Comment: Big Oil loses shield as Trump frees it from regulation

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, February 17, 2026

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

For decades, fossil-fuel companies and their climate-change-denying allies obsessively tried to kill the federal government’s right to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Like Ahab, they may find that finally harpooning their white whale risks taking them down with it.

Last week, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency retracted its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health. In the byzantine scaffolding of U.S. regulatory law, this “endangerment finding” means the EPA must regulate those planet-heating gases under the 1963 Clean Air Act. By inviting EPA restrictions, the finding has been anathema to fossil-fuel companies and the handful of ideologues in the White House driving the effort to rescind it.

But the status quo also protects fossil fuels in a way. States can’t sue or regulate us, the industry says, because the federal government already has that job, thanks to the endangerment finding. Do away with the finding, and you do away with that protection.

The timing couldn’t be more awkward for fossil fuels: In response to Trump’s crusade against federal climate action, state and local policymakers are increasingly taking action against the industry in court. One ideal scenario could be landing a huge settlement like the one they imposed on Big Tobacco in the 1990s.

Legal efforts to pry money from tobacco companies went nowhere for decades. But when the attorneys general in most states joined forces against it, the tobacco industry succumbed quickly. The legal fight against Big Oil is far more complex. But Trump’s climate hostility is inspiring more concerted action from the states even as it threatens to blow up one of the industry’s biggest defenses.

In fact, the American Petroleum Institute had urged the EPA to keep regulating emissions from power plants and other “stationary” sources while ditching vehicle regulations. For now, the Trump administration seems to have bowed to the lobbying group, adopting its legal rationale for what seems like a convoluted stance, in which emissions from one kind of pipe aren’t dangerous but those from other pipes are.

This seems unlikely to satisfy the ideologues in the White House, who traffic in a far more primitive kind of climate denialism than even the API does. It acknowledges climate change is real and argues taking money from fossil-fuel companies will only hurt their ability to help the transition to clean energy. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, in contrast, is going on Fox Business and declaring carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant because it helps the plants grow.

That kind of moronic nonsense, which Burgum surely doesn’t believe, is the sort of propaganda cooked up by the fossil-fuel industry and its well-paid supporters long ago, when climate science wasn’t as widely accepted and the damaging effects of global heating weren’t routinely evident. In fact, one of the clearest parallels between tobacco and fossil fuels is the way both industries covered up their knowledge of their impact on the world.

Evidence of such deception helped bring Big Tobacco to heel, and the legal forces mustering against fossil fuels need it to do the same to Big Oil. Despite no success in courtrooms so far, more and more lawmakers and attorneys general in states across the country are looking to the industry for relief from the surging cost of climate-fueled disasters and home-insurance premiums.

In recent months, California, Hawaii and New York have introduced bills that would give their attorneys general the right to sue the industry to recoup damages from wildfires and other natural disasters. California’s version would also help cover rising insurance premiums and the cost of fireproofing homes. And it would bolster the state’s beleaguered insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan. In just the past three years, as insurers have fled the state and raised premiums amid rising wildfire losses, FAIR Plan policies have nearly tripled. The plan recently had to squeeze $1 billion from insurance companies to help cover claims from the January 2025 fires.

Climate scientists say they can now pinpoint just how much a company contributed to global heating in the past, building emissions databases that states are using to find deep-pocketed targets. In 2024, New York and Vermont passed superfund laws that would charge companies based on their emissions record, and 10 more states have introduced similar bills in Trump’s second term, by Politico’s tally. Ten states have also directly sued the industry for climate damage, cases that have so far survived the Trump administration’s efforts to strangle them.

Now the White House is trying to get these cases before a sympathetic Supreme Court. A 2007 high court ruling laid the groundwork for the EPA endangerment finding, but today’s bench is far more conservative. The administration recently took the unusual step of asking it to intervene in a Boulder, Colo., lawsuit, arguing the EPA’s authority to regulate emissions means nobody else can. It didn’t mention it’s also trying to kill that same authority.

So far, the high court has declined to get involved with Boulder and other cases, but who knows? It could still decide to throttle climate lawsuits based on its previous EPA finding but also decide to undo that same EPA finding. Cognitive dissonance is the new law of the land, after all.

Speaking of cognitive dissonance: Another big obstacle on the road to anything like a Fossil Fuel Master Settlement Agreement is the fact that, unlike tobacco, fossil fuels are present in almost every aspect of our lives. Cigarettes were always pure, self-destructive indulgence. We weren’t powering our cars or heating our houses with them. That conflict is a legal shield that Big Tobacco never had.

And as in all legal wars, money is the deadliest weapon of all. The fossil-fuel industry has plenty of it. For that reason — in court, at least — time would seem to be on Big Oil’s side.

Outside of the courtrooms, it’s a different story. The clean-energy revolution has so far withstood even Trump’s whole-of-government assault on it. We still have the power to stop giving fossil fuels even more money and transition as quickly as possible to cleaner energy sources. As Trump, the industry and possibly the Supreme Court slam shut every other door available to us, we should use that as motivation to make this escape route even bigger.

Every dollar not given to Big Oil will save us exponentially more dollars in future climate damage. As Ahab never learned, living well is the best revenge.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.