Suppose you were the CEO of a fossil fuel company that had engaged in what the latest UCS report calls “decades of deceit” about global warming. In the 1960s, your own company’s scientists “correctly and skillfully” projected the consequences of the intended uses of your product. Science from former UCS fellow Shaina Sadai recently found that one-third of present-day sea level rise can be traced to emissions from you and your peer corporations, and that these emissions have all but guaranteed up to 22” of sea level rise, to name just one impact among many.
Now you are being sued in jurisdictions all over the world, for damages or deceptive practices or other alleged misconduct. Two US states have passed—and others are considering—so-called climate superfund laws to make polluters help pay for the growing costs to protect public infrastructure from climate-driven damages. A 2023 analysis calculated that the top 21 fossil fuel companies, including yours, owe climate reparations of $209 billion annually to communities most harmed by climate impacts and by fossil-fueled disinformation. What would you do? Would you start telling the truth and bringing your business model in line with a livable planet?
Like hell you would. Instead, you would continue running the plays from the disinformation playbook. You’d deny the science, deceive the public, and delay climate policy. You’d fund front groups. You’d greenwash. You’d misdirect the public to focus on the costs of climate action as opposed to the much greater costs of inaction. You’d whine that you were being victimized by entities working to hold you accountable.
Next play: seek immunity
Congratulations! You’ve already gone well beyond tactic #5 in the playbook (manipulating government officials). Now you’ve got cabinet officials and federal agencies enacting your agenda. You’ve even got the Department of Justice filing suit in an attempt to stop state climate litigation and climate superfund laws.
The next thing on your wish list? Legislation that would ensure your immunity from liability for your dangerous and deceitful practices.
If past is prologue, you’d use:
- a front group founded by oil and fossil gas executives to claim that you’re the poor victim under attack from groups like UCS that provide the evidence base used in lawsuits against you
- a website to sow further confusion, perhaps with a timeline that mixes fact with falsehood in ways you know effectively confuse the public
- a cheap online advertising campaign to boost your narrative, and you might target that campaign in specific states and at specific demographic groups
And whaddya know? These tactics are not, in fact, hypothetical. Most of them have been amply documented via a range of research, including from UCS, which has been reporting on fossil fuel company deceit for nearly twenty years. The fossil fuel industry has already shown its hand several times regarding its desire for a liability waiver. And indeed, their effort to undermine public support for climate litigation is also underway.
The front group
The American Energy Institute (AEI) was founded in Texas in 2015. American Energy Institute was co-founded by Ken Morgan, a former board secretary for the Texas Natural Gas Foundation, and Mary Bell Love, a “public affairs expert” who “specializes in oil and gas.” There are two non-founding members on its board. One is Lindsey Miller, former director of government affairs for Texas oil industry companies Enterprise Products Partners and the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (now part of Occidental Petroleum). The other is former coal company executive Steve Milloy, who has made a career out of leading front groups that sow doubt about the dangerous and deadly risks of tobacco and the existence and dangers of global warming.
In its most recent publicly-available tax filing, American Energy Institute declares its mission is to “provide funding to public entities to assist in the transition to ultra low emission vehicles and to educate the public about the benefits of natural gas.” The filing also claims its single largest service accomplishment for 2023, as evidenced by expenses, was to “provide assistance and funding to fleets to transition their fleets to ultra low emission vehicles.” On the American Energy Institute website, I did find a four-page document opposing electric vehicles; it ignores subsidies for fossil fuels in its calculations, seeks to rollback years of vehicle standards, and its URL uses the words “deep state.” However, I was unable to find evidence of any public entity that had received fleet-transition funding from American Energy Institute, even among their own press releases and resources.
Their 2023 tax return does not disclose their funders. In September 2024, though, a story in The Guardian linked American Energy Institute to Federalist Society chairman Leonard Leo, whom watchdog organization Citizens for Ethics describe as “synonymous with the right-wing effort to remake the American judiciary and then American society more broadly.” American Energy Institute boasted of this connection via an October 14, 2024 post on Instagram.
Screenshot from the Instagram page of the American Energy Institute, taken on May 13, 2025. Source: Instagram
The website
In November 2024, just one week after the election, the American Energy Institute (AEI, but not to be confused with the better-known anti-climate action think tank, the American Enterprise Institute) launched a new website. It features a timeline of the climate science history “debate” with notable omissions and inclusions.
It includes, for instance, the discoveries of Fourier and Tyndall but not Foote. It features with equal prominence the Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius and two unsuccessful attempts to refute Arrhenius’s quantification of the contribution of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect. When assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are cited, they are accompanied by statements highlighting areas of uncertainty (which do not include carbon dioxide’s contribution to trapping heat in the atmosphere). The only policy changes it cites are the Paris Agreement and President Trump’s actions withdrawing from it. It selectively editorializes, for instance by using the phrase “President Joe Biden framed” when it quotes a Department of Energy press release about the Inflation Reduction Act.
Screenshot from the Climate Debate History website. Source: American Energy Institute
Conversely, it describes neutrally President Trump’s remarks about terminating the “Green New Deal,” which was never enacted.
Screenshot from the Climate Debate History website. Source: American Energy Institute
Entirely absent from the site’s timeline is any milestone along the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long journey to mislead and confuse the public about the causes, impacts, and costs of climate change.
For an accurate timeline of the fossil-fueled “debate,” see UCS’s new “Climate Deceit Timeline.” I put “debate” in scare quotes because the remarkable progress of climate science over the past 175 years has not proceeded by “debate.” Scientists conduct experiments, attempt to replicate them, sometimes make errors which are subsequently shown to be errors, develop hypothesis, and when multiple lines of evidence come together with explanatory and predictive power, confirm theories. None of this is akin to “debate.” Climate deniers wish it were, because in a bad faith debate, you can move goalposts and lie faster than you can be corrected (the “Gish Gallop”). But when the facts aren’t on your side, and you’re worried the law might not be either, you pound the table and seek to subvert the law.
The ad campaign
In February 2025, the American Energy Institute launched a Facebook ad campaign promoting its Climate Debate History website. The campaign is being monitored by researchers affiliated with the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition.
Screen shot of the ad campaign featuring the Climate Debate History website. Source; Facebook Ad Library
The ad spending to date is fairly low, between $3,000 and $3,500 so far. But for that low price, Facebook estimates a potential audience size of 1 million people and that the ad was on a screen between 200,000 and 250,000 times. We know who the American Energy Institute is targeting: predominantly older men.
Screenshot from Facebook’s Ad Library, showing that the American Energy Institute ad campaign is targeting men 65 years of age and older. Source: Facebook Ad Library on May 13, 2025.
And we know where: Texas, Florida, and California.
Screenshot showing top three states where the Climate Debate History website is being promoted. 3% or less of the ad buy has targeted other states with large populations: Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. Spending in all other states makes up 2% or less of the buy. Source: Facebook Ad Library on May 13, 2025.
This ad is explicitly anti-climate litigation. It misrepresents both the plaintiffs in climate accountability lawsuits (states, municipalities, and tribal nations) and the causes of action (many of the cases allege deceptive practices in violation of state consumer protection statutes). And by attacking these public interest complaints filed by public prosecutors, it implicitly argues for a liability waiver for a powerful, destructive industry.
The ad is targeting older men in populous states that have experienced significant extreme weather and climate-related disasters in recent years. President Trump won Florida and Texas by more than 12%, and both states have large and largely conservative congressional delegations that could swing a vote on a federal liability waiver. California is the first major fossil-fuel producing state to file a lawsuit against oil companies on grounds of deception.
We know what they’re up to. What are we up to?
UCS’s brand-new report, Decades of Deceit, features a list of demands for the fossil fuel industry, including that they “[c]ease disinformation and greenwashing on climate science, public policy, and corporate actions,” “stop obstructing science-informed public policy and its implementation,” and “pay an equitable share of the costs of climate damages”—in other words, stop doing everything I’ve demonstrated them doing in this blogpost.
The industry is still running a long con on the American public with disastrous current and future consequences for humans and other species. Exposing their tactics can reduce their social license to continue causing greater and greater harm. Please join UCS in taking action: tell Congress to explicitly reject the Trump administration’s efforts to shield the fossil fuel industry from legal liability.