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Big Oil Fears the Evidence of Its Climate Lies

11 0
02.10.2026

No one knows how the US Supreme Court will rule in Suncor v. Boulder, the case that will kick off the court’s fall term next week and will likely decide whether the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, will be able to put oil giants ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy on trial for deceiving the public for decades about the climate harms of fossil fuels.

But one thing that can be said with certainty is that Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry are absolutely terrified of facing cases like Boulder’s at trial, where state and local governments will be able to present evidence of Big Oil’s decades-long climate deception to a jury. Big Oil’s own lawyers have admitted that the companies face “massive monetary liability” from the dozens of climate deception cases against them, and that stopping communities from having their day in court is a “big priority… for the entire industry.”

That’s because the evidence of Big Oil’s climate lies is overwhelming—and the discovery process in climate deception lawsuits could produce even more damaging proof that companies like Exxon have knowingly fueled climate chaos for decades while concealing the harm, undermining the science, and obstructing every effort to address the problem. As the Supreme Court prepares to hear Exxon’s pleas to escape trial in just one of the dozens of climate deception lawsuits, the Center for Climate Integrity has released a newly updated collection of 101 internal industry documents and other pieces of evidence that the fossil fuel industry is desperate to stop a jury of Americans from seeing.

All Boulder and other communities are asking Big Oil to do is to stop lying and pay for the harm their lies have caused. It speaks volumes about Big Oil companies that they’re going to such lengths to avoid telling the truth and paying to clean up the mess they’ve made.

Climate Fraud 101: Big Oil's Climate Deception Explained in 101 Documents, 1957-2026 shows how fossil fuel companies helped shape the emerging field of climate science beginning in the 1950s. By the late 1970s and early 80s, Exxon scientists were warning of “catastrophic” climate impacts if the world did not shift away from fossil fuels. Over the course of the 1980s, the oil giant and others came to understand that climate change posed two profound existential risks: one to “civilisation” itself, and the second to their business model, because the only way to “avoid the problem” was by “sharply curtailing the use of fossil fuels.”

Big Oil then chose their own interests over humanity’s and launched the most consequential corporate deception campaign in history to “emphasize the uncertainty” in climate science before measurable impacts became........

© Common Dreams