Fossil fuel companies were never going to voluntarily admit to their role in the climate crisis. By the late 2020s, people turned to two methods to force the issue. Illegal means involved sabotage, destruction of oil infrastructure and more. Legal methods focused on litigation to force governments to comply with emissions targets and on corporations to pay reparations for past damage. If the energy policies of the 47th US president, Donald Trump, were 鈥�, the reply of climate lawyers was 鈥渟ue, baby, sue鈥�.
The problem at first was that Big Oil firms deployed armies of lawyers to challenge every aspect of a case brought against them. Most plaintiffs simply couldn鈥檛 afford to continue, or else became bogged down in litigation for years.
The solution came when artificial intelligence was used to build and prosecute cases. Big Oil may have had extensive human representation, but AI lawyers were even more numerous, faster, consumed evidence more comprehensively and never slept. They could be deployed on behalf of people who couldn鈥檛 afford a lawyer, bringing cases based on novel and arcane aspects of law.
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The use of an AI tool in law started in earnest in 2023, with the release of a . The grew rapidly and it helped litigation by suggesting legal precedents and strategies.
Climate cases fell into three categories. First, challenging disinformation. A 2021 found that Big Oil companies had in extensive greenwashing and misinformation campaigns 鈥� but holding the firms to account was difficult. Second, action against governments for failing to protect their citizens. A key case establishing precedent for this was when Urgenda, an environmental group, the Dutch government in 2015 to force action on climate change.
The third category was around liability for the cost of climate damage. A vital development came as the science of climate attribution improved. It hadn鈥檛 previously been possible to draw a line connecting emissions from individual firms to the financial impacts of global warming, such as floods. When, in the mid 2020s, it became possible to determine the financial and humanitarian impact of climate change, litigation became feasible. For example, work by Friederike Otto鈥檚 World Weather Attribution team that floods in Pakistan in 2022 that killed at least 1500 people and caused over $30 billion in damage were made 50 to 75 per cent worse by the climate crisis.
AI litigation won cases by showing that corporations hadn't prepared for the effects of climate change
AI lawyers were deployed on all three strands. Local laws around the world were scoured by AI to identify avenues for litigation. One source of inspiration was a case that began in the 2010s in Peru. Human lawyers in Germany thought of using the , which allows nuisance behaviour by neighbours to be challenged in court. Since climate change affects everyone around the world, the crisis makes us all neighbours. Carbon emissions, the lawyers argued, fall under the neighbourhood law.
German energy giant RWE, from Climate Mitigation Services to be responsible for 0.47 per cent of historical greenhouse gas emissions, was for 0.47 per cent of the cost of a dam and drainage system built to protect farms and villages from melting glaciers in the Peruvian Andes.
Non-human lawyers helped in cases that were bogged down in the courts. In the US at the start of the 2020s, dozens of lawsuits were brought against the fossil fuel industry. Many were held up by the defendants challenging every aspect of the legal arguments. By 2028, AI lawyers were able to instantly fight back on such challenges and, trained on the latest science and with access to millions of documents from Big Oil companies, could overcome the human resistance. AI litigation successfully prevented new pipelines and infrastructure being built and won cases by showing that corporations hadn鈥檛 prepared for the effects of climate change.
Energy giants found themselves facing multiple lawsuits in dozens of countries. Their legal departments were overwhelmed. Just as had eventually agreed to pay billions of dollars in damages, by the 2030s, Big Oil corporations were forced to start paying up.
The wave of litigation helped speed the transition to renewable energy, and forced the fossil fuel industry to pay billions of dollars to climate finance funds for lower-income countries. Climate justice 鈥� the redistribution of oil wealth to countries most affected by climate change 鈥� was seen to be done.
Rowan Hooper is New Scientist鈥榮 podcast editor and the author of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars: The 10 global problems we can actually fix. Follow him on Bluesky @rowhoop.bsky.social
