While state and local officials advocate for climate lawsuits in courtrooms across the country, Moscow and Beijing are quietly benefiting from the outcome. Energy has always been a source of geopolitical power, and America’s adversaries understand that constraining U.S. production—even indirectly—reshapes global leverage in their favor. The growing wave of climate litigation against American energy companies risks accomplishing domestically what rival powers have long sought strategically: weakening the industrial foundation that underpins U.S. economic strength and allied security.
America’s adversaries learned something long ago that some of its own politicians still haven’t grasped: energy is power. The leverage to coerce allies, fund military buildups, and reshape the global order. Russia made that lesson viscerally clear when it weaponized its gas pipelines to squeeze Europe before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. American producers stepped into that breach, stabilizing global markets and keeping allied economies from going dark. Meanwhile, China has spent years flooding global markets with subsidized renewables and electric vehicles in a calculated bid to dominate the energy supply chains of the future.
These are not abstract foreign policy footnotes. They are hard geopolitical lessons, written in energy prices and diplomatic coercion. Yet a coalition of subnational Democratic officials and their allied climate NGOs appears to have missed every one of those lessons. They are now actively working to constrain the very industrial base that underwrites Western security. They did not need an enemy to breach the walls of Troy. They opened the gates themselves.
The Litigation Campaign
The weapon of choice is the American court system. Climate litigation worldwide has quadrupled over the past decade, and roughly 70 percent of those cases are filed right here in the United States, most of them targeting a handful of domestic oil and gas companies. There is no comparable litigation industry operating inside Russia or China. Not even close. That asymmetry alone should concern every American and every one of our allies who depends on U.S. energy exports to reindustrialize their defense base and untangle themselves from Russian supply.
What makes this campaign doubly troubling is that it has no democratic mandate. Advocates have tried and failed, repeatedly, to persuade voters to phase out fossil fuels through legislation. American voters consistently refuse to endorse a full phase-out of oil, coal, and natural gas. Further, the overwhelming majority of voters believe energy security is a key component of national security. When you can’t win at the ballot box, you take the fight to the courthouse. That’s the playbook in plain view.
The Counterargument — and Why It Fails
The climate litigation advocates are not naive, and their strategic logic deserves a fair hearing. Their core argument is coherent: if the long-term goal is to strip authoritarian petrostates of the hydrocarbon revenues that fund military buildups, then accelerating the decline of fossil fuel demand is itself a national security strategy. Russia and Saudi Arabia clearly take this threat seriously — both have spent years lobbying against aggressive climate targets and working to slow the pace of global decarbonization. On this view, litigation isn’t handing Moscow a gift; it’s hastening the day when neither Moscow nor Riyadh can hold allied economies hostage through an energy spigot. That is not a frivolous position.
The problem is that this argument is right in the long run and dangerously wrong in the near term — and we are living in the near term. The energy transition is measured in decades, not years. What fills the gap when American producers are constrained is not solar panels; it is Russian and Saudi crude, extracted under weaker environmental standards and used to fund the very authoritarianism the transition is supposed to eventually defund. The strategic question is not whether cleaner energy is desirable — of course it is — but whether crippling domestic producers through state-level litigation, faster than any viable alternative can scale, serves allied security in the window that actually matters. The answer is plainly no.
Constitutional Issues
The constitutional problems with this approach are serious. The U.S. Constitution assigns foreign affairs to the national government precisely because interstate commerce and cross-border markets require uniform, coherent rules. A patchwork of states projecting their preferred policies across the country and around the world is exactly what the framers sought to prevent. Yet several states are now attempting to impose billions of dollars in liability on energy producers for extraction and emissions that occurred entirely outside their borders. These suits don’t regulate local drilling or local pollution. They attempt to retroactively penalize global production for its worldwide atmospheric effects, effectively constructing a de facto international climate liability system managed by individual state attorneys general. That intrudes directly into an arena reserved for federal coordination and ongoing international negotiations.
Constraining American Producers Only Shifts Supply
Beyond the constitutional concerns, the strategy is self-defeating. Global energy demand does not disappear when American production is constrained. It shifts. When U.S. output is curtailed — whether through regulation or years of costly litigation — supply doesn’t disappear. It migrates to producers operating under weaker environmental standards and fewer transparency requirements. State-backed firms in Russia, China, and other authoritarian systems fill the gap. They do so with lower safeguards, less accountability, and far greater geopolitical leverage over their customers. Weakening American producers doesn’t reduce global demand. It simply hands market share to strategic competitors.
That redistribution matters enormously in an era defined by AI competition and the race for technological supremacy. AI data centers require enormous quantities of reliable electricity. China is aggressively expanding its energy capacity to power industrial growth and digital infrastructure. Meanwhile, American producers are forced to manage rising capital uncertainty driven by an unrelenting wave of climate litigation. Every dollar diverted to legal defense is a dollar not invested in production capacity, and every year of uncertainty deters the long-term capital investment the sector requires.
The Nuclear Precedent
The precedent for where this leads already exists. Many of the same climate NGOs now targeting oil and gas once pursued a comparable campaign against nuclear energy — litigating projects to death through delay, expense, and regulatory attrition. The results are now visible. Despite genuine bipartisan support for nuclear power and new legislation aimed at spurring a revival, no reactors are currently under construction in the United States. China, by contrast, has roughly 32 reactors under construction. Russia is building reactors abroad across multiple continents. Chinese and Russian government-controlled companies implemented 44 of 45 reactor construction starts globally between January 2020 and mid-2025. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the predictable result of using litigation to impose regulatory paralysis on industries that geopolitical rivals face no comparable pressure to constrain.
The Stakes
Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the stakes explicit at this month’s Munich Security Conference. Speaking directly to America’s European allies, he described a new transatlantic mission: together, to “reindustrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people,” securing supply chains against extortion from foreign powers. That objective becomes significantly harder to achieve when domestic litigation campaigns are systematically undermining the very production capacity that underpins allied energy security.
None of these argues against environmental protection or the legitimate role of courts in enforcing the law. Environmental standards matter, and the rule of law must be upheld. The argument here is for constitutional consistency and strategic clarity. Energy markets operate at national and global scale, and the policies governing them must reflect that reality. When individual states attempt to construct their own climate liability regimes and project them across international commerce, they fragment the national policy framework and hand leverage to adversaries who face no comparable constraints.
The ultimate winners of this lawfare are not the communities seeking climate redress. They are Moscow, Beijing, the litigation industry extracting fees from years of expensive legal attrition, and the state-level politicians who have found in the courthouse what they could not find at the ballot box. American energy was indispensable to victory in World War II. The strategic logic has not changed — and America’s adversaries understand that clearly, even when some of America’s own policymakers do not. It is time for judges, legislators, and the public to understand it too.
Joe Buccino is a retired U.S. Army Colonel and the author of the forthcoming book “The Crisis Evasion Handbook.”
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
