While state and local officials advocate for climate lawsuits in courtrooms across the country, Moscow and Beijing are quietly benefiting from the outcome. Energy has always been a source of geopolitical power, and America’s adversaries understand that constraining U.S. production—even indirectly—reshapes global leverage in their favor. The growing wave of climate litigation against American energy companies risks accomplishing domestically what rival powers have long sought strategically: weakening the industrial foundation that underpins U.S. economic strength and allied security.
America’s adversaries learned something long ago that some of its own politicians still haven’t grasped: energy is power. The leverage to coerce allies, fund military buildups, and reshape the global order. Russia made that lesson viscerally clear when it weaponized its gas pipelines to squeeze Europe before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. American producers stepped into that breach, stabilizing global markets and keeping allied economies from going dark. Meanwhile, China has spent years flooding global markets with subsidized renewables and electric vehicles in a calculated bid to dominate the energy supply chains of the future.
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