A key line of defense against the “catastrophic outcomes” of lawsuits that successfully force the oil and gas industry to pay for climate damages is the current Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, according to a lawyer who served in the first Trump administration.

“If we had a different Supreme Court, this would be a very different presentation that I’m giving you,” Paul Watkins said during this year’s annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Watkins is the founding partner of Fusion Law, a firm in Arizona that has received millions of dollars from the political network of Leonard Leo, a conservative power broker and co-chairman of the Federalist Society, who is largely credited with orchestrating the Republican takeover of the Supreme Court.

During his late-July presentation to ALEC, a conservative lobbying and advocacy group with a long history of platforming climate denial, Watkins held out hope that the court would deliver a ruling favorable to the oil and gas industry when it considers a major climate lawsuit involving ExxonMobil and the Canada-headquartered company Suncor Energy in October. 

“But it’s a good reminder of how close we are to really catastrophic outcomes,” said Watkins, who has played a lead role in Leo-backed campaigns to prevent companies and large financial institutions from considering climate risks in their investment decisions. Watkins, who also served as the inaugural director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Office of Innovation during the first Trump administration, added that a different Supreme Court might allow such a lawsuit to move forward.  

Sal Nuzzo, who moderated the panel, emphasized “the importance of the Supreme Court.” Nuzzo is executive director of Consumers Defense, the policy arm of Consumers’ Research, a Leo-backed group which has reportedly given $4.5 million to Fusion Law. 

Echoing remarks made by Exxon assistant general counsel Justin Anderson at a Federalist Society panel last year, Nuzzo argued that when it comes to climate accountability lawsuits, “We have to win every time. They have to win once.”

Oil and gas companies have publicly dismissed climate lawsuits as meritless. But the remarks at ALEC suggest that even some of the industry’s more ardent defenders are concerned about the progression of litigation seeking billions of dollars in damages due to the costly climate impacts of burning fossil fuels. 

“I think, clearly, the fossil fuel industry is nervous about these cases,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told DeSmog in an interview.

Trying to ‘Attack Your State’

ALEC held its 2026 meeting at a luxury hotel in Orlando, Florida, last month, giving lobbyists, billionaire-funded advocacy groups, legislators, and government officials an opportunity to mingle and discuss ways to further right-wing initiatives — including by promoting ALEC’s model bills, which often serve as blueprints for legislation that is signed into law.

Among the 1,800+ individuals who ALEC says attended were a number of groups affiliated with Leo, including the Honest Elections Project, which has a history of supporting voting restrictions and is led by a Heritage Foundation alum. It was a major sponsor of ALEC’s meeting, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, as was Consumers’ Research. 

During the ALEC panel “Stopping China and the Left from Using Our Courts to Impose the Green Agenda,” Watkins, Nuzzo, and former Texas State Rep. Jason Isaac — all anti-ESG advocates who have been on ALEC task forces and worked for groups funded by Leo’s network — discussed ways to combat climate litigation.

None of the three panelists responded to requests for comment, nor did ALEC.

“Here, we’re gonna focus on how the left has shifted to blue states and litigation to try to attack your state,” Watkins told the ALEC audience. He characterized the climate accountability lawsuits as attempts by the left to secure funding for “all the New Deal stuff” that they want — mentioning a case in Hawai’i against oil and gas companies (which the U.S. Department of Justice unsuccessfully tried to stop) as an example — and stating that the potential liability and changes to energy policy that could result from them are “pretty much unlimited.”

Fortunately, he said, “an incredibly important case” has progressed to the Supreme Court.

In Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, the City of Boulder and Boulder County are seeking to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for knowingly contributing to climate change; but Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil are asking to overturn a Colorado Supreme Court ruling allowing the case to move forward.

The Supreme Court will consider “whether federal law precludes state-law claims seeking relief for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate” — in other words, whether state and local governments are allowed to hold oil and gas companies responsible for climate impacts. The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on Oct. 5.

“Hopefully, the court will put some limits around these types of cases,” Watkins said.

Consumers’ Research is among 38 organizations that’ve filed amicus curiae briefs in support of Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil — 25 of which have documented financial ties to the defendants, the broader fossil fuel industry, “major climate denial foundations and dark-money networks that have financed opposition to climate science and regulation for decades,” or multiple of those sources, says a new report from the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog. 

“What the defendant-side amicus filers present as an independent network is, in reality, one giant feedback loop between fossil fuel companies, billionaires, and front groups,” the report states.

The Supreme Court has previously declined to hear similar cases. It did review one lawsuit brought by the City of Baltimore, Maryland, explained Columbia University’s Gerrard, but ruled on “a very narrow procedural issue.”

As fossil fuel companies face a wave of climate lawsuits from states and municipalities that seek to hold them accountable for their role in climate change, with the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity reporting that more than a quarter of Americans live in communities that are taking oil and gas companies to court, there’s growing urgency to protect the industry — and a hope that right-wing judges will step in.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who has gained as much as $2.9 million from fossil fuel holdings, according to an analysis from Court Accountability, has rejected requests to recuse himself from the case. The Supreme Court’s public information office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During a speech on the Senate floor in April, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse argued that, with climate legislation and regulation already compromised, Leo and his groups are now going after climate litigation “to make it a clean trifecta, so that one industry is free to pollute as much as it wants with no legislation, no regulation, and no litigation that can stop it.”

Red Scare Tactics

The panel’s talking points were similar to those in the 2025 U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing, “Enter the Dragon — China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance,” chaired by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has ties to both ALEC and Leo. The latter’s Concord Fund has given $2.5 million to Cruz’s Truth and Courage PAC, according to Rolling Stone.

At that subcommittee hearing, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who received Consumers’ Research’s “Consumers’ Champion Award” last year, criticized state environmental laws for attempting “to regulate the whole country” and said that Congress should “reluctantly” preempt them. Kobach later called for an investigation into China’s alleged role in the “ongoing campaign of environmental lawfare.”

Another group in Leo’s network, Americans for Public Trust, has also promoted the narrative that U.S. climate initiatives and lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry are being funded by the Chinese government, particularly through grants from the nonprofit Energy Foundation China, though sources like NPR have noted a lack of evidence that those claims are true. 

‘Strategic Ways’ to Create Conflict

As the oil and gas industry waits for the Supreme Court decision, ALEC, Leo, and other anti-ESG operatives continue to promote anti-climate strategies and legislation, with Nuzzo remarking that state legislators “are on the front lines” in moving that policy forward.

“We’ve had tremendous successes over the last several years,” he said of Consumers Defense. “Many of you in the room may have even been a part of sponsoring some of the bills we’ve had. About 25 to 27 states have passed or introduced legislation to combat ESG in some form or fashion.”

Watkins referenced Consumer Defense’s new model legislation, the “Energy Freedom Act,” and noted its similarity to ALEC’s model bill, the “Energy Producers and Consumer Protection Act.” Both seek to protect energy companies from climate change litigation at the local and state level.

“Essentially, the idea is to create a number of rights in your state that are directly opposed to the attacks on those rights in the blue states,” he said, which may enable the Supreme Court “to protect federalism and protect your ability to govern your citizens.”

Iyla Shornstein, the Center for Climate Integrity’s political director, said in a statement last week that the bills “are part of a corrupt and coordinated effort to put Big Oil companies above the law.”

“A more accurate title for [ALEC’s] bill would be the ‘Protect Big Oil By Sticking Taxpayers With All Climate Costs’ Act,” she said.

Meanwhile, in April, Cruz and Wyoming U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman introduced Senate and House bills that would give fossil fuel companies broad immunity to climate accountability lawsuits. Gerrard said his guess is that the federal legislation will wait until the Supreme Court rules on Suncor v. Boulder, “because if Suncor wins, it won’t be needed.”

At the ALEC panel, Watson agreed with an audience member’s suggestion that “international oppression” — other countries’ successful climate lawsuits — is encouraging litigation from U.S. states, and said it’s an area in which the Trump administration “has to use the remaining time that they have to push back as hard as possible, because it is much harder to push back on growth from the state level.”

“If you see activity, foreign activity, that’s harming your state, I think that’s absolutely essential to get in front of the administration as quickly as possible,” he said.

Isaac, the panel’s third participant, said to “keep in mind, California is one of those foreign influences.”

The former member of the Texas House of Representatives, who calls himself the “Carbon King,” is the founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute (AEI) — formerly the Texas Natural Gas Foundation — which “represents energy producers across the United States” and is funded by Leo groups, according to 990 tax filings.

The board of AEI’s attached trade organization, the American Energy Association, includes Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s oil company, Liberty Energy. Isaac has also spent years arguing against ESG, once referring to banks with ESG policies as “the enemy” during an interview with Minnesota Public Radio.During the ALEC panel, Isaac urged attendees to speak with him or Watkins following the event “about some strategic ways we can do policy to really create a conflict” with national legal implications.  The goal, he said, would be to create a lawsuit that “goes up to the Supreme Court and gets overturned.”