How a Progressive Legal Tool Became a Weapon for Climate-Change Skeptics

April 1, 2025

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Republicans are undoing years of climate progress under the second Trump administration using an unlikely progressive tool: antitrust law.

Their antitrust strategy, which may pose the next great threat to climate organizing in the U.S., is to sue companies that work together on green initiatives, alleging they are colluding in violation of the antitrust laws. While untested in courts, Republicans are increasingly pushing this novel theory to prosecute organizations that join green coalitions, and they have already succeeded in fracturing many of the world’s leading climate alliances.

The Republican antitrust offensive has “had a very real chilling effect on the financial sector” and is “almost certain to have a detrimental effect on achieving climate goals in the U.S.,” said Hana Heineken, an attorney for ClientEarth, a legal nonprofit that advocates for climate accountability.

The main U.S. antitrust statute, the Sherman Act, prohibits competitors from agreeing with one another to fix prices, limit output, or otherwise restrict competition. Republicans assert that agreements among businesses to promote environmental goals, known as Environmental, Social, and Governance goals, or ESG, violate the Sherman Act because they reflect a “collusive effort to restrict the supply of coal, oil, and gas,” as five Republican Senators wrote in a letter to U.S. law firms in 2022.

After years of fending off progressive climate legislation, Republicans are now on the offensive, using a barrage of antitrust lawsuits and investigations to try to break up the private-sector coalitions that emerged amid the political gridlock.

In 2022 and 2023, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee and 19 red states launched sprawling investigations into the world’s preeminent ESG programs, including Climate Action 110+, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, through which many of the world’s largest financial institutions pledged to pursue net-zero goals. In a June 2024 report, Republicans on the committee claimed these net-zero pacts constituted a “climate cartel” engaged in “apparent violations of longstanding U.S. antitrust law.”

Antitrust lawsuits quickly followed after Donald Trump won the November 2024 presidential election.

Two weeks after the election, the state of Nebraska sued four major truck manufactures who agreed to follow a California law requiring them to phase out combustion engines, claiming the “Clean Truck Partnership” constituted an “industry-wide conspiracy.”

The following week, 11 Republican-led states sued the world’s three largest institutional investors—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—alleging they illegally conspired through ESG pacts to reduce coal production among companies whose stock they jointly own.

Most recently, in December 2024, the House Judiciary Committee claimed that financial institutions colluded to replace ExxonMobil board members who refused to endorse certain climate goals. The committee then issued a new set of demands to over 60 financial institutions, ramping up its ongoing investigation.

The Republican antitrust offensive has transformed the ESG landscape, dismantling many of the world’s top industry initiatives even before courts have had a chance to weigh the antitrust claims being asserted.

In January 2025, the six largest U.S. banks each left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, once hailed as “the most promising private sector–led initiative to date,” in what was deemed a response to Republican legal scrutiny. Also this January, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative suspended its operations after several top members withdrew, citing legal concerns. More than 70 organizations also have withdrawn from Climate Action 100+ during the course of the GOP-led antitrust investigations.

The leader of the Republican investigation, Rep. Jim Jordan, took credit for these departures, calling them a “huge win” for his probe and urging all U.S. businesses to “abandon the climate cartel.”

The rapid dissolution of ESG pacts in the face of Republican legal pressure has raised concerns that years of private climate organizing may come undone under the threat of antitrust litigation, irrespective of its legal merits.

The Republican antitrust threats “certainly have set back climate finance campaigns in the U.S.” and have “had a major impact” on the net-zero landscape, said Patrick McCully, a senior analyst for Reclaim Finance, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for a more sustainable banking sector. He said the threat of antitrust lawsuits has “frightened numerous banks, investors, and insurers” who “don’t want to deal with the hassle and potential brand damage” of litigation.

Democrats, in response, have claimed that Republicans are weaponizing the antitrust laws they normally disfavor for political ends.

“There is no theory of antitrust law that prevents private investors from working together to capture the risks associated with climate change,” wrote Rep. Jerry Nadler in a June 2024 rebuttal report, which claimed Republicans were bullying companies into abandoning ESG using a “sham” antitrust theory borrowed from a conservative think tank.

The antitrust theory being asserted—that climate pacts constitute anticompetitive collusion—has sparked fierce debate among antitrust experts, who disagree about whether shared commitments to climate goals violate the antitrust laws.

“The claim that joint ESG initiatives are ‘climate cartels’ is a legally unfounded weaponization of the antitrust laws,” said Nicole Veno, an antitrust litigator and co-author of a forthcoming article, “Climate and Antitrust,” in the Georgetown Environmental Law Review. Veno argues that climate agreements generally do not violate the antitrust laws because they do not limit output of a consumer product, fix prices, or comprise an illegal group boycott—the three main antitrust theories Republican have put forward.

Doug Peterson, the former Nebraska attorney general who helped spearhead the GOP’s antitrust strategy, believes the Republican antitrust scrutiny is well founded. “When businesses coordinate and collectively commit to impacting market factors under the guise of ESG, those agreements can restrain trade and harm consumers,” Peterson said in an email. “As antitrust enforcers, state AGs are appropriately addressing this behavior.”

Fueling this debate is the lack of clear antitrust guidance from U.S. courts and antitrust agencies. While the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have clarified that there is no ESG exemption to the antitrust laws, they have not addressed the extent to which pacts to achieve net-zero emissions, or follow state climate laws, may pose antitrust risks.

This is in sharp contrast to Europe, where competition authorities have put forth detailed guidelines on sustainability agreements, including a “soft safe harbor” that permits green energy pacts under certain conditions.

Denise Hearn, a senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment who has criticized the GOP’s antitrust push, says it is now up to courts to adjudicate these claims on a case-by-case basis: “Antitrust law is fact-specific, and the accusations over the course of two years have been vague and wide-reaching, lumping a huge diversity of financial institutions (banks, insurers, asset owners, index funds) and nonprofit groups together under one banner.”

How courts ultimately resolve these disputes could shape the future of U.S. climate organizing.

If successful, the Texas-led lawsuit could effectively end joint climate initiatives among financial institutions, which would pose “an existential threat to ESG,” as Carrie Campbell Severino, the president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, predicted in National Review.

And even if the current lawsuits fail, many expect that climate organizing will continue to shift away from corporate ESG and toward state-level regulatory policy as Republican legal pressure on ESG mounts.

That appears likely. The Judiciary Committee has said it will continue its antitrust investigations, and Project 2025, the conservative plan that positioned itself as a blueprint for the second Trump administration, has called on the FTC to set up a special antitrust task force to investigate ESG.

Meanwhile, the ESG landscape continues to unravel. In March, another wave of large companies, including Deloitte, Lloyd’s, and J.P. Morgan’s asset management arm, withdrew from major net-zero alliances, and Wells Fargo formally dropped its net-zero goals.

There is little precedent for how swiftly Republicans have undermined ESG with antitrust threats. While antitrust lawsuits have disrupted industries before, industrywide change typically comes after years of litigation and court orders, not at the outset of a case, particularly one based on tenuous legal theories.

Veno attributes ESG’s downfall to the lack of financial incentives to defend it. “These companies are trying to do the right thing, but they don’t have much financial incentive to fight back against baseless attacks on ESG agreements, which rarely come with short-term financial upside.”

As the Trump administration begins its broader push to roll back environmental protections, Republicans have already scored a major victory by decimating the private-sector coalitions that were once seen as a backstop for deregulatory efforts—in large part due to a novel antitrust theory that has yet to be upheld in court.