New Oil Major Approach - Yes, Global Warming Is Real - Kind Of - But Not Our Fault, What About Your Science Bias, Huh??

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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”.

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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.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/26/fossil-fuel-companies-accept-climate-crisis-just-not-their-role-in-it