While the US government continues to call climate change a hoax and attack the science, in courtrooms from The Hague to Honolulu, fossil fuel companies are taking a different approach. Shell, Chevron, RWE and TotalEnergies all accept that climate change is real, human-caused and serious. The era of corporate climate denial, at least in legal proceedings, is largely over.
What has replaced it is a more nuanced position: accepting the science of climate change while contesting their responsibility for it.
New research published in the journal Transnational Environmental Law offers the first systematic analysis of how major fossil fuel companies defend themselves when taken to court over their role in causing global warming. Drawing on case documents from landmark lawsuits, the research identifies three distinct strategies companies are using.
The first and broadest argument is that climate change is a collective problem caused by society’s demand for energy, not by the companies that supply it. Chevron and Shell, in separate cases on different continents, cited the same passage from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report – that greenhouse gas emissions are driven by “population size, economic activity, lifestyle, energy use” – to argue that responsibility lies with modern industrial society as a whole.
The German energy giant RWE made a similar defence in a lawsuit brought by a Peruvian farmer and mountain guide who argued that the company’s emissions had contributed to glacial retreat threatening his home. RWE’s lawyer told the court that the company’s emissions had been produced “for the common good to ensure a stable energy supply”.
RWE’s lawyers argued that CO2 molecules were ‘indistinguishable from each other,’ making it legally impossible to trace a specific emission to a specific harm. Photograph: Angela Ponce/Reuters
Shell, sued by Dutch environmental groups demanding a 45% emissions cut by 2030, argued in its appeal that the energy transition was the responsibility of governments, not individual companies.
This framing recasts fossil fuel production as a passive response to demand, rather than a driver of harm, and positions political processes – not courts – as the appropriate venue for addressing climate change.
The second strategy is more technical. Companies do not dispute that the climate is warming or that human activity is the cause. However, they contest whether a clear legal causation between their emissions and the science exists.
In the RWE case, lawyers challenged a peer-reviewed Nature Geoscience study attributing flood risk at a Peruvian glacial lake to human-caused warming – not by denying climate change but by arguing that the glacier model contained underlying uncertainties, and that CO2 molecules were “indistinguishable from each other”, making it legally impossible to trace a specific emission to a specific harm.
In Italy, where Greenpeace and a group of citizens sued the energy company Eni over its emissions, its defence characterised attribution – the field of science that shows how climate change has influenced extreme weather – as a nascent, non-standardised field. Across jurisdictions, the pattern is consistent: companies argue that climate science is valid for understanding global warming but disputed as a basis for establishing who bears specific legal responsibility.
A third strategy involves questioning the credibility of those producing the science. In the RWE case, the company’s lawyers submitted printouts of tweets by the leading climate scientist Friederike Otto – noting she had described climate lawsuits as “interesting” – to argue she was too partial to serve as a court-appointed expert. When the claimant submitted an independent attribution study by Oxford and Washington researchers, the lawyers attacked the lead author’s social media posts and professional associations, arguing that links between scientists constituted evidence of a coordinated network.
In the US, defendants in a lawsuit brought by Oregon’s Multnomah County against ExxonMobil and other oil companies have sought to strike peer-reviewed evidence by alleging undisclosed connections between a claimant’s lawyer and the studies’ authors.
In courtrooms across the world, the same pattern holds: fossil fuel companies now accept the science but refuse responsibility. The central battleground in climate litigation will no longer be whether climate change is happening, but who, legally and financially, bears responsibility for it.
Noah Walker-Crawford is a research fellow at Imperial College London and the London School of Economics and the author of Save the Climate but Don’t Blame Us: Corporate Arguments in Climate Litigation, published in Transnational Environmental Law
