Could the oil industry be held responsible for fueling the heatwave that led to the woman’s death?
That’s the question at the heart of a new lawsuit in Washington state. Misty Leon’s mother died from overheating during the hottest day in state history in June 2021, when temperatures soared to 108 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists said an unusual heat dome descending on the Pacific Northwest would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. So last year, Leung sued ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell and other oil majors for wrongful death, accusing them of deceiving the public about the devastating consequences of fossil fuel emissions and delaying action that could have prevented her mother’s death, despite knowing for decades that they would have devastating consequences. During one smoldering week in June, an estimated 1,200 people in the region died from the heat.
Earlier this month, a King County judge ruled against the oil company’s motion to dismiss Leon’s lawsuit, allowing it to proceed to trial. Mike Meno, communications director for the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit organization that supports climate change liability lawsuits, said the ruling is a signal that this type of litigation has value. “This is the latest legal liability that oil companies are extremely afraid of and will fight tooth and nail to escape,” he said.
More than a decade after an investigation found that ExxonMobil knew about the dangers of global warming since the 1970s but publicly downplayed the threat, lawsuits against the oil company have proliferated. Margaret Barry, who manages the climate change litigation database at Columbia University Law School’s Sabin Center, says there are nearly 40 such lawsuits pending across the country. After years of delaying tactics by the oil industry, at least five of the lawsuits in Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, the District of Columbia and Honolulu have moved on to the discovery stage, where both parties are attempting to uncover evidence to support their claims in court. This is the last major step before trial, in which oil company executives must defend their actions in front of a jury.
Some cases are on hold as the justices wait to see how the Supreme Court will handle the case from Boulder, Colorado, this fall. The city and county of Boulder alleges ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy violated state law by concealing the dangers of their products and are seeking funding to pay for increased infrastructure improvements to combat heat waves, wildfires and flooding. The outcome could impact existing climate change litigation or force plaintiffs to take a different approach.
Portland residents fill a cooling center at the Oregon Convention Center during Heat Dome in June 2021. Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Meanwhile, the industry, with the help of the Trump administration and Republican politicians, has begun fighting back against the lawsuits. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s largest lobbying group, said one of its priorities for 2026 is to “end extreme weather liability policies.” The industry is beginning to take on the challenge of “attribution science.” This is a rapidly developing field that seeks to quantify how climate change, and even emissions from specific companies, have intensified extreme weather events.
Meno said this surge in activity suggests the industry feels under threat. “Simply put, big oil companies are in a panic.”
Republicans are seeking to pass legislation that would give oil majors immunity from these types of lawsuits, and have been successful in several states so far. Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Louisiana recently signed laws protecting fossil fuel companies from lawsuits related to greenhouse gas emissions, while Montana and Utah (again) amended their current laws to narrowly define what constitutes a “public nuisance,” effectively blocking lawsuits against oil companies seeking climate change damages based on that legal theory. The effort has gone national, with Republicans in the House and Senate this spring introducing legislation, with support from the American Petroleum Institute, that would give oil companies broad immunity from lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for climate change.
In April, a ProPublica investigation uncovered a coordinated effort by conservative groups tied to activist Leonard Leo behind these “liability protection” laws. Evidence provided to Grist by the watchdog group FieldNotes shows that Koch Industries and Exxon, among others, have extensive relationships with organizations promoting these laws, including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Tort Reform Association.
“If these companies have done nothing wrong and think the law is on their side, why are they lobbying Congress for immunity?” Meno said.
Oil executives are also receiving federal support following an executive order from President Donald Trump last year directing the attorney general to prioritize blocking climate change lawsuits brought by states. In May, the Justice Department responded to Minnesota’s climate change lawsuit against Big Oil with its own suit, just as the state’s case was moving into the discovery phase. He said Minnesota was trying to regulate and undermine “America’s energy advantage.” greenhouse gaswhich should fall within federal law – echoing a well-known argument in the oil industry. In a related move, Robert Levy, a longtime Exxon lawyer, recently joined the Justice Department’s new division called the Energy and Natural Resources Division (rather than the Environment and Natural Resources Division).
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As oil companies work to slow these lawsuits, the scientific evidence supporting some of these lawsuits is growing stronger. A major new report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concludes that existing science linking climate change and extreme weather events is increasingly robust, especially when it comes to extreme heat, extreme cold, and heavy rainfall. Although the report does not make recommendations on how the findings should be used, it has undergone an unusual level of scrutiny. Last month, ahead of the report’s release, opposition research firm Argus Insight requested to see internal communications between members of the committee working on the report, as well as emails that may have been exchanged with academics and lawyers involved in researching legal strategies for climate change litigation.
“We’ve seen a backlash against the process, not the science itself,” said Carly Phillips, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate Change Litigation Hub. “For me, it was really illustrative, because the science is really sound.” She sees what opponents see as an attempt to discredit scientific evidence before it can be heard in court.
Earlier this year, Republican attorneys general pressured the National Academy of Sciences and the Federal Judicial Center, a research organization for federal judges, to remove a chapter on climate science from the latest version of the judge’s reference book, but only the Center responded. President Trump took part in Sunday’s debate and ordered officials to review the National Academy of Sciences’ actions. “Our taxpayers should never have funded climate change fraud, and our judges should never have relied on climate change fraud,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Big Oil is ostensibly hoping to avoid the fate of Big Tobacco, which paid hundreds of billions of dollars to settle lawsuits that showed the companies lied about the health risks of smoking. Exxon attorney Justin Anderson explained during a Federalist Society panel on climate litigation in November that as the legal theories of those seeking to hold oil companies accountable for global warming evolve, the fossil fuel industry needs to keep up.
“Why do they keep adapting and changing their theories?” Anderson asked. “That makes sense in a way. I have to win every time. I have to win every case that’s brought to me. They just need to find a case that they can get through.”
