America’s oil and gas companies came under litigation assault from a new player last week as outgoing Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel finally got around to filing a climate-related lawsuit she’d promised to pursue two years ago. The suit’s premise is painfully familiar: It centers on a claim that companies like BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, along with the American Petroleum Institute engaged in “an unlawful conspiracy in restraint of trade to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy.”
In reality, the litigation seeks to enable Michigan’s state government to regulate air emissions via the backdoor of trying to penalize the industry on claims under state anti-trust laws. So, Nessel’s lawsuit is based on the same flawed premise deployed in the long-running climate lawfare campaign I’ve written about frequently in recent months. It is also likely to meet the same fate met by at least 10 other state and local claims: Being tossed out of court.
Writing at EnergyInDepth, analyst Mandi Risko notes that Michigan’s case “is being advanced by the same private law firms—Sher Edling, Hausfeld, and DiCello Levitt—that have been driving climate litigation against energy companies since at least 2017.” She also points out the fact that, “As those claims have repeatedly run into legal roadblocks, the framing has shifted. The campaign has not.”
Nessel’s anti-trust angle is neither new nor novel. As the Detroit Free Press reported, similar claims were made by several municipalities in Puerto Rico in cases that were tossed out last September and October.
Nessel’s suit contends that, were it not for the supposed conspiracy (remember when Democrats used to pretend to hate conspiracy theories?) Michigan would be further along in its transition to weather-dependent alternative energy sources like wind and solar than it currently is. But that claim also seems specious on its face given the growing consensus admitted openly at last November’s COP30 meeting and last week’s WEF conference that there is no real energy transition happening globally. If its’ own transition is stalled, that just places Michigan right in line with the global trend.
The transition’s failure has nothing to do with some grand conspiracy by all-powerful “big oil” boogeymen. It has to do with the reality that the unpredictable, unreliable alternatives being offered as replacements for energy dense fossil fuels simply are not viable or scalable to societal levels. It has to do with physics, not with a bunch of proverbial big cigars hatching plots in smoke-filled rooms.
A great illustration of this reality comes with Nessel’s contention that the companies have acted “as a cartel” to “restrain the emergence of electric vehicles (EV) and renewable primary energy technologies in the United States.” This is just silly: The pace of adoption of renewables and EVs is determined by market demand and economics, not by conspiracies. The clearest illustration of that reality came with the collapse of EV sales during the fourth quarter of 2025, following the Sept. 30 cancellation of the huge $7,500 per unit federal subsidy for them. No subsidies, no buyers. This isn’t complicated. The oil companies didn’t cause that: Business plans that are unsustainable without massive federal subsidies did.
The Detroit Free Press also noted that Nessel’s cynical litigation was met with scorn by the state’s business community, “including the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which accused Nessel at the time of ‘jumping on the partisan bandwagon’ on a contentious issue in a way that would likely fail in court and be a waste of taxpayer money.”
And fail it probably will. In addition to the near certainty that this latest suit will run up against the federal government’s longstanding primacy on the regulation of air emissions, it is likely to run into the same questions over causation, jurisdiction, and constitutional limits on state powers cited by judges who have tossed out similar cases in states around the country.
That likelihood could help explain why Nessel waited until so late in her term in office to get the case filed: Given how slowly the nation’s court system advances such cases, her successor in office will most likely end up being blamed for the final outcome. “Cynical” may be too kind a word to describe it.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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