Biden Judge Dismisses Democrat AG’s Climate Claim As ‘Speculative’
A Biden-appointed federal judge tossed Michigan’s lawsuit against major oil companies Tuesday, finding its attempt to link a decades-old alleged conspiracy to current energy costs too "speculative."
Paris Apodaca · Sep 23, 2026 · 4 min read
A Biden-appointed federal judge tossed Michigan’s lawsuit against major oil companies Tuesday, finding its attempt to link a decades-old alleged conspiracy to current energy costs too “speculative.”
U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering dismissed Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s federal antitrust claim against BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute (API), ruling that the state lacked antitrust standing. Then-President Joe Biden nominated Beckering to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan in 2021.
“This decision adds to the growing list of federal and state courts that have dismissed climate lawsuits. These climate suits are baseless no matter plaintiffs’ attempts to concoct new litigation theories, like these meritless antitrust claims,” Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr. of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher LLP, counsel for Chevron Corporation told Daily Caller News Foundation.
Nessel filed the lawsuit in January, alleging the companies acted as a cartel to suppress competition from renewable energy and preserve their dominance in Michigan’s transportation and primary energy markets.
Beckering’s opinion cited a previous federal appellate decision warning that it would be “entirely speculative and beyond the competence of a judicial proceeding to create in hindsight a technological universe that never came into existence.”
“The Court concludes that these damages calculations are sufficiently speculative to suggest that Defendants’ alleged conspiracy did not proximately cause Plaintiff’s overcharges,” she wrote.
Beckering found most of those alleged harms were outside the scope of federal antitrust law.
“These harms are, at most, ‘collateral damage’ with respect to the markets in which Michigan alleges Defendants conspired: the transportation and primary energy markets,” Beckering wrote. “Therefore, Michigan cannot invoke the antitrust laws to remedy these harms.”
That left Michigan with one plausible antitrust injury: allegedly paying too much to power the state.
Michigan has plausibly pled just one antitrust injury: overcharges for energy,” Beckering wrote.