risk of societal collapse is becoming less remote, writing: “climate change could contribute to a collapse by increasing the likelihood of catastrophic risks such as international conflict or by causing multiple stresses, resulting in system-wide synchronous failures…Climate change has already displaced millions of people, and has the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions more, leading to greater geopolitical instability.”

It goes without saying that, given fossil fuel combustion is the primary driver of the climate emergency, we should be accelerating the transition away from coal, oil, and gas. And yet, under President Trump, the U.S. is doing the exact opposite, boosting fossil fuels domestically and abandoning all climate policies while pressuring other countries to do the same. Now Trump is looking to exploit another country’s oil, insisting that U.S. oil companies will go in and invest billions of dollars to repair the infrastructure and “get the oil flowing.” It is unclear whether this will actually pan out.

But critics say the message is crystal clear – that Trump is putting the interests of Big Oil and his fossil fuel donors above the interests of the public. The move is also especially maddening given the worsening fossil fueled climate crisis – a reality even if Trump denies it.

“In an era of accelerating climate breakdown, eyeing Venezuela’s vast oil reserves this way is both reckless and dangerous,” Greenpeace International Executive Director Mads Christensen said in a statement. “The only safe path forward is a just transition away from fossil fuels, one that protects health, safeguards ecosystems, and supports communities rather than sacrificing them for short-term profit.”

Exploiting Venezuela’s oil reserves – the largest in the world – during a time of climate breakdown may also violate international law, as suggested by the International Court of Justice in its climate change advisory opinion issued last July. The opinion explicitly calls out countries’ continued support of fossil fuels, stating: “Failure of a State to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG emissions — including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licenses or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies — may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that State.”

That may not matter much to a president that seems intent on disregarding norms and the law, both domestic and international. But it should matter to the rest of us who care about trying to preserve the rule of law and some semblance of a habitable planet – a planet that our children and future generations are inheriting and that is rapidly becoming less safe and less stable.

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The Trump administration announced on Monday that it is immediately suspending the leases for all offshore wind projects currently under construction in the U.S., a move that threatens to crush the nascent American offshore wind industry and one that critics say will harm electric ratepayers, public health, and the climate. The announcement comes just two weeks after a federal district court in Massachusetts overturned President Trump’s Day One directive halting all federal leasing, permitting and approvals of wind energy projects, on the basis that the directive was arbitrary and capricious and clearly unlawful.

Monday’s announcement of the leasing pause by the Department of the Interior applies to five offshore wind projects, all off the East coast and several of which were nearing completion – Vineyard Wind 1 and Revolution Wind in New England, Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind offshore of Long Island, New York, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind in Virginia.

The latter project was just months away from becoming operational, poised to deliver nearly 2,600 megawatts of clean electricity to the grid, or enough to power up to 660,000 homes. Consisting of 176 turbines, it was slated to become the largest offshore wind farm in the country.

Vineyard Wind 1, located roughly 15 miles south of the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, was already partly operational, generating clean power at 50 percent capacity and sending it into the New England grid. Once completed, the 62-turbine project was expected to produce over 800 megawatts of renewable electricity and power over 400,000 homes.

Revolution Wind, a similarly sized 704-megawatt project, was also almost completely built and had been expected to come online later in 2026. The wind farm was slated to deliver clean electricity to consumers in both Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Empire Wind 1, sited off the southern coast of Long Island, began offshore construction this year and was expected to reach commercial operation in 2027. And Sunrise Wind, located just south of Revolution Wind off the southeastern tip of Long Island, was also slated to come online in the next two years.

Together, the five projects were projected to power the equivalent of over 2.5 million homes.

But now their outlook is uncertain with the Trump administration’s order putting them on hold – a move that clean energy advocates and legal experts say is illegal and has already been rejected by the courts.

“This is a desperate rerun of the Trump administration’s failed attempt to kill offshore wind – an effort the courts have already rejected,” Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at Conservation Law Foundation, a New England-based environmental law organization, said in a statement. “Many of these clean energy projects passed years of rigorous review, were upheld in court, and are moving forward. Trying again to halt these projects tramples on the rule of law, threatens jobs, and deliberately sabotages a critical industry that strengthens, not weakens, America’s energy security.”

The Department of Interior cited national security concerns as the reason for its lease suspension, saying that the security risks were “identified by the Department of War in recently completed classified reports.” The DOI’s announcement adds that unclassified reports have found that the turbine blades and towers create radar interference.

National security was also invoked by the Trump administration in August as a justification for issuing a stop work order on Revolution Wind, which was already 80 percent complete. The project developer, Orsted, sued over that order and succeeded in getting a preliminary injunction reversing it. Earlier this year the Trump administration issued a similar stop work order on the Empire Wind project; that order was lifted following negotiations between New York governor Kathy Hochul and President Trump.

New York led a coalition of 16 states plus the District of Columbia in challenging Trump’s directive halting all federal approvals of wind projects, and on December 8 U.S. District Court Judge Patti B. Saris ruled in plaintiffs’ favor and struck down the unlawful directive.

“Wind energy is good for our environment, our economy, and our communities. I am grateful the court stepped in to block the administration’s reckless and unlawful crusade against clean energy,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in response to the court’s ruling.

The new move to pause already approved federal offshore wind leases will likely face legal challenges.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement that the move “appears to be a second, even more lawless and erratic stop work order, reviving the Trump Administration’s prior failed attempt to halt construction of Revolution Wind.”

“Every day this project is stalled is another day of lost work, another day of unaffordable energy costs, and other day burning fossil fuels when American-made clean energy is within reach,” Tong added. “We are evaluating all legal options, and this will be stopped just like last time.”

Virginia Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner along with Rep. Bobby Scott also issued a statement slamming the Trump administration’s latest offshore wind pause, saying it “threatens thousands of good-paying American jobs coming to a veteran-heavy area, undermines energy security, and damages the credibility of the United States government.”

Environmental advocates say the move to block offshore wind threatens public health, energy security, and is especially absurd during a time of accelerating climate change.

“At a time when climate change itself poses one of the greatest national security threats we face, blocking clean energy projects is reckless and dangerous,” CLF’s Sinding Daly said.

“Blocking construction on all offshore wind projects underway in the U.S. is an attack on our economy and our public health,” said Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce. “The Trump administration’s vengeance towards renewable energy knows no end. Instead of progressing us forward as a nation, they are obsessed with attacking a growing industry that provides good clean energy jobs and affordable, clean electricity.”

As One Earth Now previously reported, offshore wind is already demonstrating that it is a viable source of energy and one that is co-existing with the marine environment. South Fork Wind, the nation’s first, fully operational commercial-scale offshore wind farm, is supplying clean electricity to the New York grid and has met or even exceeded performance expectations during its first year of operation. As Orsted’s Norm Zeyack explained during a recent boat tour to see the project up close: “South Fork’s performance is translating into real value for New York State ratepayers.”

The Trump administration’s move to block offshore wind may also jeopardize energy and infrastructure permitting reform legislation that is currently pending in Congress. A version of the legislation – which critics warn would weaken a bedrock environmental law called NEPA – passed the House of Representatives last week, but has not yet passed the Senate. In a statement responding to the administration’s offshore wind pause, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Martin Heinrich, Ranking Member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the move leaves permitting reform talks “dead in the water.”

“The illegal attacks on fully permitted renewable energy projects must be reversed if there is to be any chance that permitting talks resume,” the senators said. “There is no path to permitting reform if this administration refuses to follow the law.”

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Youth plaintiff Olivia testifies during the Held v. Montana youth climate trial in June 2023. The lawsuit has been part of a wave of global climate litigation that is reshaping climate policy and governance and strengthening accountability. Credit: Dana Drugmand

Co-published with Climate in the Courts

On June 24, 2015, the Hague District Court in the Netherlands handed down a world-first ruling in a climate lawsuit brought by the Urgenda Foundation and 886 Dutch citizens against the Dutch government. For the first time anywhere in the world, a court had determined that a national government has a legal duty to protect its citizens from dangerous climate change. The Dutch court ordered the government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions at least 25% (below 1990 levels) by the end of 2020.

The decision had a ripple effect around the world, inspiring similar cases in countries such as Germany, Belgium, Ireland, France, Colombia, South Korea, and New Zealand. Now, 10 years later, climate litigation has become a powerful global force that is reshaping climate policy and governance, establishing key principles for holding governments and corporate polluters accountable, and building a durable edifice for climate protection.

That’s according to a new report published earlier this month by the Climate Litigation Network, a project of the Urgenda Foundation that supports communities using the law to protect our shared future. The report reflects upon the last decade of climate litigation and discusses why this turn to the courts is happening and what the impacts have been, both within and beyond the courtroom.

“It’s critical that this reflection on the impact of climate litigation is also happening 10 years after the Paris Agreement was signed, and now in the days after COP30 concluded – as there is a very close relationship between the weakness of international climate regime, and the global movement of accountability through climate litigation that’s developed over the past ten years – and that will continue to play a crucial role,” Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, said during a media briefing ahead of the report’s Dec. 2 launch.

With our political systems failing to meet the moment and to respond to the climate crisis at the scale and urgency required, courts are an essential backstop for preventing further regression and safeguarding fundamental rights in the face of widespread climate harm, the report suggests. People are turning to the courts because their political leaders have failed them.

“Climate litigation is a direct response to the decades-long inability of politicians to deliver on their promise to protect us all from the devastating impacts of climate change,” Maxwell said.

Accountability mechanism for the Paris Agreement

World leaders have been meeting to discuss and negotiate a path forward on climate action for 30 years, under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of the Parties procedure. A landmark deal was reached at COP21 in Paris 10 years ago, when 195 state parties agreed on the overarching objective to limit the rise in global average temperature to well below 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) and to strive to have it not exceed 1.5°C. The Paris Agreement was adopted on December 12, 2015.

A decade later, the world is dangerously off-track towards meeting its Paris promise. The 1.5°C target is set to be exceeded in the next few years, and temperatures are projected to rise by 2.5°C to 2.8°C by century’s end under current policies. The Paris Agreement established long-range goals for getting global warming under control, but left it up to countries to decide for themselves how they would contribute to the overall goals.

“The agreement lacks a mechanism to test whether each country’s target is sufficient and fair toward that collective temperature limit. And that’s where climate litigation comes in,” Maxwell explained. “Over the past decade people have turned to the courts to build that accountability framework from the ground up.”

Legal architecture for climate protection

CLN’s report finds that, during this time, climate lawsuits have worked to build a legal architecture for climate protection.

In framework cases brought against governments, for example, courts have clarified that national climate targets and plans must be specific and that mitigation actions cannot be deferred because that would unduly burden younger and future generations.

Additionally, it has now become clear that countries’ emissions reduction targets (known in UN parlance as Nationally Determined Contributions) must be fair and science-based, aligned with the 1.5°C objective, and they must be implemented. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, laid out these standards in its historic advisory opinion on climate change issued in July this year. The opinion, along with other rulings from national and international courts, establish that governments have binding legal duties to protect people from climate change.

In other words, climate court cases have helped to anchor the goalposts and clarify what is expected in terms of government climate policy. But, as the report says, “The question now is whether governments will meet this legal standard in practice – or leave it to future courts to compel compliance.”

In some cases, climate litigation has already led to real change, strengthening climate policies and influencing public opinion, the report notes. As Maxwell explained, governments have strengthened their targets and amended their climate laws in Brazil, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and South Korea. In the Netherlands, the Urgenda case ruling led to the adoption of new policies to curb emissions. “Even as the Government appealed the ruling, it took steps to cut emissions, including bringing forward the closure of the Hemweg coal-fired power plant by five years,” CLN’s report explains. As a result, the Netherlands achieved the 25% emissions reduction by 2020 that the courts had ordered.

Targeting corporate climate polluters

Governments have not been the only targets of climate lawsuits. Communities, organizations and individuals are increasingly taking corporate polluters to court.

“We all know that the world’s highest-emitting companies shouldn’t be able to pollute with impunity, making profits on the back of our future. Now the courts are catching up,” Sarah Mead, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, said in a press release.

Inspired by the Urgenda case, a Dutch environmental group called Milieudefensie brought a landmark case in 2019 against Shell, which at the time was headquartered in the Netherlands. The case argued that Shell, as a major carbon emitter, was violating its duty of care under Dutch law, and in 2021 the district court agreed and ordered the company to slash its entire supply chain emissions 45% by 2030. The ruling was another world-first, a monumental advance in corporate accountability for climate change. In 2024 an appeals court ruled in favor of Shell and overturned the emissions reduction order, but in doing so the court still recognized that major emitting companies have a legal duty to limit their emissions.

That principle, Mead said, “will now serve as the foundational building block for the next generation of corporate framework cases.” Those types of cases generally challenge corporations’ failure to mitigate emissions or transform their business in alignment with the Paris Agreement goals.

Other corporate climate cases aim to make companies pay for climate-related loss and damage. One pioneering case in this category, Lliuya v. RWE, involved Peruvian farmer and mountain guide Saúl Luciano Lliuya who sued German energy company RWE in 2015 over the company’s contribution to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which is changing the environment in Lliuya’s community and putting his home at risk of flooding. While the case was ultimately dismissed because the evidence of flood risk was not strong enough, the court affirmed the principle that major emitters like RWE can be held liable for their contributions to climate damage.

New cases are already underway seeking to build upon and apply that principle. Pakistani farmers who suffered devastating losses during the 2022 Pakistan floods have initiated a case in Germany against RWE and the cement company Heidelberg Materials, hoping to make those companies pay for a proportion of damages associated with the flooding disaster. And survivors of typhoon Odette which ravaged the Philippines in 2021 are now suing Shell in the UK.

Supporters of Philippine typhoon survivors rally outside the Royal Court of Justice in London on December 11, 2025. Credit: Fossil Free London

In the U.S., major fossil fuel companies are facing over two dozen cases centered around allegations of fraud and deception on climate change and its risks and solutions. Many of the cases are attempting to make the companies pay for localized climate damage and adaptation costs, and several are inching closer to trial after years of procedural delays.

Mead and Maxwell say corporate climate accountability cases are already having an impact beyond the courtroom, as they create material financial risk for the companies targeted and expose polluters’ “complete disregard for our collective future.”

Shortfalls and stymying climate action

While there have been notable breakthroughs and important advances in the climate litigation space, oftentimes litigation falls short or fails to result in justice or accountability, and sometimes the courts are used by powerful interests to target environmental activists or push back against climate action.

As a paper published in the journal Nature in October points out, “litigation is increasingly used to stymie climate action.” The authors observe that SLAPP suits, or strategic lawsuits against public participation, “are being used to silence activists and lawyers fighting climate change. For example, in March 2025, a North Dakota jury found Greenpeace liable for US$660 million in damages to an American oil and gas company, Energy Transfer for its involvement in protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.”

In the United States, climate lawsuits brought by young people against governments have faced steep hurdles, with courts refusing to hear many of them on the merits. That pattern stands in sharp contrast to other countries, where courts have accepted climate cases, including youth-led ones, and have often ruled in plaintiffs’ favor.

An exception in the U.S. was a case in Montana brought by youth activists against their state government over an anti-climate policy, which went to trial and resulted in a breakthrough victory for the young plaintiffs. But cases challenging the US federal government’s response to climate change and support for fossil fuels have so far fallen short. After nearly a decade of procedural wrangling, the Juliana v. US case ended earlier this year without ever reaching trial, and a new youth climate case filed this year against the Trump administration was dismissed by the trial court in October.

Looking ahead

Climate litigation is by no means a silver bullet. “No one is under the illusion that we are going to litigate our way out of this crisis. Litigation is just one tool,” Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, told me in an interview in October.

And yet, as the CLN report highlights, litigation has become an essential instrument to push for greater climate action and accountability.

“Climate litigation is proving to be one of the most powerful tools we have to shift the dial in the favor of stronger climate action,” Mead said.

Observers and experts in this space say that the trend of turning to the courts amidst the climate emergency will certainly continue, with many more cases expected to be filed over the coming years.

“The last ten years have constructed a legal architecture that’s now very clear. What’s needed is enforcement and implementation,” Maxwell said. She said she expects the next phase of government climate cases will focus on those aspects.

In Montana, for example, the youth activists who succeeded in their climate suit against the state government have now filed a fresh petition with the state’s highest court seeking to enforce the court’s judgment and overturn several new laws that they say defy the courts and the Montana constitution.

“In the face of government inaction,” Mead noted, “courts are stepping in. This is democracy in action.”

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On his first day back in office in January, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency and directed his administration to “unleash” American energy, but these orders deliberately excluded the fastest growing and cheapest forms of new energy – renewable solar and wind. The administration has been especially hostile to the latter, halting federal leasing and permitting for new wind projects, cancelling funding for port facilities to service offshore wind, and even revoking permits or issuing stop work orders for wind projects already under development or construction.

In August, for example, the acting head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordered an immediate halt to construction of Revolution Wind, a 704-megawatt offshore wind farm located off the southern coast of Rhode Island. The project was 80 percent complete, and thus the move sparked outrage among clean energy advocates and elected officials in the region who were counting on the resource to meet both rising energy demand and decarbonization goals. New England’s electric grid operator warned that delaying Revolution Wind would increase risks to reliability. And Rhode Island’s attorney general said that without Revolution Wind, the state’s Act on Climate – a law mandating 45 percent emissions reduction by 2030 – would be “dead in the water.”

The project’s developer Orsted took the Trump administration to court over the stop work order, and succeeded in getting it overturned. Offshore construction is nearing completion, and absent any further hurdles, Revolution Wind is expected to start operating sometime in the second half of 2026. The project, consisting of 65 turbines, is designed to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of over 350,000 homes across Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Opponents of offshore wind, including some representatives from the commercial fishing industry, have been particularly vocal, disseminating misleading or unsubstantiated messaging that echoes anti-wind talking points from fossil fuel interests. As investigative reporter Rebecca Burns explained in an article published last year in Sierra magazine – “For more than a decade, climate deniers and fossil fuel interests have quietly cultivated ties with these activists, equipping them with talking points, legal muscle, model ordinances, and other tools to try to subvert renewable energy adoption.” The claim that offshore wind is killing whales, for example, is not supported by scientific evidence, NOAA Fisheries points out.

“The majority of Rhode Island residents want us to deploy offshore wind,” Christian Roselund, co-director of Climate Action Rhode Island’s Yes to Wind campaign, told me. He helped organize a rally in Newport, Rhode Island in response to the stop work order on Revolution Wind that drew over 100 people, which he said “was largest protest I know of in favor of offshore wind.”

Three months later, on a sunny day in November, Roselund and several others from his organization joined dozens of other community and environmental activists from the region on a boat tour to see offshore wind up close. I tagged along as well, on assignment with Sierra magazine to report on a wind project “success story” – in this case, the first fully operational, commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S. called South Fork Wind.

Developed by Orsted, South Fork Wind is a 132-megawatt project consisting of 12 turbines, located 35 miles east of Montauk on the tip of Long Island, New York. The project was completed in 2024 and is designed to provide enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of over 70,000 New York homes.

We passed right by Revolution Wind as we approached the South Fork project, as the two wind farms are sited in adjacent offshore lease areas. The boat had already slowed down at that point, reducing its speed from 30 knots to roughly 10 knots in accordance with vessel speed restrictions since the area we were traveling through is a seasonal management area for the North Atlantic right whale.

“People on our vessels look out for protected species and stop work if they see them,” Orsted’s Kevin Hansen, head of government and stakeholder relations for the Northeast region, said during a recent webinar about South Fork Wind. “As part of delivering this wind farm, we have a lot of environmental monitoring that goes into our project development. Just tons of safeguards,” he explained.

Benthic monitoring results indicate that the project is actually co-existing with the marine environment, as the turbine foundations function as artificial reefs supporting a variety of species. “We have some amazing underwater photos showing the sea life that’s developed around the foundations of the South Fork, and it’s beautiful – mussels, star fish, barrel fish surrounding the site,” National Wildlife Federation’s Amber Hewett, one of the organizers of the boat tour, told me. She said that fishermen, even ones who fish recreationally, have testified during hearings that the fishing has actually improved in this area.

As for generation output, South Fork has achieved an average capacity factor of about 46 percent for its first year of operation, and for the first half of 2025 the capacity factor average was even higher at 53 percent, which is on par with performance data for natural gas plants in New York. “It’s doing really, really well and probably exceeding our expectations for power production,” Hansen said of the wind farm’s performance. Moreover, he noted that South Fork Wind was found to be generating about 92 percent of the time. “[The project] is not very intermittent. It’s pretty consistently producing power almost all the time,” Hansen said.

Hansen mentioned one example of how South Fork Wind is contributing to improving electric grid reliability. During a heat wave in June, the grid operator for New York had to declare a major emergency, calling on every available resource to try to meet surging electricity demand. At that moment, South Fork Wind happened to be generating power at nearly full production capacity, helping to bolster the power supply when the grid needed it most.

Offshore wind is also critical for supplying power especially during the winter months, clean energy advocates say. That is because wind speeds tend to be highest during the colder months, which is when the Northeast experiences rising demand on the natural gas system, since gas – the largest source of electricity in the region – is also the primary energy source used for heating.

“We have significant issues with having adequate gas capacity to meet those needs, and what we end up with is very high power prices and importing LNG [liquified natural gas],” Roselund told me. Offshore wind is certainly important for decarbonization, he said, but it is also “particularly strategic” for addressing those high winter power prices.

Roselund works as an energy policy analyst in the solar and energy storage industry and has been involved in the energy transition professionally for about 16 years, so he brings some expertise to his advocacy. “We’re on a good pace for solar deployment [in New England]. Where we’re really lacking in is power in the fall and winter. And that’s where offshore wind comes in,” he told me. “For me, it’s really clear there is no resource more important to the energy transition in New England than offshore wind.”

And yet, the offshore wind industry faces enormous headwinds from a federal administration that seems to be intent on shutting it down and preventing any further development. “Windmills, we’re just not going to allow ‘em. They’re ruining our country,” President Trump said in an Aug. 26 cabinet meeting, just days after his administration issued the stop work order on Revolution Wind.

While that project is now moving forward, others may be stymied or at least delayed as the administration moves to reconsider, and potentially revoke, construction and operation plan approvals for multiple projects, including Maryland Offshore Wind, SouthCoast Wind, and New England Wind 1 and 2. The SouthCoast and New England Wind projects, located south of Martha’s Vineyard, were all slated to provide clean power to Massachusetts (SouthCoast would also provide some power to Rhode Island).

Another offshore wind farm located just a little south of the Revolution Wind and South Fork projects, called Sunrise Wind, is under construction and has not (or at least not yet) been targeted by the Trump administration. Sunrise Wind will consist of 84 turbines and will be 924 megawatts, capable of powering approximately 600,000 homes in New York. Orsted’s Hansen said it is expected to be completed in 2027.

Offshore wind is happening in the U.S., despite the Trump administration’s hostility to it, and it has significant potential to contribute to the clean energy transition. I saw it up close, and from what I saw, these offshore turbines are co-existing with the marine environment and generating a reliable source of zero-carbon electricity.

“They were really magnificent,” Roselund told me in reflecting on the boat tour to South Fork Wind. “I saw us moving off of burning things for energy for the first time in a meaningful way in human history.”

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Houses in Bethel, VT sustained severe damage from Hurricane Irene in 2011. Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region via Flickr

All across the United States, households are facing a mounting affordability and cost-of-living crisis. Costs are rising across the board, from groceries and electric utility bills to health insurance and housing. Part of the rising cost of housing is the increasing price of homeowners insurance – a very real increase that is hitting Americans hard in their pocketbooks.

In Hollywood, Florida – a city of over 154,000 residents located roughly 20 minutes north of Miami – windstorm property insurance premiums have more than doubled over the past five years, the city’s mayor Josh Levy testified during a spotlight hearing held by Senate Democrats in May. “My own premium for homeowners’ coverage jumped from $3,200 a year to over $7,000 in a single year,” Levy said.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren noted during the hearing that in her state, home insurance rates went up by 16 percent just last year. In Texas, Houston resident Rocky Kneten testified that he has seen “significant premium increases in the last half dozen years.” Kneten said his homeowners’ insurance premium has more than doubled since 2010.

Experts say it is clear that climate change, which is supercharging extreme weather and ‘natural’ disasters like hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires, is a big factor driving the rising costs of home insurance. Philip Mulder, assistant professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin, said that his research “shows an unmistakable connection between disaster risk and rising premiums.” With extreme weather on the rise, insurance companies are taking on more risk and losses, and in some especially high-risk areas they are dropping coverage altogether.

“As losses go up, insurers pull back and raise prices,” Dave Jones, former insurance commissioner for the state of California, explained during a press briefing hosted by Covering Climate Now earlier this year. His state has been particularly hard hit by wildfires in recent years, including the devastating blazes that torched the greater Los Angeles area in January. These types of catastrophic events are occurring across the country as the climate crisis unfolds, and as a result, Jones warned, “we’re marching toward an uninsurable future in the United States and across the globe.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has repeatedly been raising the alarm about the climate change-fueled homeowners’ insurance crisis and the prospect that it could cascade into the broader economy. Rising costs and unavailability of homeowners’ insurance impacts mortgages (since you generally can’t get a mortgage without insurance) and in turn, property values and the wider real estate market. The chief economist for Freddie Mac, Whitehouse says, has warned that there is likely to be another 2008-style economic recession on the horizon.

But that is not the whole story, because, as Whitehouse says, “this is a story with a villain in it.” The senator says it is imperative to spotlight this villain, which is, of course, the fossil fuel industry and its web of front groups and enablers. This operation, Whitehouse said during a press briefing last month ahead of the COP30 UN climate summit, “has engaged in a decades-long campaign of climate denial fraud.”

That part of the story, that the climate emergency we are experiencing today has in large part been engineered by the fossil fuel firms whose products and extractive business model result in climate-destabilizing pollution, is supported by evidence uncovered through multiple investigations in recent years by journalists, academics, and Democratic members of Congress. As Jones said during the CC Now press briefing, there is strong evidence demonstrating “that the oil majors knew that their emissions were going to cause this very outcome, and yet they misled, deceived, and lied to the American public about it.”

In an op-ed published in The New York Times in January in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, Jones called for holding oil companies accountable for climate-related damages including rising insurance costs. “As the former insurance commissioner of California, I can confirm that private insurance companies cannot continue to provide coverage at anything approaching affordable rates in the face of increasing climate-driven disasters,” Jones wrote. “States, cities and regulators urgently need to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for the devastation that fossil fuels cause.”

Some municipal and state governments are already taking oil and gas majors to court over alleged climate deception and consequent damages. And now, for the first time, Big Oil is facing a class action lawsuit seeking accountability for the skyrocketing costs in homeowners’ insurance.

The lawsuit, filed last week in federal district court in Washington State, alleges that the oil and gas industry has engaged in a decades-long campaign of deception on climate change that has effectively delayed the transition to clean energy and worsened the damaging impacts that are resulting in rising insurance rates. The two plaintiffs, Richard Kennedy and Margaret Hazard, are both Washington residents who have seen sharp increases in their homeowners’ insurance premiums. Hazard’s premiums have doubled since 2017 while Kennedy’s has more than doubled over that time. They are representing a larger class of homeowners who have or will purchase insurance after 2017 in both the US and Washington State.

“We see a direct correlation between Big Oil’s lies and the alarming increase of homeowners insurance due to the rising threat of natural disasters,” said Steve Berman, lead lawyer on the case who previously served as special assistant attorney general for 13 states in the litigation against Big Tobacco. Just as the tobacco industry misled the public about the damaging impacts of its products, resulting in significant public health costs, the fossil fuel industry has lied about the harms of its business, resulting in huge costs that are falling on the public, the case contends.

“Big Oil’s deception has become the most costly lie – a lie worth hundreds of billions of dollars,” Berman said.

Defendants include ExxonMobil, BP PLC, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell and its subsidiary Equilon Enterprises, and the industry’s chief trade association - the American Petroleum Institute. The case brings federal claims including violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, as well as state law claims of fraudulent misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, unjust enrichment, nuisance, and violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act. Plaintiffs seek compensatory damages, including an award of treble damages, and restitution and disgorgement of profits as well as an order for defendants to cease their deceptive conduct.

A similar class action RICO case brought by Puerto Rican municipalities against many of those same defendants (plus additional ones) was recently dismissed by a federal district court over a procedural statute of limitations issue, though the municipalities are now pursuing an appeal. That case sought to hold the industry liable for damages associated with the 2017 hurricanes that decimated Puerto Rico.

The new lawsuit is the first to target Big Oil for rising home insurance costs, and just the second climate deception case brought by individuals. In May a woman in Washington State who lost her mother in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome brought a wrongful death suit against Exxon and other big oil companies.

The litigation likely has a long journey ahead in the courts, and Big Oil lawyers are currently turning once again to the US Supreme Court in an attempt to stop all climate cases pending against Exxon et al. before any case can get to trial. There is certainly no guarantee that the lawsuits will succeed or that the oil companies will be forced to pay for some of the damage they have brought about. But without these accountability efforts, it is guaranteed that the costs will continue to fall entirely upon everyday Americans.

As Prof. Mulder, the expert in risk and insurance, noted during the Senate Democrats’ hearing, “The rising cost of homeowners insurance is a reminder that climate change creates real costs for household budgets.”

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A group of 24 countries signed onto a “declaration on transitioning away from fossil fuels” at COP30 in Belém, Brazil and announced the first international conference on this transition to take place April 28-29, 2026 in Colombia. Credit: Screen shot from press conference broadcast on Nov. 21, 2025.

Something is happening. As this headline today from The Guardian states: “End of fossil fuel era inches closer” as the COP30 UN climate summit in Belém, Brazil officially comes to a close.

The transition away from fossil fuels towards clean, renewable energy is in motion – but important questions remain as to how fast and fair the transition will be and how it will be funded. Although the summit outcome text failed to include a transition roadmap or concrete language on fossil fuel phaseout, momentum is building beyond the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process to start to work towards implementing this transition.

More than 80 countries backed calls for a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels, but these calls faced stiff resistance from petrostates like Saudi Arabia, which “use the consensus rule to block action and ambition,” as the Center for International Environmental Law’s Erika Lennon explained. Lennon and other advocates continue to call for urgent reforms to the UNFCCC procedure in order to address this deliberate obstruction.

In the meantime, countries supportive of moving away from fossil fuels are taking matters into their own hands and forging ahead. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reportedly said he would take the roadmap proposal to the G20 summit and was prepared to fight for it, even though it is unlikely to gain traction among some major emitters and fossil fuel producers. COP30 president André Correa do Lago also said he would carry the roadmap idea forward through high-level dialogues that he plans to hold over the next year. But perhaps the most significant development is the announcement by the government of Colombia on Friday that it will be hosting, in alliance with the Netherlands, the first international conference on the just transition away from fossil fuels just five months from now.

The conference will take place on April 28 and 29, 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia. “This will be a broad intergovernmental, multi-sectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels,” Colombia environmental minister Irene Vélez Torres explained at a high-level press conference on Friday at COP30 in Belém. Colombia is among the two dozen countries that are backing what they call the Belém Declaration on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels – a commitment to operationalize and act on the promise that all parties to the UNFCCC made two years ago in Dubai.

“This declaration is grounded in a simple scientific truth – fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate crisis, and keeping the [Paris Agreement] objectives require a fast, full, fair, and financed phase out,” Torres said. “As difficult as it can be, we also know that this conversation cannot end here. We must keep the momentum, lead with bravery, rise to the challenge, and build a coalition of the willing.”

The 24 countries that have signed onto the declaration include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Cambodia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Luxembourg, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Nepal, Netherlands, Panama, Spain, Slovenia, Vanuatu and Tuvalu.

“We need to build this group of states that is going to make this happen, regardless of what happens with the UNFCCC,” Vanuatu’s climate change and environment minister Ralph Regenvanu said.

His colleague from the fellow small island Pacific nation of Tuvalu echoed the sentiment of frustration with the existing international climate regime. “After 30 years, this process is still failing us,” Tuvalu minister of climate change Maina Talia said at the press conference. “So, we will not wait.”

“The Pacific will be at the conference in Santa Marta, and we are preparing to host the second meeting,” Talia added. He said the new process “complements the Paris Agreement by addressing fossil fuel phaseout directly, equitably, and with real accountability.”

The science and the law are clear that there can be no real future for fossil fuels. In its landmark advisory opinion on climate change issued in July, the International Court of Justice even suggested that countries that fail to protect the climate system by continuing to support fossil fuel production, consumption, licensing, and subsidies may be committing internationally wrongful acts. “The ICJ reinforces that continuing to expand fossil fuels, knowing the harm, is incompatible with states’ legal obligations,” Vishal Prasad, leader in the group Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, said during a COP30 press conference earlier in the week.

The economics are also increasingly favorable for renewable energy. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out during an address on Thursday at COP30, “clean energy has never been cheaper and more abundant.”

The barriers to preventing climate chaos and realizing a clean energy future are not technological nor economic, but political. The political will and courage may still be sorely lacking for most major fossil fuel polluting countries, but like the clean energy revolution itself, the movement away from fossil fuels now appears to be unstoppable.

“The phaseout of fossil fuels is not only necessary but inevitable,” Colombia’s Torres said. “What the world must decide now is how and how fast.”

“We cannot afford to wait,” Marshall Islands special envoy for climate change Tina Stege said. “As an atoll nation that is just 2 meters above sea level, we know that climate action cannot wait.”

“This roadmap is inevitable,” Stege added. “It’s happening.”

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