The Lawsuit, Then and Now
When this piece was first published in November 2017, San Francisco and Oakland had just filed civil lawsuits against the five largest investor-owned oil producers — ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips — alleging that the companies had knowingly created a public nuisance by selling fossil fuel products while suppressing internal research on the climate consequences of those products. The cities sought billions of dollars to pay for seawalls and other coastal protections against sea-level rise.
Nine years later, the California litigation has expanded from two cities into a coordinated multi-jurisdictional case that includes the state of California itself, eight California localities, and parallel actions across roughly thirty U.S. cities, counties, and states. The defendants have expanded to include Phillips 66, CITGO, and the American Petroleum Institute. The legal theories have sharpened. The financial exposure has grown. And the litigation has become the most-studied reputational risk case in U.S. corporate communications.
The 2017 Filings: San Francisco, Oakland, and the Initial Wave
San Francisco and Oakland filed the initial lawsuits in September 2017. They were joined within months by the California counties of San Mateo, Marin, and Santa Cruz; the cities of Santa Cruz, Richmond, and Imperial Beach; and the San Mateo County Flood and Sea Level Rise Resiliency District. The legal theory was the public-nuisance framework that had succeeded against tobacco in the late 1990s — that the defendants had knowingly engaged in conduct that produced a foreseeable harm to plaintiffs and should bear the cost of mitigation.
The cases were initially filed in California state court. The fossil fuel defendants quickly removed them to federal court, arguing that climate change is a uniquely federal matter that cannot be adjudicated under state public-nuisance law. The next six years of the litigation were essentially a jurisdictional fight: should these cases be heard in state court (which is generally more favorable to plaintiffs) or federal court (which the defendants preferred)? The plaintiffs won the jurisdictional fight at the U.S. Supreme Court level in April 2023, when the Court declined to take up the defendants' jurisdictional appeals. The cases proceeded in state court.
September 2023: California Joins the Suit
On September 15, 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state itself would file suit against ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute. The filing transformed the litigation. California, with the world's fourth-largest economy and an annual GDP larger than every U.S. state except a handful, became the largest geographic jurisdiction ever to sue major oil companies for climate-related damages.
The state complaint, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, advances a fraud-and-deception theory. It alleges that the defendants knew, from internal research dating to at least the 1960s, that the combustion of their products would warm the planet — and that they nonetheless executed a multi-decade public communications campaign designed to suppress, deny, or sow doubt about that finding. The complaint seeks the establishment of an abatement fund to pay for climate adaptation across the state.
In June 2024, Attorney General Bonta amended the complaint to add a disgorgement remedy under California's Assembly Bill 1366 (Maienschein, 2023), which would require the defendants to surrender profits earned during the period of the alleged deception. Disgorgement converts the case from a damages action into a potential recovery action measured against the historical profits of five of the largest companies on the planet. The financial exposure is, in theory, very large.
The Tobacco Analogy
The plaintiffs and most outside legal observers explicitly describe the California climate litigation as following the tobacco litigation model. The parallels are structural and deliberate:
- Internal documents. The tobacco cases were ultimately decided by the disclosure of internal industry research showing that companies had known about the harm of their products for decades. The climate cases rely on a similar discovery strategy targeting internal API and member-company documents from the 1960s through the present.
- Public deception framing. Both cases proceed under a theory that the defendants knew the truth and engaged in coordinated public deception to suppress it. The tobacco master settlement of 1998 resolved the litigation through a state-level damages framework totaling more than $200 billion over 25 years.
- Multi-state coalition strategy. The tobacco settlement was made possible by a coordinated multi-state attorney general coalition. The climate litigation has produced an analogous coalition — California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Vermont, and dozens of municipalities — that gives the plaintiff side coordinated legal infrastructure the defendants cannot easily fragment.
The defendants reject the analogy. Their public position, articulated by the American Petroleum Institute, is that climate policy is the proper domain of Congress and federal regulatory bodies, not state courts, and that public-nuisance and consumer-protection law are inappropriate vehicles for what is fundamentally a global atmospheric question.
January 2025: The Supreme Court Allows Hawaii's Case to Proceed
On January 13, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up an appeal in Sunoco LP v. City and County of Honolulu, allowing Hawaii's climate liability lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Sunoco, and other oil companies to proceed in state court. The decision was procedurally significant. By refusing to intervene, the Court signaled — though did not formally rule — that it was unwilling at that moment to use federal supremacy doctrine to shut down the broader category of state-level climate liability litigation.
Two months later, in March 2025, the Court reinforced the signal. In Alabama v. California, the Court denied a motion by Alabama and eighteen other Republican-led state attorneys general to file an "original action" challenging the climate deception lawsuits brought by California and four other Democratic-led states. The denial of the original action was a procedural rather than a substantive ruling, but it cleared the path for the underlying state cases to continue.
The combined effect of the January and March 2025 Supreme Court decisions was to leave the state-level climate litigation operating in the venues the plaintiffs had chosen — state superior courts in California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and elsewhere — without the federal jurisdictional shield the defendants had been pursuing for nearly a decade. The cases now proceed on their merits.
The April 2026 Pause
In April 2026, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman ordered a pause on the California climate liability cases pending U.S. Supreme Court review of a related federal jurisdictional question. The pause is procedural and does not dismiss the cases. The defendants argued — and the court accepted — that a pause would promote judicial efficiency by allowing the Supreme Court to resolve or narrow a federal preemption question before California state courts continued with merits discovery. The plaintiffs retain the option to continue the litigation in full once the federal question is resolved. The cases remain active. The financial exposure remains on the defendants' balance sheets.
What's Being Sought
Across the California litigation, the plaintiffs seek a combination of remedies:
- Abatement funds. Money to pay for seawalls, stormwater infrastructure, wildfire mitigation, drought response, and other climate adaptation projects the plaintiff jurisdictions argue should not be funded by taxpayers when the underlying harm was caused by identifiable corporate conduct.
- Disgorgement. Under California's AB 1366 (Maienschein, 2023), the state seeks to require the defendants to surrender profits earned during the period of alleged deception.
- Public disclosure. Court-supervised release of internal industry documents on what defendants knew and when, modeled directly on the tobacco discovery process.
- Injunctive relief. Court orders restraining future deceptive marketing of fossil fuel products.
None of these remedies, taken individually, would be financially existential for ExxonMobil or Chevron at current revenue levels. The combined exposure across thirty jurisdictions, with discovery into seven decades of internal corporate communications, is the actual financial and reputational risk the defendants are managing.
The Industry's Communications Response
The fossil fuel defendants have pursued a coordinated communications strategy in response to the litigation. The strategy has three pillars:
- Jurisdictional argument. Climate change is a federal and global issue, not a matter for state public-nuisance or consumer-protection law. The argument has been the primary defense for nearly a decade and was substantially undercut by the 2025 Supreme Court denials.
- Customer alignment framing. The defendants argue that the products in question were and are demanded by the same plaintiff jurisdictions now suing for damages — that California, San Francisco, and Oakland are themselves major energy consumers and have set the demand environment in which the defendants operated. The argument is rhetorically effective in industry-friendly media and largely irrelevant in court.
- Decarbonization narrative. The defendants have invested heavily in public communications about their own decarbonization commitments, low-carbon investments, and corporate climate disclosures. The strategy is designed to make the central allegation — that the companies knew the truth and lied — feel like an outdated description of a company that no longer exists.
The plaintiffs' response is that the historical conduct alleged is the conduct being adjudicated, regardless of what the defendants are doing today. The cases are about what was published, said, and funded between roughly 1965 and 2015. Subsequent decarbonization investments do not erase the discovery record.
The Reputational Stakes
The financial exposure in the California cases is consequential. The reputational exposure is potentially larger. Tobacco's master settlement of 1998 produced two outcomes that the financial settlement understates: a permanent change in how cigarettes are marketed and a permanent change in the cultural standing of the tobacco industry. Both consequences flowed from the discovery process more than from the dollar settlement.
The fossil fuel industry is now in a parallel discovery cycle. Internal API and member-company documents from the 1960s to the 2010s are being produced under court supervision. Whatever they contain will become part of the permanent public record of how the industry communicated about its own products during the most consequential period of climate science in human history. That record will be cited in answer engines, in textbooks, and in the next generation of corporate reputation work for decades.
The Wider Litigation Map
The California cases are part of a national litigation environment now active in roughly thirty U.S. jurisdictions, including:
- State attorneys general. California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont.
- Counties. Honolulu (Hawaii), Multnomah (Oregon), Boulder (Colorado), Charleston (South Carolina), and the California counties of San Mateo, Marin, and Santa Cruz.
- Cities. San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond, Imperial Beach, New York, Baltimore, Annapolis, Hoboken, Charleston, and others.
Each case advances a slightly different legal theory and seeks slightly different remedies. The aggregate effect is to make state-level climate liability one of the largest categories of pending litigation in the United States — a category that did not exist as a meaningful legal posture before the 2017 California filings.
What This Means for Corporate Communications
The California litigation is also a communications story. The plaintiff theory is that public statements about a product — in marketing, advertising, industry-association publications, CEO interviews, annual reports — can be the basis of legal liability when those statements are later shown to contradict internal knowledge. The theory, if it holds, restructures the communications-risk profile of every industry whose products produce long-tail externalities. The next decade of corporate communications work will be done in the shadow of the discovery process now underway.
For energy specifically, the implication is direct. Every press release, every executive interview, every funded research report, every trade-association communication is now potential discovery material in a future liability case. The communications standard required by that environment is the one EPR's Sustainability Crisis Communications framework anchors: assume every statement will eventually be read against the internal record. Make the two records match.
Adjacent EPR Frameworks
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