News & Analysis
April 21, 2026
In the latest win for climate accountability efforts, a federal court has rejected the Trump administration’s “highly unusual” lawsuit that sought to block the State of Hawaiʻi from taking oil majors to court for climate deception. In January, another federal court rejected the Trump administration’s separate but nearly identical lawsuit against the State of Michigan.
Undeterred by the unprecedented intimidation tactics, each state has separately filed major lawsuits against Big Oil companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP. Hawaiʻi’s case, filed just hours after the Trump administration’s preemptive attempt to block it, seeks to make the companies pay for damages caused by “a decades-long campaign of deception to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change.” Michigan’s, filed earlier this year in federal court, accuses the “fossil fuel cartel” of driving up costs for consumers by conspiring to block cleaner and cheaper energy sources in violation of antitrust laws.
The Department of Justice had sued both states last year after officials publicly pledged to take legal action against major oil and gas companies that would hold them accountable for their decades-long climate deception. Weeks earlier, the top executives of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other oil and gas companies had reportedly urged President Trump in a White House meeting to help them fight the growing number of states and municipalities taking them to court for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels. In response, President Trump issued an executive order directing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to “take all appropriate action to stop” climate lawsuits that could result in “crippling damages” for oil and gas companies. Weeks later, Bondi announced that the Department was preemptively suing Hawaiʻi and Michigan “to prevent each state from suing fossil fuel companies.” Legal scholars described the move at the time as “highly unusual,” “an intimidation tactic” and “like DOJ grasping at straws.” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said suing state officials for “potential claims” was “at best frivolous and arguably sanctionable.”
Now, just a year later, Bondi is no longer the U.S. Attorney General, and the DOJ lawsuits against Hawaiʻi and Michigan have both failed.
U.S. Senior Judge Helen Gillmor this week dismissed the Trump administration’s case against Hawaiʻi with prejudice. “There is no basis in the complaint to find that a potential lawsuit by the state of Hawaiʻi against fossil fuel entities would predictably result in harm to the United States,” she ruled. While the Trump administration argued that Hawaiʻi “would attempt to regulate greenhouse gases and interstate pollution,” Gillmor pointed out that the state’s lawsuit instead “alleges tortious and deceptive conduct against fossil fuel entities in marketing their products.”
If the Trump administration had been allowed to successfully block states from taking legal action against corporations, Gillmore found it would have created a dangerous precedent that could allow the federal government to “prevent any state court lawsuit against a private entity so long as the United States alleges that the litigation might interfere with the goals of the executive branch.”
A 2020 lawsuit the City and County of Honolulu filed against many of the same oil majors for damages caused by climate deception is already in discovery and moving toward trial.
