A new theory of Big Oil's climate liability: anticompetitive collusion

Michigan's new antitrust lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry is super smart.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about, you know, the fascist takeover of our country. But I am, in my day job, a climate accountability lawyer. And so I wanted to share a piece I wrote recently for The New Republic about an exciting new climate lawsuit—because it’s important, in all the darkness, to know there are real solutions out there to the challenges we face.

We’ve known for a while now that Big Oil is freaking out about climate change lawsuits. For months, their lobbyists have been urging Congress to pass a liability waiver so they can’t be sued for climate damages. Recently, the American Petroleum Institute, or API, the industry’s largest and most powerful fossil fuel trade association, declared that ending “abusive state climate lawsuits” is one of its top priorities for 2026.

But if Big Oil was nervous before, they should be feeling absolutely terrified now, following the filing of a new lawsuit last week by Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel that levels a novel allegation against the fossil fuel industry: anticompetitive conduct, in violation of state and federal antitrust laws.

Most of the climate accountability cases to date have been filed under state consumer protection laws; antitrust is not yet a central part of how people understand our climate crisis. But over the last four years, there has been a revolution in the antitrust field. We’ve seen antitrust laws, long semidormant, applied in areas ranging from pharmaceuticals to fast-food wages to housing costs to health insurance—issues that hadn’t been the focus of antitrust challenges before. Michigan’s complaint demonstrates that Big Oil’s climate conspiracy fits this framework, too.

A key purpose of federal and state antitrust laws is to stop businesses from combining “in restraint of trade” to unfairly shut out competitors and deprive society of the benefits of competition. Antitrust laws were designed to protect open, thriving markets. They prevent existing companies from colluding against new entrants in the market, a practice that serves to slow down innovation and freeze technologies in place.

Michigan’s lawsuit argues that Big Oil engaged in exactly this kind of shut-out-the-upstarts collusion against renewable energies—a decades-long conspiracy to, according to the initial filing, “forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy and maintain their dominance in the energy market.”

The complaint details how Big Oil achieved this through a range of alleged anticompetitive strategies. First, the fossil fuel industry engineered an across-the-board abandonment of renewable energy that only makes sense in the context of anticompetitive collusion. Already in 1980, Exxon scientists had “internally modeled” that avoiding catastrophic climate change would require a transition away from fossil fuels. Under a “competitive scenario,” they predicted, clean energy would achieve a 50 percent share of the global energy market within 50 years. “A self-interested and law-abiding rational firm,” Michigan’s complaint argues, “would have used this insight to innovate and compete in the energy market.” Instead, Exxon shared this proprietary information with its ostensible competitors, both directly and through API, choosing to abandon a massive business opportunity in exchange for a strategy of collusively restraining innovation to delay the inevitable energy transition. It’s like if in the 1990s Apple had internally modeled that MP3 players were the next big thing, but instead of developing the iPod, Steve Jobs had taken the information to Sony and other competitors and worked together to collectively keep the market locked into CD players.

Michigan’s complaint then argues that Big Oil misused intellectual property rights to suppress the development and spread of clean energy technologies. Exxon, which invented the lithium battery and obtained other electric battery patents, and even developed the first hybrid electric vehicle, sat on these technologies rather than pursuing them. Chevron blocked the use of nickel-metal hydride, or NiMH, rechargeable batteries, another critical EV technology, with capture-and-kill tactics to acquire NiMH patents in order to restrict their use in cars. Stanford Ovshinsky, the inventor of NiMH batteries, explained that this technology was never commercialized because he “made the mistake of having a joint venture with an oil company” and “it’s not a good idea to go into business with somebody whose strategies would put you out of business, rather than building the business.”

The industry pursued similar strategies to restrain the growth of solar energy. Oil companies could have led the solar revolution—indeed, by the early 1980s, they controlled approximately 70 percent of U.S. solar sales, which accounted for 85 percent of global supply. Instead, companies like BP focused on acquiring solar technology patents and then engaging in extensive patent infringement lawsuits to slow the progress and commercialization of the technology, before ultimately closing plants, selling off assets, and exiting the solar business altogether.

In addition to these capture-and-kill tactics, the fossil fuel industry orchestrated decades-long campaigns of deception to suppress demand for renewable energy alternatives. I’ve written previously about this climate-denial conspiracy. But it’s worth stressing that these companies were quite explicit that the goal of their deception was to restrain clean energy competition. For example, a 1988 memo by a senior public affairs manager at Exxon explained that “the petroleum industry position” was to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” regarding climate change in order to “resist” public understanding of the danger, as this “could lead to noneconomic development of nonfossil fuel resources.” In other words, their plan—written down in black and white—was to lie about climate change in order to block the clean energy transition they knew was necessary to avoid global catastrophe.

This strategy was remarkably effective. While the most recent analysis of peer-reviewed scientific literature found that there is greater than 99 percent agreement on the existence and causes of man-made climate change, only one in five Americans understands such a consensus exists. And Big Oil companies continue to misleadingly portray their fossil fuel products as climate solutions, as in their campaigns to falsely advertise natural gas, a fossil fuel product whose destructive climate impact rivals and in some circumstances exceeds that of coal, as a clean energy source.

Michigan’s lawsuit also describes Big Oil’s efforts to “infiltrate” critical information-producing institutions—universities, scientific journals, and international climate committees—to reinforce the anticompetitive effects of their misleading claims. For example, between 2001 and 2012, Exxon, API, and other fossil fuel companies paid over $1.2 million to Willie Soon—a climate denialist then based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—to fund research that undermined the scientific consensus on climate change. “As a contractual condition of this funding,” the lawsuit states, Soon’s Big Oil patrons “retained the right to review Soon’s work” and “demanded that its sponsorship remain secret.” Soon then “failed to disclose his conflict of interest in at least eleven papers”—items one funding contract referred to as “deliverables.” Exxon’s chief climate scientist also founded MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and directed researchers in the program to emphasize climate uncertainty. Similar programs were set up at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the University of California Berkeley, Stanford, and many other universities, including some where these companies maintain contractual control and approval rights over research projects.

These industry-funded programs generated “research” favorable to the fossil fuel industry, allowing Big Oil to disseminate junk science under the guise of independent commentary. It’s the same strategy used by Big Tobacco—and, in fact, Big Oil employed many of the same operatives. The industry also extended these tactics to international bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “submitting false evidence ... and fabricated economic models, to taint and mislead U.N. technical bodies’ fact-finding processes.”

Michigan argues that these various anticompetitive strategies—and others; it’s a long complaint—allowed Big Oil to freeze the clean energy transition for decades, and that but for this conspiracy, solar, wind, and EV technologies would have reached scale years earlier. To test this claim, we can look at the explosive growth of renewable energy in recent years in China, the one superpower in the world where Western Big Oil companies don’t have influence. In 2024, the total installed electricity capacity of the planet—fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables, all of it—was about 10 terawatts. Today, the Chinese solar supply chain can produce 1 terawatt of solar panels every year. Because of these economies of scale, renewables are now, at the global level, cheaper than fossil fuels, despite the trillions of dollars in economic and political subsidies that continue to advantage oil and gas. The U.S. was primed with every advantage to reach this tipping point decades earlier. But we were robbed of this time by Big Oil’s anticompetitive collusion.

Incumbent supermarkets in a small town aren’t allowed to coordinate with each other to stop a startup new supermarket from gaining traction, or from developing a new method of delivering groceries. There is no Big Oil exception to this principle. Michigan’s lawsuit makes a compelling case that if Big Oil had not colluded to suppress competition, renewables would have begun scaling far earlier than they ultimately did, and we’d likely be on track to avoid the kinds of devastating climate disasters we face today: hurricanes, floods, heat waves, firestorms, droughts, famines, die-offs, mass extinctions, and worse.

These companies blocked the future through their collusion, using strategies at odds with open markets—strategies they are still advancing to this day. Their conspiracy likely constitutes the most devastating antitrust offense in history, and Michigan’s lawsuit should serve as a model for plaintiffs across the country seeking to hold these corporations responsible for the disastrous consequences of their actions.