These Initiatives and Trends are Directly Confronting the Big Carbon Cartel
From lawsuits and competition from renewables to the first international conference to tackle fossil fuels head-on, the oil and gas industry is facing mounting pressure.
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.”