News & Analysis
December 18, 2025
Big Oil companies have long known — and lied — about how their products fuel climate change. In 2025, the devastating toll of the fossil fuel industry's deception was clearer than ever, as climate-fueled disasters such as the Los Angeles fires and storms and floods across the U.S. made the first half of the year the costliest on record for U.S. weather disasters.
From first-of-their-kind lawsuits to important court wins for communities, 2025 saw major advances in ongoing efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for their deception and the damage it has caused. As the year comes to a close, let’s review the highlights from 2025.
Hawaiʻi sued Big Oil for climate deception, and a daughter filed a historic lawsuit to hold Big Oil accountable for her mother’s death in a climate disaster.
Hawaiʻi became the tenth state to sue ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other fossil fuel companies for lying about the dangers of fossil fuels and knowingly fueling the climate crisis for decades.
The first-ever wrongful death case against Big Oil companies was filed by the daughter of a woman who died in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. Misti Leon’s lawsuit charges ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and other oil and gas companies with fueling the heat dome in Washington state that killed her mother. Most recently, a Washington federal court rejected Big Oil’s attempt to move the case into federal court, sending the case back to state court where it was originally filed.
Climate accountability lawsuits continued to advance toward trial.
In a major victory, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Boulder’s climate deception lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy could proceed toward discovery and trial, joining the state supreme courts of Hawaiʻi and Massachusetts in rejecting Big Oil’s motions to dismiss local climate deception cases. State courts also rejected Big Oil’s attempts to dismiss climate deception cases in Vermont, Minnesota, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia and ruled that lawsuits in Chicago, Maine, and Washington could proceed in federal court.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied requests from Big Oil companies and their political allies to stop climate deception lawsuits from moving forward. The justices have turned down six requests to take up deception cases against Big Oil since 2023, but Exxon and others are again asking the justices to bail them out and review the Colorado Supreme Court ruling in favor of Boulder.
Some lower courts ruled in favor of Big Oil on these issues, but most communities are appealing those decisions. The Maryland Supreme Court heard arguments from Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County this fall to reverse the dismissal of their lawsuits against Big Oil.
Big Oil’s allies fought to help the fossil fuel industry escape accountability.
Communities’ steady progress toward putting Big Oil on trial has triggered intense pushback from the fossil fuel industry’s allies, including the Trump administration. Hawaiʻi’s climate deception lawsuit was filed just hours after the Department of Justice preemptively sued Hawaiʻi and Michigan for planning to file climate deception lawsuits against Big Oil companies — a move Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel characterized as a “frivolous” attempt to stop the states from taking fossil fuel companies to court. Nessel confirmed that Michigan intends to file a similar suit against Big Oil companies in the future, despite the intimidation.
Facing a pressure campaign from a pro-fossil fuel advocacy group, newly elected officials in Puerto Rico voluntarily dismissed the Commonwealth’s case against Big Oil in order to align with the Trump administration’s policies “to support the burning of fossil fuels [and] the protection of oil companies." Newly elected officials in Charleston, South Carolina, similarly opted to not appeal a ruling dismissing the city’s case against Big Oil.
As the threat of accountability grows, Big Oil is lobbying for an escape plan.
As more cases moved forward toward trial, Big Oil sought ways to block communities from accessing the courts at all. Fossil fuel companies are actively lobbying Congress for immunity in the form of a liability shield that would put Big Oil above the law. In June, more than a dozen Republican attorneys general proposed creating a “liability shield” for fossil fuel companies modeled on a 2005 law protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and the New York Times later confirmed that securing similar legal protections is a priority for the fossil fuel industry this Congress. House Republicans also proposed legislation to prohibit the District of Columbia from using its consumer protection laws “against oil and gas companies over environmental claims” — a tactic recommended in the Republican attorneys general letter.
The National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, members of Congress, and nearly 200 organizations have spoken out against Big Oil’s attempts to bar the courthouse doors from communities demanding climate accountability.
Communities pushed for Big Oil to be held accountable for higher home insurance costs.
The connection between Big Oil’s climate lies and the growing home insurance crisis became clearer than ever this year. This fall, Washington residents filed a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and other major oil and gas companies for running a “coordinated and deliberate scheme to hide the truth about climate change and the effects of burning fossil fuels,” leading to escalating home insurance costs.
The class action lawsuit underscores the growing consensus that Big Oil’s campaign of climate deception makes them uniquely culpable for worsening extreme weather disasters — and should be held liable for the economic damage. As damage from wildfires, floods and hurricanes grows, insurance premiums are skyrocketing across the country, property values are declining, and insurers-of-last-resort are taking billions in losses and struggling to stay solvent.
The good news? Policymakers are advancing solutions to make sure taxpayers aren’t shouldering this burden alone, by making the polluters who fueled this insurance crisis pay their fair share. Bills introduced in California, Hawaiʻi, and New York this year all work to ensure that fossil fuel companies — which made a fortune creating the climate conditions that led to the insurance crisis — pay for the damages of extreme weather disasters, rather than those costs being passed on to everyday Americans through higher insurance premiums.
CCI and others shined a light on Big Oil’s deceptive plastics claims.
Facing increasing pressure to address the plastic waste crisis, plastics producers now claim to have finally found a solution: “advanced recycling.” But a 2025 report from CCI exposed how the industry’s public claims about “advanced recycling” — a marketing term that describes various ways to use chemicals or heat to break down plastics — are simply more deception. “The Fraud of Advanced Recycling” cites doubts from the plastic industry’s own experts, consultants, and trade associations about the validity of so-called new technology.
The new report expands on CCI’s 2024 report “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling,” which exposed how plastics producers have known for decades that traditional, or mechanical, recycling practices are not technically or economically viable at scale. Evidence first published in that report has since been cited in a lawsuit the California Attorney General filed against ExxonMobil for its role in the plastic pollution crisis. This year, Exxon countersued California — a move the California Department of Justice characterized as “another attempt from Exxon Mobil to deflect attention from its own unlawful deception.”
Studies connected Big Oil to climate disasters.
Up to 158 heat waves over the past 25 years would have been virtually impossible without climate change, a new study published in Nature found. Researchers found that oil, gas, and cement producers contributed significantly to the conditions that led to extreme heat waves in the past quarter-century, tracing 57% of total carbon dioxide emissions from 1850 to 2023 to just 180 polluters.
Another study found that extreme heat caused by emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies cost an estimated $28 trillion in GDP damage between 1991 and 2020. The researchers found that every 1% of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 equated to approximately $502 billion in heat damages alone. Additional research found that emissions from 122 of the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement producers have contributed up to 58% to present day surface air temperature rise and up to 37% to the observed global mean sea level rise to date.
Evidence of Big Oil’s lies continued to mount.
CCI released a first-ever analysis of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell’s climate-related advertisements over the past 25 years, underscoring the ongoing ways oil companies are deceiving the public about their role in the fight against climate change. The report, “Big Oil’s Deceptive Climate Ads: How Four Oil Majors Sold False Promises from 2000-2025”, highlights more than 300 unique climate-related ads published that “not only misrepresent the climate impacts of the companies’ products, initiatives, and actions, but also feed a larger false narrative that oil and gas companies are part of the solution to climate change.”
According to newly unearthed documents, an ExxonMobil-funded coalition of think tanks spent years sabotaging support for international climate treaties across the Global South. The documents, first reported on by DeSmog and the Guardian, show that Exxon was “quietly financing climate denial in developing countries.”
As we enter 2026, Big Oil’s desperation to escape the courtroom has never been clearer. Now more than ever, it’s time to hold Big Oil accountable.
