This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

In a campaign plan released last year, President-elect Trump pledged that his administration would “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.”

That’s a reference to the dozens of state and local governments fighting to put Exxon and other oil companies on trial for spreading disinformation about their products’ harm to the climate. The first of those lawsuits were filed during the first Trump administration, which opposed the cases in court, and now many are finally moving forward in state courts after prevailing against Big Oil’s repeated attempts to derail them.

While the Trump administration can — and is expected to — do immense harm to the climate through regulatory rollbacks and other gifts to fossil fuel companies, it’s unclear how much of an impact Trump 2.0 and a Republican Congress could have on state and local efforts to hold the industry accountable through the courts. Legal experts said that while the election doesn’t have any direct impact on the cases, the new political landscape could create potential additional hurdles to their path toward trial.

“Despite the radical change in climate policy that we expect from the new administration,” the courts will remain “a critical bulwark against attacks on sound climate science and sound climate litigation,” said Denise Antolini, a retired University of Hawai‘i law professor.

“The courts are not going to fold overnight, they are a very strong system of checks and balances. But there of course are chinks in the armor,” she said.

The Department of Justice could influence the fate of climate accountability in the courts. In the spring, congressional Democrats who led an investigation into the oil industry’s climate disinformation campaigns urged the DOJ to pursue its own probe into the matter, and potentially even file its own lawsuit, as it did against the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

That won’t happen under a Trump administration. But throughout the Trump and Biden presidencies, the Justice Department has weighed in — and been asked to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court — on various battles in state and local climate accountability lawsuits. While the Biden administration filed a brief in support of communities, the Trump DOJ routinely backed Big Oil — even arguing alongside oil companies at the U.S. Supreme Court on the very last day of Trump’s first term.

Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick to be U.S. Attorney General, has said climate change is real but “doesn’t require surrender to AOC’s Green New Deal socialist Woketopia,” and has introduced legislation to abolish the EPA.

There are currently two pending requests from the Supreme Court for the Department of Justice to weigh in on petitions to hear cases that seek to stop communities from putting Big Oil on trial. The lame duck Biden administration now has a ticking clock to file their responses.

“It is absolutely critical that the Biden Department of Justice weigh in and plant a flag in the ground, because although the DOJ can amend or change [the opinion], it’s an opportunity to say the truth about what the law requires — speak truth while the window of opportunity is still open,” said Antolini.

In the first of those petitions, oil companies are asking the justices to review a decision from the Hawai‘i state Supreme Court........

© Truthout