The state of Hawaii has joined an intensifying legal battle by states and communities across the country to try to hold large fossil fuel firms accountable for the damaging climate impacts of their products.
Hawaii is the 10th state so far to take the fossil fuel industry to court over alleged climate deception. The state’s lawsuit comes as the Trump administration goes on offense in an attempt to block state laws and lawsuits targeting major polluters.
Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez filed a lawsuit on Thursday against seven groups of affiliated oil and gas companies as well as the American Petroleum Institute seeking to recover damages for costs associated with worsening climate-related hazards such as severe storms, sea level rise and wildfires like the deadly blazes that devastated Maui in 2023.
The suit, filed in the First Circuit Court in Honolulu, alleges that major oil companies misled the public for decades about climate change and its link to fossil fuels in order to protect their profits, thereby delaying the energy transition and exacerbating what scientists say is now an emergency.
We’re hiring!
Please take a look at the new openings in our newsroom.
See jobs
“The climate crisis is here, and the costs of surviving it are rising every day,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said in a statement. “Hawaiʻi taxpayers should not have to foot that bill. The burden should fall on those who deceived and failed to warn consumers about the climate dangers lurking in their products. This lawsuit is about holding those parties accountable, shifting the costs of surviving the climate crisis back where they belong, and protecting Hawaiʻi citizens into the future.”
Meanwhile, in a move that legal experts say is highly unusual, Trump’s Department of Justice filed lawsuits late on Wednesday against Hawaii and Michigan over those states’ anticipated climate suits against oil companies. At the time of the filings, neither state had yet sued any fossil fuel companies, and Michigan still has not yet filed a complaint.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel did indicate last year that she was preparing to bring a case against Big Oil and was seeking outside counsel to help in this initiative. And on Monday, Green said in an interview with KHON2 News that Hawaii would be filing a climate case against fossil fuel companies on Thursday this week.
The Department of Justice pointed to those early announcements in their complaints against the two states, filed in federal district courts in Hawaii and in Michigan. DOJ argues that the state actions violate the Constitution and are barred by the Clean Air Act, which authorizes EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“When states seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authority, they harm the country’s ability to produce energy and they aid our adversaries,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson, of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, said in a statement.
Hawaii’s attorney general called the Trump administration’s act illegal and an attack on its state sovereignty. The Michigan Department of Attorney General did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move by DOJ to file suits to try to preemptively block states from suing fossil fuel companies is unprecedented and unlikely to go anywhere, according to climate law experts.
“I’ve never heard of the federal government—or anyone—filing a lawsuit seeking an injunction to block someone from filing a lawsuit against a third party. The usual procedure is to wait until the lawsuit is filed and then move to intervene in that lawsuit,” said Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. If Michigan proceeds to file its climate lawsuit, as Hawaii has now done, the Department of Justice’s cases “will become moot,” he added. “DOJ will then have to follow the usual procedure and move to intervene in those suits.”
Patrick Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said the Trump administration’s filings were premature and lacked merit. “I don’t see any jurisdictional basis for federal courts to [stop] states from bringing suit,” he said.
“The fact that DOJ is seeking to prevent even the filing of the lawsuits—without knowing the basis for the states’ claims—is pretty remarkable and unusual,” Ann Carlson, faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law School, wrote in a new blog piece commenting on the move by DOJ.
She pointed out that the Trump administration’s argument that the Clean Air Act preempts state climate lawsuits is potentially undercut by the administration’s attempt to nix EPA’s legal authority under that statute to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by revoking the 2009 endangerment finding.
“By the U.S. government’s logic, states are preempted from any lawsuit seeking to recover damages because the Clean Air Act regulates greenhouse gases except that if Zeldin has his way, it won’t regulate them,” Carlson writes.
The Department of Justice also filed suit on Thursday against New York and Vermont seeking to stop their climate change superfund laws that require major fossil fuel polluters to help pay for state climate change costs. Last year Vermont became the first state in the country to enact polluter pays climate legislation, which is modeled after the federal Superfund program.
New York followed in passing similar legislation, which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law in December. Both the New York and Vermont laws are already facing legal challenges from industry groups, and 22 Republican-led states have also brought a case against the New York law.
The DOJ is now asserting many of the same arguments in its complaints against New York and Vermont—which also feature EPA as a plaintiff. Those arguments are namely that the state laws are unconstitutional and preempted by the Clean Air Act.
The DOJ’s lawsuits against the four states follow an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on April 8 directing the attorney general to put a stop to state climate laws and lawsuits, particularly ones that target or otherwise burden fossil fuel producers. The order, which specifically referenced the New York and Vermont laws as well as California’s cap-and-trade program and the dozens of state and municipal climate lawsuits filed against Big Oil, argued that these actions impermissibly impede on the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda.
“These burdensome and ideologically motivated laws and lawsuits threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “The Department of Justice is working to ‘Unleash American Energy’ by stopping these illegitimate impediments to the production of affordable, reliable energy that Americans deserve.”
The American Petroleum Institute applauded the Department of Justice’s actions suing states over their climate laws and lawsuits.
“The Trump Administration gets it. This cadre of state lawsuits and laws is not only an attack on the companies that provide Americans with affordable and reliable energy, but also an unconstitutional affront to the federal government’s role in setting national energy and climate policy,” said Ryan Meyers, API senior vice president and general counsel. “We thank the Department of Justice for their bold action in taking on this activist-driven state overreach.”
Climate accountability advocates pushed back against the Trump administration’s move to go after states.
“This is political theater, plain and simple. Trump is using the Department of Justice to protect his biggest donors, and the public is being forced to bankroll it,” said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign.
In its announcement Thursday of Hawaii’s climate lawsuit against fossil fuel companies, the Hawaii Department of the Attorney General condemned what it said was an “illegal attempt to interfere” with its case by the Trump administration.
“The federal lawsuit filed by the Justice Department attempts to block Hawaiʻi from holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for deceptive conduct that caused climate change damage to Hawaiʻi,” said Lopez, the attorney general.
“The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing and is a direct attack on Hawaiʻi’s rights as a sovereign state,” she added. “The state of Hawaiʻi will not be deterred from moving forward with our climate deception lawsuit. My department will vigorously oppose this gross federal overreach.”
“Decades-Long Campaign of Deception”
Hawaii’s lawsuit alleges that major fossil fuel companies “perpetrated a decades-long campaign of deception” by misrepresenting the climate risks of their products, which in turn contributed to more fossil fuel use and worsening climate impacts. The deception continues to this day, the state claims, through greenwashed advertising that misleadingly portrays the industry as a leader in addressing the climate change problem.
BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Sunoco and ConocoPhillips are among the companies named as defendants. Inside Climate News reached out to these companies, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, with requests for comment.
Only Shell responded. In a statement, a Shell spokesperson said the company agrees “that action is needed now on climate change.”
“Addressing climate change requires a collaborative, society-wide approach. We do not believe the courtroom is the right venue to address climate change, but that smart policy from government and action from all sectors is the appropriate way to reach solutions and drive progress,” the Shell spokesperson said.
Hawaii argues in its lawsuit that companies like Shell worked to distort the public’s understanding of climate science and to block policies to try to rein in emissions and transition to cleaner forms of energy. “By sowing doubt about the future consequences of unrestricted fossil fuel consumption, Defendants’ deception campaign successfully delayed the transition to alternative energy sources,” the complaint alleges.
“These defendants had a duty to warn people about the climate dangers associated with their products, or to mitigate those dangers. But they did neither of those things,” Lopez said in her statement. “Instead, they put profits ahead of people and facilitated the increased use of their dangerous products through decades of deceptive conduct. They violated Hawaiʻi law, harmed all Hawaiʻi residents, and will now be held accountable in a Hawaiʻi court.”
The lawsuit accuses the defendants of violating Hawaii common and statutory law including the Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices Statute, public and private nuisance, trespass, failure to warn, negligence and harm to public trust resources. The state is seeking damage payments and civil penalties, disgorgement of profits and an order for the defendants to halt their deceptive conduct.
With the filing, Hawaii joins over three dozen communities and states that have taken fossil fuel entities to court in recent years as climate change costs pile up and investigations begin to reveal the extent of the industry’s early knowledge of the problem as well as its role in disseminating disinformation on the reality of and solutions to the crisis.
Among the cases already underway are ones filed by Honolulu and Maui. Honolulu’s lawsuit is now in the pre-trial discovery phase after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year rejected a bid from oil companies to try to derail it.
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
