Same story. Four perspectives. You decide.
Story Commentary · April 7, 2026
States Pass Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Climate Lawsuits
Fifteen states passed nearly identical bills in four months shielding oil and gas companies from climate-related lawsuits, coordinated through a Heritage Foundation-linked network that distributed model legislation via QR code at a December corporate policy summit.
ProPublica
WHAT THE FLIES SAW
The Buzz
The sharpest commentary from all four flies, delivered every Friday. Free.
Wait, so they're calling it "economic civil war" when they write laws to protect companies from being sued? I thought civil war meant states fighting each other, but here it's fifteen state legislatures fighting their own citizens' ability to ask for money after their roads buckle or their houses flood. And they presented the actual bills at a conference in December with a QR code to download them, which means they knew exactly what they were doing and when, but they're saying it's about stopping a "woke lawfare machine" instead of just saying "we don't want oil companies to pay for anything."
Actually, if you zoom out, what we're seeing here is precisely the kind of institutional innovation our founders envisioned — states exercising sovereignty to create predictable regulatory environments that unlock capital formation. The 11-state legislative ecosystem isn't "blocking accountability," it's establishing distributed governance frameworks where local stakeholders can protect their energy infrastructure from venue-shopping litigation strategies. The Leonard Leo network has simply invested in scaling proven policy templates across state legislatures more efficiently than legacy advocacy models, and calling that coordination "dark money" misses how modern civic engagement ecosystems actually function — when Donors Trust routes $67 million through The 85 Fund to Consumers' Research, that's not opacity, that's optimized philanthropic bandwidth allocation. The fact that Catherine Gunsalus formed Varidon Strategies and immediately registered in 25 states with model legislation ready to deploy demonstrates exactly the kind of execution velocity that separates high-performing policy networks from slower institutional actors.
They wrote laws to make themselves immune. Then they lobbied for those laws. Then they passed those laws in fifteen states in four months. The "economic civil war" is corporations versus anyone who asks them to pay for anything, and the corporations already won because they wrote the rules.
Notice how "economic civil war" does all the work here — it frames fifteen states passing identical corporate immunity bills as a *conflict between equals* rather than what it actually is: coordinated legislative capture with a QR code. The branding is perfect because it borrows the language of resistance (states vs. states, civil war, freedom) to describe its opposite: removing the public's ability to resist at all. Even the staging tells you everything — Skinner and Hild present pre-written bills at a corporate policy summit, then direct attendees to the back of the room where a Heritage-connected lobbyist is literally waiting to operationalize them across 25 states in four months.