Written by Ivan London, Senior Attorney at Mountain States Legal Foundation and James Dickey, managing attorney for the Upper Midwest Law Center.
Published May 9, 2025
The Trump administration is suing Michigan and Hawaii over their stated plans to sue energy companies for alleged climate change harms. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison should watch out because he’s probably next.
Minnesota’s lawsuit against energy producers is a naked attempt to reshape national energy policy that will have global repercussions for costs. In other words, bad decisions by Minnesota courts will skyrocket prices for consumers everywhere, which is explicitly against the Trump administration’s energy policies.
Ellison’s lawsuit claims that energy production that results in burning gasoline and natural gas has caused global climate change. Yet Ellison’s beef with the companies isn’t about harm from climate change but what energy producers supposedly have said or not said to the public about the energy they produce for our nation. He also faults these companies for having funded research by organizations that disagreed with the State’s view of the climate science. (RELATED: ‘War On Coal Is Finally Over’: Energy Experts Say Trump Admin’s Deregulation Agenda Could Fuel Coal’s Revival)
It’s part of a larger coordinated effort to use litigation to lay the groundwork for an economy-wide green energy transition and to secure additional income for state budgets. Democratic prosecutors in nine states, more than a dozen cities and counties, and Washington, D.C. have brought similar cases using the same playbook to try to keep the deliberations in state courts. In Puerto Rico, “similar” turned out to be identical, as Judge Aida Delgado-Colon discovered when large blocks of text in a complaint filed on behalf of San Juan matched word-for-word a different lawsuit by 16 Puerto Rican municipalities the year before.