‘Economic civil war’: States push laws to protect oil and gas companies from liability

Across the country, Republican-led state legislatures are passing a series of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from lawsuits accusing them of being responsible for the growing destruction and devastation caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have been adopted or are currently under debate in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold companies accountable.

A ProPublica investigation found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups sharing staff or with financial ties to the prominent conservative activist. Leonard Leowho is credited with appointing conservative justices to the United States Supreme Court. These groups drafted state laws, planned their release, and hired a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

This effort is unfolding as courts consider more than 30 major lawsuits filed by states, counties and municipalities accusing fossil fuel companies of misrepresenting the risks their products pose to consumers and seeking to recoup the costs of disasters and other climate impacts like losses from wildfires or coastal flooding that their products helped cause. One of the goals of the legislation is to prevent these cases from moving forward and prevent new ones from being filed.

The strategy to establish state laws that will make it virtually impossible to sue oil and gas companies was laid out in detail by a group of lobbyists and political operatives in December, during a panel presentation at the annual State and Nation Policy Summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council — the influential organization that brings together state lawmakers, business executives and conservative activists to draft and promote legislation.

During the session, one of the panelists, Will Hild, executive director of a nonprofit called Consumers’ Research, described climate cases as a liberal effort to use the court system to exact a new tax on energy companies in the form of civil judgments. Another panelist, Oramel H. Skinner, former Arizona solicitor general and executive director of the nonprofit Consumer Alliance, warned that these rulings would trickle down and make citizens’ lives less affordable and, ultimately, make many of their choices — whether owning a pickup truck or buying a side of beef — illegal.

ProPublica reviewed an audio recording of the event obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented.

Hild and Skinner had come to the session with a ready-made solution: a set of pre-written bills and lots of funding.

Consumers’ Research and the Alliance for Consumers are both funded by organizations linked to Leo. ProPublica reviewed lobbying records in 25 states, federal tax returns from more than a dozen organizations and notes from other closed-door strategy sessions among ALEC members and found that several groups Leo supports are part of a national strategy to grant legal immunity to corporations for their climate emissions.

Since 2021, Leo rolled out $1.6 billion donation through a series of nonprofits and other organizations that obscure the source and recipients of donations – so-called dark money groups. Much of that money was funneled through a nonprofit legal defense group founded by Leo — now called The 85 Fund — which receives and distributes Leo’s funding. Many of these nonprofits are increasingly focusing on issues related to climate change.

Roundtable moderator Michael Thompson is a senior vice president at CRC Advisors, Leo’s for-profit political and corporate consulting firm based in Virginia. He also serves on ALEC’s Private Business Advisory Council. Hild’s organization, Consumers’ Research, received more than 65% of its 2024 funding through a dark money group called the Donors Trust. Fund 85 contributed more than $67 million to Donors Trust in 2024. Consumers’ Research also works closely with CRC advisors and assigned them more than $670,000 worth of work in 2024. Another panelist, Paul N. Watkins, was an attorney at Consumers’ Research. According to tax filings, his law firm received more than $2.2 million in 2024 from the group. As recently as 2024, Skinner was also legal counsel to Leo’s 85 Fund, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings.

“For decades, the left has mobilized immense resources to take over the institutions that shape our society – the legal system, universities, medical and scientific organizations, the entertainment industry and our largest corporations,” Leo wrote to ProPublica in a text message. “This power grab has resulted in a radically woke culture that reflects neither the will of the American people nor the pillars of limited constitutional government that have made our country great. That’s why our company supports organizations committed to crushing liberal domination and restoring balance to the institutions that shape society.”

During the ALEC session, Skinner introduced a model bill that would effectively prohibit cities and towns from filing public nuisance lawsuits against businesses and others when the issue concerns widespread public harm like climate change. In several cases, plaintiffs have argued that the impacts of climate change — the warping of a road because of extreme temperature swings, for example — are a “nuisance” caused by fossil fuel companies.

Nuisance claims are common in the American legal system, giving individuals, businesses, or communities a way to sue when someone else’s actions damage their property, degrade the health or safety of the environment around them, or infringe upon their rights. Under these laws, parties can seek financial compensation or request a court order to remedy problems such as pollution. Skinner, however, argues that nuisance laws should only be used to address easily fixable local problems, such as excessive noise coming from a bar. His bill would reduce the use of public nuisance lawsuits in climate cases by limiting the liability of manufacturers and other businesses and giving state attorneys general sole authority to bring them.

“Think very seriously about all the levers you have in your states to stop this woke justice machine from working,” Skinner told the audience. “The goal of the left is to reshape society around you using the courts.”

The second bill, called the Energy Freedom Act, was produced by the policy nonprofit associated with Hild’s organization. Among many provisions, it would protect businesses from liability related to greenhouse gas emissions if those releases did not violate the federal Clean Air Act.

Critics of the bills say they infringe on the rights of local communities. They send the message that “you can pollute with impunity,” said Carly Phillips, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really an eye-opener for places that are affected by climate change.”

The push to block climate lawsuits in all states comes as several lawsuits against the oil industry are approaching, or have already entered, the perilous legal phases of discovery, when plaintiffs will have the opportunity to seek confidential industry documents and impeach oil executives. The stakes for oil companies are enormous. By some estimates, more than $10 trillion in damages can be attributed to U.S. emissions.

There’s a reason why state and local governments are filing more and more lawsuits. The frequency and cost of climate-related disasters, including severe storms, droughts and floods, continue to rise – between $350 billion and $450 billion in each of the last three years – straining government budgets. Importantly, the science of assessing the extent to which a given disaster was influenced by climate change has continued to advance. To cite just one example, the March heat waves in the United States would have been virtually impossible without the emissions that caused climate change, according to the European science group World Weather Attribution, and were about four times more likely to occur than a decade ago.

Boulder, Colorado, is among places facing increasing droughts, more extreme precipitation, and larger wildfires — all of which are significantly fueled by climate change linked to emissions from fossil fuel use. The state estimated the cost of these perils would be several hundred million dollars. In 2018, Boulder County sued Exxon Mobil and Canadian oil company Suncor Energy, accusing the companies of “intentional, reckless and negligent conduct.”

Among its claims, the county alleged that the oil companies engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the public and violated consumer protection rules by misrepresenting the dangers of their products. They accused oil companies of creating a public nuisance by altering the environment and letting the county pay to reduce growing hazards such as flooding that tests roads and bridges. Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy never filed a response in Colorado, but requested that the case be dismissed.

Since then, the lawsuit has been mired in a dispute over whether Colorado’s courts were the proper venue, with the state Supreme Court ultimately ruling last May that it was. Suncor filed suit with the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider, and this fall it will consider the company’s petition asking whether federal environmental law preempts state law.

This high-profile national court case is just one facet of an increasingly tense fight over accountability for the fossil fuel industry. In January, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest fossil fuel industry group in the United States, said fighting climate liability lawsuits was one of its top priorities in 2026. The group’s lobbying records e last year show that he advocated for legislation to protect oil producers from climate lawsuits at the state level. The Trump administration; other industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce; and several nonprofit advocacy groups associated with Leo have argued that state courts are not the right venue for claims that ultimately concern emissions that cross borders widely, and they want to see other cases moved or dismissed. They say that because the federal government already has the power to regulate these emissions, federal courts, not states, should hear the claims.

In an interview, Hild told ProPublica that he viewed the lawsuits as an illegitimate effort to implement policy through the courts and to “regulate the entire American economy from a single state.”

In an email, Skinner wrote: “Our effort is not focused on climate change. But it is true that left-wing activists and their dark money donors have invested enormous sums of money and years of groundwork to launch a coast-to-coast campaign of climate-focused public nuisance lawsuits.”

Neither Watkins nor Thompson responded to requests for comment.

When Skinner and Hild finished their presentation at ALEC, they made available a QR code to download language for invoice templates and directed the audience to a woman named Catherine Gunsalus, who was in the back of the room. She would be able to answer any questions, they said.

Gunsalus until recently worked for the Heritage Action Fund, the policy and lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, the Trump-aligned think tank that is most recently known for promoting the Project 2025 agenda. Records show that Gunsalus also lobbied in conjunction with another Leo-affiliated group, Americans for Public Trust.

In April 2025, she created a lobbying firm called Varidon Strategies and began registering in states almost immediately afterward, records show. In mid-summer, Varidon represented the Alliance for Consumers Action Fund; Consumer research; The Honest Election Project, an affiliate of the 85 Fund; as well as other Leo entities in 25 states. In the majority of these filings, Varidon used an em address to the estate of Holtzman Vogel, a Virginia-based law firm that is often retained by Leo’s organizations.

Gunsalus did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

In the four months since the ALEC summit, there has been substantial activity in the states where Varidon registered. On January 5, Missouri officials introduced the Eliminate Criminal Profiteering Act, which could prevent law firms’ revenue from settlements in nuisance lawsuits often used in climate cases. Two days later, lawmakers passed the Public Nuisance Reform Act, which proposed narrowing the definition of what could be considered a nuisance.

That same month, similar bills were introduced in Indiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. In February, eight more followed in Oklahoma, Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Louisiana and Kansas. Skinner, who is registered to lobby in Kansas, was invited to testify at a hearing on that state’s bill and launched a new “End the Lawfare” website targeting the “left-wing” agenda. Since April 2, versions of the model legislation proposed at the ALEC meeting have been introduced in a total of 11 states. In Utah, the governor signed two related bills, and in Tennessee and Indiana, the bills are awaiting their governors’ signatures.

The more states that have some sort of waiver, the narrower the options for cities and states to repair when environmental conditions deteriorate, and the costs continue to rise. Hild and Skinner and the Leo Network bills also have another goal: to spark a conflict that pits states against each other, a conflict that only the Supreme Court or Congress can ultimately resolve.

As Hild said at the ALEC rally: “This is an economic civil war.”