The Center for International and Environmental Law (CIEL) has been a familiar player in the climate litigation campaign for years, but its new report deals a massive blow to the theory that oil companies – and oil companies alone – possessed unique knowledge about climate change.
Whether the report intentionally undercuts the #ExxonKnew theory or not, CIEL has assembled one of the strongest arguments yet for #EveryoneKnew.
In 2017, CEIL’s report Smoke and Fumes: The Legal and Evidentiary Basis for Holding Big Oil Accountable for the Climate Crisis became one of the climate lawfare campaign’s foundational documents.
Now, in 2026, CIEL’s latest report argues the U.S. government understood the risks of climate change decades ago, documenting how federal agencies researched, discussed, and acted on climate science long before today’s litigation campaigns took shape.
At this point, the better question is not “Who knew?” It’s: “Who didn’t?”
#EveryoneKnew
CIEL’s own findings concede the point that EID Climate has made for years: climate change was not a secret known only to the energy industry.
According to the report, senior U.S. government officials were exchanging memos about the “carbon dioxide problem” as early as the 1960s, and a 1965 report delivered to President Lyndon Johnson explicitly stated the possibility that rising CO2 levels could trigger serious warming and sea-level rise.
CIEL traces the awareness back further still, to international scientific cooperation during the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year, when dozens of governments coordinated the first program to monitor atmospheric CO2.
The report goes even further, acknowledging that much of this early climate research was government-funded and widely discussed in mainstream media across the world.
Further, the report rehashes the same information that E&E News published all the way back in 2018:
“John F. Kennedy was warned about ‘climate control’ in February 1961, becoming perhaps the first American president to learn about people’s impact on planetary temperatures. The warnings never stopped. Every president since then has been exposed to similar scientific findings. Sometimes it was called ‘climatic change,’ other times it was “air pollution.”
And has been pointed out repeatedly over the years, plenty of others knew, too, including automakers, the utility industry, and even Bell Labs. The list of who “knew” is getting longer and longer, begging the question – who didn’t?
Another Story Backfires
Common sense tells you what CIEL’s own report now reinforces: if governments, scientists, automakers, utilities, researchers, and countless other institutions all understood the evolving science, the idea that responsibility can somehow be pinned on a handful of energy companies simply defies logic.
And while we’re revisiting mid-20th century history, it’s worth remembering another thing. During the energy crisis of the 1970s, the federal government – who also “knew” – pursued policies and asked the industry to increase domestic production to reduce dependence on foreign oil.
The historical record has always been far more nuanced than today’s climate litigation campaign would have you believe.
It stretches back more than a decade and was reaffirmed in a 2018 New York Times Magazine investigative report that climate science was broadly understood across government, academia, and industry.
It was not hidden away in an energy company filing cabinet. EID Climate has highlighted that inconvenient fact for years: the notion that one company secretly possessed unique knowledge simply doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
This is the problem CIEL’s new report creates for the campaign it helped build. Activists portray the industry’s knowledge as uniquely damning. This report shows that despite federal officials funding and reviewing the research, they still continued to support industrial development, encourage domestic energy production, and build an economy around oil and gas.
Courts Have Rejected #ExxonKnew
The theory hasn’t fared much better in court. In what was billed as the “climate trial of the century” brought by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in 2015, the court firmly rejected the #ExxonKnew claims. As EID explained back in 2020:
“It was put to the test…but former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was forced to abandon the claim because he simply didn’t have any evidence. Yet, Schneiderman’s office continued to investigate the company under new theories for three more years, reviewing over four million ExxonMobil documents in the process. Only after being told to “put up or shut up,” did the New York attorney general’s office bring a case of weak accounting claims against the company. The pared down cased was dealt a comprehensive defeat by a New York State Supreme Court justice in 2019.” (emphasis added)
Having struggled to make those claims stick, it’s no surprise that CIEL has pivoted to try and blame governments instead.
Bottom Line: CIEL just can’t seem to connect the dots. The activist groups and all of their friends in the climate litigation campaign keeping pushing a debunked theory while at the same time publishing reports that acknowledges the U.S. government and plenty of others knew about it as well.
This litigation campaign is losing in the courtroom and is also failing the logic test.
