Analysis
Fossil
fuel companies finally accept the climate crisis – just not their role in it
Noah
Walker-Crawford
The era
of corporate climate denial is over but in courts around the world the big
names have shifted strategy
Thu 26
Mar 2026 15.00 GMT
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”.
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
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