Oil giants say Hawaii’s climate suit belongs with lawmakers
The companies argued the state is really asking a court to decide how much fossil fuel the world should have burned, a question they say belongs to the state legislature.
by Jeremy Yurow, Court House News, October 20, 2026
HONOLULU (CN) — More than a dozen lawyers for the world’s largest oil companies and their trade group crowded into a Honolulu courtroom Tuesday to argue Hawaii’s climate change lawsuit against them belongs in the Legislature, not a courtroom.
The state says BP, Chevron, Exxon and others spent decades misleading the public about what burning their products would do to the planet. The companies told First Circuit Judge Jordon Kimura the state is really asking a court to decide how much fossil fuel the world should have burned.
“It sounds like the defendants are trying to hit a home run on the idea of political questions,” Kimura told Theodore Boutrous, the Chevron attorney arguing for all the defendants.
Kimura asked how deciding whether an advertisement was misleading, or whether the companies had a duty to warn, would require the court to set emissions targets.
Boutrous conceded it would not. But he said the state’s theory would force a court to decide whether global emissions were too high and what governments around the world would have done without the companies’ statements.
Climate policy belongs to the Legislature and the governor, Boutrous argued, who he said have balanced the state’s need for fuel against climate concerns since the 1980s. He also pointed out the state itself argued climate change was a political question when young people sued it in the Navahine case.
“They want this court to become the climate change czar under state law, at the expense of these defendants,” Boutrous said. “What they’re really saying is: political question doctrine for me, but not for thee.”
Kimura appeared skeptical. He said Hawaii’s liberal pleading standard allows a complaint to survive if the state can prove any set of facts supporting it.
When Boutrous said no one could trace where the emissions harming Hawaii came from, he pushed back.
“We’re in the middle of the Pacific, with no adjoining states or countries for thousands and thousands of miles,” Kimura said.
Victor Sher, representing the state, said the case is about deceptive marketing, not emissions limits. He read at length from the Hawaii Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Honolulu’s nearly identical lawsuit, which held that the city’s claims do not seek to regulate emissions.
“The emissions, it’s true, Your Honor, are the vehicle of the injury,” Sher said. “They’re not the source of the liability.”
The state must prove the difference between the world as it is and the world as it would have been without the companies’ conduct, Sher said. If a jury finds no deception or that it made no difference, “then we lose.”
Kimura pressed Sher, too. He noted the Hawaii Supreme Court’s Honolulu ruling addressed only federal preemption, not the political question doctrine.
He also questioned whether the state’s proposed abatement fund would put the court in the business of climate policy and whether the state had identified a legal basis for imposing a standalone public trust duty on the companies.
Scott Janoe, representing Sunoco and its Aloha Petroleum subsidiaries, argued separately that the complaint is a fraud case in disguise and should have to meet a stricter pleading standard. He said the complaint uses terms such as deceive, mislead and greenwash about 430 times.
“A rose by any other name, Your Honor,” Janoe said.
The American Petroleum Institute is also seeking dismissal under Hawaii’s anti-SLAPP law, arguing the state’s claims violate its First Amendment rights.
Kimura questioned how the law applies to multiparty cases, saying it “leaves us guessing a lot.”
The state sued BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Sunoco and other companies, along with the American Petroleum Institute, in May 2025. It seeks damages, civil penalties and a fund to help pay for sea-level rise, wildfires and other climate harms.
Kimura took the motions under advisement and did not say when he would rule.