Doubt Is Their Product: California Sues Big Oil for Decades of Climate Deception
The case of California v. Big Oil is not about whether the planet is warming. It is about whether the law can hold to account an industry that, for half a century, told the public to doubt it.
Robert Nogacki | Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec
In September of 2023 the State of California sued five of the world’s largest oil companies (Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP), together with their trade group, the American Petroleum Institute. The suit, People of the State of California v. Big Oil, was filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court by Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta. Its claim is not that the companies emitted carbon dioxide, which is lawful, but that they knew for decades that their products were warming the planet, concealed what they knew, and spent years persuading the public to doubt it. California asks the court to make them fund the repair of the resulting harm, pay damages and civil penalties, and stop their misleading environmental advertising.
As of the middle of 2026 the case is frozen. In April of 2026 the trial judge stayed the entire proceeding until the United States Supreme Court decides a related Colorado case, Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, with argument expected in the fall of 2026 and a ruling around the middle of 2027; that decision will determine whether claims like California’s may be heard in a state court at all. What follows is the longer story: how the case came to exist, what it really alleges, and what stands in its way.
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In November of 1959, the American oil industry gathered to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its birth. The occasion was a symposium grandly titled Energy and Man, convened by the American Petroleum Institute at Columbia University, and the guest of honor was Edward Teller: physicist, father of the hydrogen bomb, a man whom no one could accuse of environmental sentimentality. Teller had come to speak about the future of energy. He also said something his audience would have preferred not to hear. The burning of fossil fuels, he told them, releases carbon dioxide; carbon dioxide produces a greenhouse effect; and an increase of merely ten per cent in its atmospheric concentration would be enough to melt the ice caps and put New York under water. The transcript of those remarks was recovered years later, in an archive in Delaware, by the historian of science Benjamin Franta.
This is the proper place to begin any account of People of the State of California v. Big Oil. Not because Teller was a prophet. On the contrary: because he was not. He was a competent physicist reporting the state of knowledge of his day, no more. The warning was issued not from a barricade but inside the temple, at the industry’s own birthday party, by an expert it had invited. The knowledge now being litigated for billions of dollars was, in 1959, plain enough to serve as after-dinner conversation.
The physics behind the warning was, even then, well advanced in age. Joseph Fourier had described the mechanism by which the atmosphere traps heat in the eighteen-twenties. John Tyndall had measured in a laboratory the capacity of carbon dioxide and water vapor to absorb thermal radiation in 1859, precisely a century before Teller spoke, a coincidence that history arranged with almost literary symmetry. Svante Arrhenius, in 1896, had calculated how far the temperature would climb were the concentration of carbon dioxide to double, and his estimate still falls within the range accepted by modern climate science. The greenhouse effect is neither a hypothesis nor an ideology. It is a nineteenth-century physics textbook. A thermometer, unlike a human being, has no stake in the question and does not argue.
The industry knew, and not from the newspapers. California’s complaint documents that scientists in the companies’ employ understood the danger by the nineteen-sixties at the latest. Toward the end of the nineteen-seventies the American Petroleum Institute convened an internal task force on carbon dioxide and climate. In 1980 a scientist from Stanford, invited to brief it, warned that if fossil-fuel consumption held steady, global warming would be “barely noticeable” around 2005, only to bring “globally catastrophic” effects by the twenty-sixties. That same year, the Institute was urging governments to triple the world’s output of coal.
It is here that the story forks. The first path, the obvious one, led to warning consumers and joining the transition that Teller had called inevitable. The second led somewhere far more ingenious. Rather than deny the knowledge it possessed, the industry resolved to manufacture doubt about that knowledge in everyone else.
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Here begins the part of the complaint to which it devotes the most space, and which ought to interest a lawyer most of all. The manufacture of doubt is a subtler art than the lie.
The template was not new. The tobacco industry supplied it. In an internal memo at one of the cigarette companies there appears a sentence that became the unwitting motto of an entire trade: “Doubt is our product.” The logic runs as follows. To protect sales, you need not persuade the public that the science is wrong, a hopeless task. You need only persuade it that the science is uncertain. And since science is indeed never certain to the last decimal (some margin of doubt as to pace, scale, and timing always remaining), it is enough to inflate that natural margin into the proportions of a fundamental dispute.
The techniques were countable. First, a handful of credentialed contrarians were funded and their voices amplified far beyond their actual weight in the field. The historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway described this group in a book whose title, Merchants of Doubt, has attached itself to the phenomenon for good; California’s complaint cites it by name. The very experts who had earlier disputed the harms of cigarettes resurfaced now on the subject of climate.
Second, the journalistic reflex toward balance was put to work. Seat one scientist “for” across from one scientist “against,” and the viewer comes away with the impression of a fifty-fifty dispute, when the proportion in the peer-reviewed literature ran on the order of ninety-seven to three. False symmetry is among the cheapest and most effective instruments of disinformation, for it turns a virtue, impartiality, against the truth.
Third, front groups were built. The complaint describes the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, an organization created originally by the tobacco industry to impersonate a grassroots citizens’ movement and cast doubt on the link between secondhand smoke and cancer, then lent out to the cause of climate. It describes the Global Climate Coalition. It describes the team on climate-science communications that the American Petroleum Institute assembled in 1998, on which not a single climatologist sat, though an Exxon lobbyist and a Chevron representative did. The aim of that multimillion-dollar campaign was disarmingly candid: to bring the average citizen to believe that the scientific basis of climate change was in doubt. Victory would arrive at the moment doubt became a part of common sense.
Fourth, and most durably, the frame of the argument was moved. When outright denial became impossible to sustain, the industry executed a pivot. One Shell employee put it without ornament: the company “did not want to fall into the same trap as the tobacco companies, who became entangled in their own lies.” Henceforth it was publicly conceded that the climate is changing, while it was maintained, in the same breath, that the cost of action was too high against the unresolved uncertainties. As an Institute director announced in 1998, “the debate is not about action versus inaction,” but about which set of measures accords with our knowledge and our prosperity. The sentence sounds reasonable. That is exactly the source of its power. It shifted the discussion off the question “is this happening,” already lost, and onto the question “is it worth responding now,” which can be argued without end.
Fifth and last came greenwashing: the repainting of a fossil-fuel company as an enterprise of “green energy,” the advertising of the one per cent of investment directed to renewables and the silent passing over of the ninety-nine per cent that remains fossil. It is this final stage that keeps the case alive in the present tense, for it concerns advertisements a consumer in California sees today, not archival material from the nineteen-seventies.
It is worth pausing on why this works, for the mechanism is psychological before it is political. A lie can be refuted; a doubt offers nothing to refute, and so it never quite loses. The mind, presented with a dozen competing hypotheses, does not patiently weigh them and choose: adjudicating a technical dispute is laborious, and the layman has neither the time nor the instruments for it, so, faced with too many uncertainties at once, he sets the whole question down and turns away. The campaign never needed to be believed; it needed only to make belief tiring. A public told that the experts have not yet agreed then does the one thing that asks nothing of it, which is to defer, and deferral wears the mask of prudence while doing the work of consent. To be unsure, in the end, is not to have withheld a decision. It is to have made one, in silence, in favor of whatever is already under way.
From the whole there emerges an observation at once decisive and unsettling. To manufacture doubt is cheaper, and more effective, than to manufacture conviction. You need persuade no one that warming is a fiction. You need only render him uncertain enough to put the decision off. Delay is the product. And the product was delivered wholesale: a postponement of response measured in decades.
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Here we reach the heart of the matter, which is easily missed if one accepts the frame imposed by the case’s own name. “Climate lawsuits” suggests that California is trying to punish the companies for emitting carbon dioxide. Were that so, the defense would hold an easy hand: one cannot sue a company for selling a lawful product that the entire world used, the plaintiff included.
But the complaint, read with care, is not a case about emissions. It is a case about deception. The seven claims the state asserts resolve into a single logic: public nuisance, the destruction of natural resources, false advertising, deceptive environmental marketing, unfair business practices, and products liability for failure to warn, in both its strict-liability and its negligence varieties. The connective tissue of all these counts is not carbon. It is knowledge, concealment, and the absence of a warning. The substance of the charge is not “you emitted carbon dioxide” but “you knew, you concealed it, you lied, and you sold without warning.”
That shift of frame is the whole stake, legal and rhetorical alike. The wrong here is not the burning of fuel. The wrong is the doubt factory. California does not ask the court to set global energy policy; it asks that the companies finance the repair of the harm (an abatement fund), pay damages and penalties, and cease their further misleading communications. The state seeks, as well, a penalty of twenty-five hundred dollars for each violation of its advertising laws. At the scale of a campaign measured in hundreds of separate messages, the arithmetic turns serious.
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Intellectual honesty requires that one begin with the other side’s arguments, for they are stronger than an enthusiast of the suit would care to admit.
The most formidable is federal law. The defense contends that greenhouse-gas emissions are an interstate and international phenomenon, governed by federal law (the Clean Air Act in particular), and that a single state may not, by way of tort, set what amounts to climate policy for an entire country and the world. This is no straw man. The Supreme Court of Maryland accepted it in March of 2026, dismissing the suits of Baltimore and Annapolis as claims that “cannot be seriously contemplated.” In dissent, however, Justice Killough called the majority’s emissions-framing a “classic strawman”, since the companies were sued for what they concealed, not for what they emitted, the very distinction on which this case turns. Several other courts have dismissed or narrowed analogous claims, on differing procedural and doctrinal grounds. A split has opened: the high courts of Hawaii and Colorado have let analogous cases proceed; Maryland’s has shut them down. Splits of precisely this kind are what move the federal Supreme Court to step in.
The federal ground shifted again in February of 2026, when the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health; that withdrawal may, paradoxically, weaken the strand of the preemption defense that rests on the Clean Air Act occupying the field, for there is now less federal regulation left to displace, even as the deeper structural objection stands untouched.
The second card is causation. How is one to attribute particular California wildfires and droughts to particular defendants, among the billions of emitters across a century? This is the problem of the commons in its purest form, and the science of attribution, though maturing quickly, will remain a field of ferocious evidentiary combat. It bears adding that no court anywhere in the world has yet held a fossil-fuel company financially liable for the harms of greenhouse-gas emissions; the theory, for all its documentary force, remains untested at judgment.
The third is the First Amendment. Some of the claims touch upon speech, and participation in public debate, along with the right to petition, is constitutionally protected. The line between lobbying and persuasion on the one hand, and punishable commercial fraud on the other, is thin and contested; the defense has tried to exploit it once already, in a California anti-SLAPP motion, without success, the court holding that the exemption for commercial speech applied.
Candor requires a further concession, and it cuts against the prosecutorial grain of this account. Not every uncertainty was manufactured. The core physics has been settled since the nineteenth century, and the human signature in recent warming is now about as firmly established as anything in the field; but the precise sensitivity of the climate to a given quantity of carbon, the timing and regional distribution of its harms, the probability of this or that tipping point, and, above all, the comparative cost and wisdom of abating emissions now rather than adapting to them later while accelerating the technologies (nuclear among them) that might do the work more cheaply, have all carried genuine and legitimate ranges of disagreement. To treat every such argument as disinformation is to flatten a real and difficult trade-off space: the developing world’s hunger for energy, the plain historical fact that cheap fossil fuel powered the modern economy and lifted a great many people out of poverty, the awkward truth that the consumers and governments now seeking damages are also the parties who bought and burned the product. The doubt factory was real. It does not follow that all doubt was its output.
There is, too, a structural objection that a thoughtful judge will feel even while deploring the conduct. A damages suit of this kind asks a state court to do, through the law of tort, what the Constitution arguably assigns to Congress, to the federal agencies, and to the treaty power: to apportion responsibility for a global atmospheric commons and, in effect, to set energy policy for the country and the world. A ruling that declines the invitation would not necessarily be the work of a captured bench; it might be the work of a court that knows the difference between a wrong and a forum. And even a sweeping plaintiff’s victory would leave the deeper problem roughly where it found it. Litigation is a blunt instrument for a diffuse harm: it can punish a documented deception, which is right and overdue, but it cannot price carbon, license a reactor, fund the research, or convene the diplomacy that the physics actually requires. The lawsuit is a reckoning with the past. It is not, and was never going to be, a climate policy.
Three levels of certainty, then, should be kept apart. It is certain that the physics is sound and that the companies knew early; this is documented. It is probable that the disinformation delayed the political response; the thesis is coherent, but proving it at trial will be hard. It remains uncertain whether the law, especially after a ruling by the present Supreme Court, will permit damages at all. The Court that agreed to hear the Boulder case did not do so in order to affirm it.
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And so the California case today is frozen. In April of 2026, Judge Ethan Schulman of the San Francisco County Superior Court stayed the entire proceeding, finding that to do so “would be in the interests of justice,” until the federal Supreme Court resolves Suncor Energy v. Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County. It is the Boulder dispute that has become the litmus test for more than thirty analogous proceedings across the country.
The Supreme Court took the case in February of 2026 and framed two questions: whether federal law forecloses state-law claims concerning the effects of international emissions, and the narrower question of whether the Court may review an interlocutory state-court judgment at all. Argument is expected in the fall of 2026, in the term that opens in October, with a decision most likely before that term concludes, around the middle of 2027.
The setting of that argument is telling. Against Boulder, friend-of-the-court briefs have been filed by more than two dozen state attorneys general, by dozens of members of Congress, and by the federal administration, which has, in addition, issued an executive order aimed at blocking the initiation of new suits of this kind. The American Petroleum Institute has made the burial of climate lawsuits a priority for 2026 and is pressing Congress for a statute granting fossil-fuel companies immunity, the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act, modeled on the protection enjoyed by the makers of firearms. In parallel, the Supreme Court has unanimously sided with the oil companies in a Louisiana coastal-destruction case, on a separate, removal-based theory rather than on preemption, confirming the industry’s broader preference for the friendlier federal forum. The fight thus proceeds on three fronts at once: in the courts, in Congress, and in the offices of the executive. (For accuracy rather than insinuation: Justice Samuel Alito holds stock in several oil-and-gas companies but not in the named Boulder parties, Exxon and Suncor, so the Court’s counsel found his recusal there not required; his absence from the Louisiana ruling above, where he does hold stock in a defendant’s parent, is why that decision was unanimous.)
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It would be a mistake to file all this away as a piece of peculiarly American procedural exotica. The mechanism of manufacturing doubt is universal, and its latest incarnation, greenwashing, is already a subject of regulation on the other side of the Atlantic, for now by way of legislation rather than litigation. The European Union’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, which member states must transpose during 2026, will from this autumn forbid unsubstantiated environmental claims of exactly the sort at issue in California’s count for deceptive marketing, while the more ambitious Green Claims Directive, which would have required prior verification of such claims, has stalled, its withdrawal floated by the Commission in 2025. The courts, meanwhile, are not idle. The European Court of Human Rights, ruling in 2024 in a case brought by a group of older Swiss women, held that a state’s inadequate climate policy could violate the right to private and family life; the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion in 2025, affirmed that states bear obligations under international law to protect the climate system. The question to be settled in San Francisco, whether the law can bear the weight of climate harm, will sooner or later be put to the courts of Europe as well.
Return, then, to that hall at Columbia in 1959. What will stand before the court in San Francisco is not the question of whether the planet is warming; the underlying science was settled before Teller finished speaking, and the ice has done nothing since but confirm it. The stake is something else: whether the law possesses a remedy for the manufacture of uncertainty itself. Whether the decades in which a known truth was patiently converted into an “open question,” the resulting hesitation having become, in its turn, a cause of harm, have anyone at all to answer for them.
Doubt can be a virtue, and it can be a weapon. In science it is the engine of progress; in the hands of a public-relations department it can be an instrument of delay. The court in San Francisco has been asked to tell the two apart, and to do the narrower thing the law can honestly do: not to set the planet’s energy policy, which belongs to others, but to put a price on a documented deception. The thermometer, as we have said, does not argue. The question that remains is whether the law will, and on which side it will come down.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
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He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
