The Argument
On Monday, Oct. 5, the Supreme Court heard Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, No. 25-170. Boulder sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in 2018 under Colorado's consumer-protection law, alleging the companies' conduct contributed to climate harms in the county, such as flooding and wildfire. The Colorado Supreme Court let the case proceed. The oil companies say federal law, chiefly the Clean Air Act and federal common law, pre-empts state claims over global emissions. The Trump administration filed a brief in September 2025 urging the justices to take the case. Justice Alito did not take part, so eight justices heard it, and reports describe them as divided, with doubts about both sides' sweeping arguments. There is no decision yet.
An opinion essay published this week, whose text was supplied to the Old Goat, argues that even a win for Suncor would not end the matter, because of attribution science, the discipline that runs climate models with and without human carbon dioxide to estimate how much a heat wave or flood was made likelier. The essay says more than twenty municipal suits are pending in state courts, along with two tribal suits, consumer-fraud cases brought by eleven state attorneys general, a Vermont climate-superfund law and a Washington State wrongful-death case. Those counts are the essay's, not the Old Goat's.
The Number That Travels
The figure behind the essay's argument is real and traceable. A study in Nature led by Christopher Callahan, then at Dartmouth and now at Stanford, with Justin Mankin, estimated that emissions from the 111 largest carbon producers between 1991 and 2020 caused about $28 trillion in heat-wave losses worldwide. The ten biggest producers account for more than half of it, and Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP are among them. The essay cites per-company figures of $1.98 trillion, $1.91 trillion and $1.45 trillion. The Old Goat could confirm the $28 trillion total and the company group from press coverage of the paper, but not those three individual numbers, and does not repeat them as fact. The study counts heat only, and it is a modeled estimate with the uncertainties that implies. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said "attribution science is not science." The essay replies that the field is covered at length by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and two National Academies reports. The Old Goat is not qualified to referee the science and does not try.
What The Money Says
A bill called the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, introduced April 17 by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, would bar liability at any stage of the fossil-fuel supply chain, require pending cases to be dismissed, and overturn state "polluter pays" laws. Utah enacted a state law of the same family on March 24. The American Petroleum Institute thanked the sponsors. Reporting says the plan is not to pass it by itself but to attach it to a must-pass vehicle.
The obvious move is to follow the donations. The Old Goat did, in the Federal Election Commission's disbursement records for the industry's committees. The result is small, and that is the finding. In the 2026 cycle:
- ExxonMobil's PAC gave Cruz's campaign $10,000 (two $5,000 payments on Jan. 14, 2026) and Hageman's campaign $2,500 (Mar. 2, 2026).
- The American Petroleum Institute's PAC gave Cruz $1,500 (Oct. 6, 2025) and Hageman $2,500 (Feb. 3, 2026).
- Chevron's employees' PAC gave Hageman $5,000 ($2,500 on May 14 and $2,500 on June 18, 2026). No Chevron payment to Cruz turned up.
- Koch Industries' PAC: no payments to either found.
That is $11,500 to Cruz and $10,000 to Hageman from the four committees searched. It excludes individual executives' checks, super PAC spending, trade-association dues and lobbying, none of which this search covers.Donors → Two things follow. The immunity push cannot honestly be reduced to a donation trail, and anyone who tells it that way will lose the argument on the numbers. And the asymmetry is the story: the essay says the exposure the bill removes runs to hundreds of billions of dollars, against a few thousand in direct PAC checks. The Old Goat's INFERENCE is that the asset being protected is the liability itself, and that the cheapest line in the whole transaction is the vote.
The Check Nobody Wants To See Come Back Empty
The Old Goat also ran the routine test the site runs on any "they knew first" suspicion: did anyone at the defendants trade around the argument date? Insiders' Form 4 filings from Aug. 1 to Oct. 8 show no Exxon Mobil transactions at all. EDGAR lists Exxon-filed Form 4s dated May 27 and July 1 (two); the three the Old Goat opened report no transaction lines. Suncor and BP are foreign filers and do not file Form 4s, so no such record can exist. At Chevron, John Hess sold about $157 million on Aug. 3 and Michael Wirth about $64 million on Aug. 14, two months before the argument, both as option exercise-and-sale blocks of the kind that follow earnings, with only small director entries since. The one same-week oil sale the scan caught, a $6.1 million sale on Oct. 5 by Diamondback Energy director Charles Meloy, fits his own cadence of sales on May 8, June 16, Aug. 3 and Oct. 5, and Diamondback is not a party to the case. That is a clean negative: no signal, reported as one.Suspects →
Why It Matters Anyway
The essay's best line comes from Georgetown's Aisha Saad, who says attribution science makes climate change "not only legible but litigable." Tobacco fought liability for decades until states sued for the Medicaid costs, and asbestos plaintiffs lost for years before they won. The Old Goat does not know how this Court will rule and will not guess from a split argument. If it sides with Suncor, the immunity arrives by judgment instead of by statute, and the Cruz-Hageman bill becomes the back-up. If it does not, the bill becomes the front-line. In both versions the money stays small and the stakes stay large.
Follow the money, and sometimes the money is a rounding error. Then follow the vote.
The Old Goat will update this dispatch when the Court rules, when the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act moves, or when new Exxon, Chevron or Diamondback filings land.