Climate lawyers are gearing up for a spike in climate litigation this year — even as President-elect Donald Trump takes office after campaigning on a promise to block many of the cases.
Youth climate activists are coming off major victories in the states, and local governments are ramping up their legal battles alleging that the oil and gas industry has misled the public about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions for decades.
The climate liability fight waged by local governments is advancing in state courts across the country and could soon come before the nation’s highest bench.
“Courts are emerging as critical players in climate action, especially as a lack of political will and obstruction by fossil fuel interests continues to impede bold outcomes and accountability,” Delta Merner, lead scientist for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a recent blog post.
Globally, the International Court of Justice is expected to release an advisory opinion next year on states’ obligations to combat climate change. That follows two weeks of hearings prompted by a request from the United Nations General Assembly that the world’s highest court examine what countries should do to prevent climate change — and what consequences they face for failing to do so.
Here are some of the key climate issues that will be decided by the courts this year:
NEPA
Federal judges from the District Court level all the way up the nation’s highest bench will grapple in the new year with challenges seeking to constrain how agencies take a “hard look” at the environmental and climate effects of major projects such as pipelines and railways.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling by early summer in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which asks the justices to limit agency NEPA reviews to environmental impacts close to a project itself and restrict analysis to impacts the agency has authority to regulate.
Some legal observers have predicted the justices, who heard oral arguments in the case in December, may not overly constrain agencies from studying environmental harms.
Meanwhile, a surprise 2-1 appellate court decision invalidating the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s power to issue NEPA regulations is facing pushback.
Both the Biden administration and the Marin Audubon Society have filed petitions asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to reconsider its position. Neither party in the lawsuit, which was about NEPA review of tourist flights, had challenged CEQ’s regulatory power.
Court watchers have suggested that the case is a good candidate for reconsideration, and the D.C. Circuit may opt to nix only the part of the ruling targeting CEQ’s regulatory power. But the case may still be used as a template for parties to target CEQ’s authority more directly in future litigation.
The outcome of the rehearing requests could affect another lawsuit brought by 20 Republican-led states last spring challenging the Biden administration’s second phase of NEPA rulemaking.
While the case in federal court in North Dakota did not originally challenge CEQ’s regulatory power, the red states behind the case recently cited the D.C. Circuit’s decision as support for their claim that the agency’s rule should be reversed.
The Biden administration has argued that the court should wait to see what the D.C. Circuit does on rehearing.
Climate liability
The Supreme Court has two requests before it from oil companies and Republican-led states to dismiss lawsuits from local governments that want the fossil fuel industry to pay for the costs of climate change.
In the waning hours of the Biden administration, the solicitor general has urged the justices to turn away the petitions from the oil industry and red states. Trump, as he did in his first term, is expected to support efforts to fight back against the climate lawsuits.
“The lure of legacy often motivates outgoing administrations to tattoo the legal landscape with their brand in as many ways as are available in their final hours,” wrote Donald Kochan, executive director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, in a recent opinion piece on President Joe Biden’s last days in office.
Oil companies argue that the climate cases should be moved from state to federal court, where they believe they are more likely to prevail. The Supreme Court in 2021 gave the industry a small, technical win on the venue issue, but since that time, federal appellate judges have largely ruled that the lawsuits belong in the state courts where they were initially filed.
D.C. Circuit energy rulings
In one of the more closely watched cases of 2025, the Biden administration is making a last-ditch attempt to defend its rule for planet-warming emissions from the nation’s sprawling power sector.
But the D.C. Circuit, which heard arguments in the case last month, is unlikely to reach a decision on the matter before Trump takes office. The president-elect is widely expected to repeal the regulation, which places new limits on the nation’s second-largest source of carbon pollution.
An Obama-era version of the rule and the Trump administration’s replacement regulation have both been previously rejected in the courts.
The D.C. Circuit is also considering long-shot requests for the court to reconsider its rulings calling for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to redo or revise NEPA analyses of a Northeast gas pipeline expansion and a pair of LNG export projects in South Texas.
The court does not have a deadline for responding to the rehearing requests.
‘Energy dominance’ 2.0
The return of Trump’s first-term “energy dominance” agenda is expected to tee up a new round of legal fights over how federal energy projects are approved.
The president-elect has vowed to lift a pause on liquefied natural gas exports, even as the Department of Energy has warned of the climate and economic risks of continuing to ship fossil fuels abroad. The D.C. Circuit, meanwhile, has struck down or ordered more work on several federal analyses of gas projects.
New oil, gas and coal leasing on public lands is also likely to spark legal challenges, just as it did during Trump’s first term.
“He genuinely and forcefully embraces supporting, pushing and advancing more drilling,” GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said of Trump during the Dallas Citizen Council’s meeting last month. “It’s going to be game on on Jan. 20.”
The president-elect has also floated the idea of fast-tracking permitting for companies investing $1 billion or more — a proposal that, if enacted, would face legal opposition.
“Congress specifically intended for those effects to be considered and mitigated or avoided, so it would be unlawful and arbitrary to run roughshod over those laws simply because of the price tag of development,” said Susan Jane Brown, principal and chief legal counsel at Silvix Resources, an Oregon-based nonprofit environmental law firm.
Tyson Slocum, energy program director at Public Citizen, said Trump has “no authority whatsoever” to waive health and safety protections based on the price of capital investment.
Conservative groups like the Heartland Institute haveurged the incoming administration to prioritize streamlining the permitting process — and have noted that Trump did not say he’d scrap reviews for big investors, only that they’d be speedier.
“I see nothing in Trump’s statement asserting that any projects ‘would not need environmental reviews,’” said Heartland President James Taylor, adding that he would not be “remotely surprised if climate activist groups and activist media once again twists words to create fake news in order to make Trump look bad. Sad, but not surprising.”
A version of this story appears in Energywire.
