Big Oil Is Getting Sued for Heat Deaths. It's Fighting Back With an Army of Immunity Laws.

That's the part that should be making more noise. You can lose a lawsuit and come back. You get immunity written into law and it's over, full stop, and nobody outside of a few policy reporters even noticed it happened. These companies spent decades funding climate denial and now they're spending whatever it takes to make sure no court ever gets to say that out loud in a verdict. The legislature route is perfect for them because it happens quietly, during committee hearings most people never watch, and by the time anyone's paying attention the bill is already signed.

And yeah the courts are slow and imperfect but at least a judge has to sit there and look at the evidence. A state rep just has to answer to whoever's funding their next campaign.

Big Oil figured out that winning in court requires a good lawyer, but winning in a statehouse just requires a good lobbyist with a catering budget, and one of those is a lot cheaper than the other.

The sequence point is exactly right, and the paper trail on it is damning. The American Legislative Exchange Council's model bill templates on "energy regulatory relief" predate the wave of municipal heat-death suits by years. These were not drafted in reaction to Honolulu v. Sunoco or the Hawaiian Electric litigation. The legislative infrastructure was already being constructed while those cases were still working through standing arguments at the district level.

What the European comparison misses, though, is that the precautionary principle never had a real foothold here because the industry captured the regulatory standard-setting process at the federal level through the 1990s and early 2000s. The EPA's own endangerment finding, finalized in 2009, represented the first formal acknowledgment that greenhouse gases threaten public health under the Clean Air Act. The industry's response to THAT finding is documented in the litigation discovery already unsealed in the Rhode Island case: internal strategy memos describing the endangerment process as an "existential threat" requiring a "legislative fix."

So yes, backward sequence. But more precisely: the sequence was deliberately reversed by the same actors now funding the immunity push. They neutralized the regulatory pathway first, then the liability pathway second. The lawsuits exist BECAUSE the first campaign succeeded.

The government immunity point is actually worth engaging with, because the legal history here is more interesting than the Mother Jones framing suggests. Sovereign immunity and corporate immunity operate through completely different doctrines, and the specific laws being passed in states like Texas and Louisiana aren't general defenses available to any business, they're targeted preemption statutes written to block a specific category of climate liability litigation before it can reach discovery. That's a meaningful distinction. A company defending itself in court is routine. A legislature passing a law after suits are filed, specifically to extinguish those suits, is a different kind of thing.

On the heat point, "it's been hot in July since before my daddy was born" is the whole argument the oil companies are making, which is precisely why the attribution science they've spent forty years funding research to undermine has become the central evidentiary battleground. The tort claims aren't that Chevron invented summer. They're that internal documents show these companies modeled the warming trajectory accurately decades ago and ran public disinformation campaigns anyway. That's closer to the tobacco litigation pattern than it is to suing the weather.

The gas price observation is fair as a political matter. Prices are high partly because of the Hormuz situation and partly for reasons with nothing to do with climate litigation. Using that to argue against the lawsuits conflates two separate things, but I understand why it lands rhetorically.

The legal causation point is fair, but it cuts both ways. A hard case in court is not the same thing as a blank check for lawmakers to hand out immunity before the facts are tested. When the powerful want the law rewritten in advance, that is not prudence, it is protection by privilege.
I also do not trust the activist reflex on the other side to turn every tragedy into a fundraising machine. But that does not make the immunity scheme clean. If a company spent years sowing doubt, then it should face scrutiny in open court, not hide behind legislators it helped cultivate.
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, yes, but Caesar does not get to excuse the well-connected from ordinary accountability. That is corruption by another name.