This article originally appeared in Real Clear Energy February 20, 2026.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has shifted the legal strategy in her fight against fossil fuel companies. Nessel’s office filed an antitrust lawsuit in January that reads less like a traditional competition case and more like an alternate history of how energy markets supposedly would have evolved but for a decades-long conspiracy. The complaint does not merely allege misconduct; it imagines an entirely different Michigan – one where electric vehicles dominate roads, renewable energy is ubiquitous, and consumers enjoy lower costs and broader choices in transportation and home energy.
In this “but-for” world, electric vehicles would no longer be niche or luxury products. They would be rolling off assembly lines across the state, parked in driveways in every region, and charging at grocery stores, highway rest stops and converted gas stations. Renewable electricity – delivered through a fully green grid or even a dedicated 100% renewable network – would power those vehicles. Homes and businesses would rely primarily on solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal energy, with fossil fuels relegated to a secondary role.
This vision quickly collides with reality. As is noted in the case, Michigan has roughly 9.4 million vehicles on the road — and fewer than 180,000 of them are electric. Nearly 70% of the fleet consists of trucks and SUVs, not compact commuter cars. The state has about 5,000 gas stations compared to roughly 1,800 public charging stations. Renewables account for less than 10% of transportation energy use and less than 10% of primary energy overall. Gasoline and oil still supply roughly 90% of transportation energy – not because of some hidden cartel switch, but because consumers continue to choose them given price, convenience, range, and reliability.
Nessel’s case is absurd because her alternative reality doesn’t exist anywhere – regardless of the fossil fuel industry’s supposed power. And it is fantastical because in fact Michigan has a multitude of incentives that distort the market in favor of renewable energy sources and companies. If there is an antitrust case here, it should be filed in the other direction.
Michigan already mandates renewable energy through a renewable portfolio standard. The state has poured billions of taxpayer dollars into electric vehicle manufacturing, battery plants, wind projects and solar development. At the same time, Michigan’s electricity market remains tightly controlled, with limited customer choice and little retail competition. If fossil fuel companies truly possessed the power to suppress viable alternatives, these mandates and subsidies would be inexplicable.
Rather than grappling with those contradictions, the lawsuit leans heavily on a curious narrative: Oil companies allegedly misled the public about climate science, distorted academic research by “capturing” universities, and slowed the adoption of cleaner technologies. What is new here is not the story, but the legal theory. Instead of tort claims, Michigan repackages these allegations as antitrust violations, arguing that public skepticism and slower EV adoption are evidence of suppressed competition.
The complaint even attributes decades of public opinion polling trends to this alleged deception campaign, asserting that Americans would otherwise have rushed into electric vehicles and renewable energy. That assumption is tenuous. Consumers haven’t adopted electric vehicles en masse because of price and questions about their range.
Behind the scenes, this lawsuit also fits neatly into a national climate-litigation strategy driven by politically aligned class-action firms. These firms present themselves as contingency-fee crusaders, but they are often already flush with funding from activist donors and public-interest pipelines. Simply persuading a state attorney general to sign on is itself a major win: It generates headlines, confers legitimacy, attracts more donors, and encourages additional states to pile on.
That dynamic suggests the case is less about winning on the merits than about momentum. The relief Michigan seeks is sweeping – treble damages for alleged overcharges, broad injunctions against vaguely defined “anticompetitive conduct,” and attorneys’ fees. Even if the legal theory is shaky, the political payoff is immediate.
The larger issue here is institutional. Courts are not designed to set climate or energy policy, especially when those policies require tradeoffs among cost, reliability, consumer preference, and technological readiness. Michigan already has a legislature, regulators and energy planners empowered to make those decisions. Using antitrust law to force an imagined energy transition through litigation risks turning judges into energy czars and law firms into shadow policymakers.
The attorney general’s lawsuit says more about the ambitions of climate litigators than about the realities of Michigan’s energy markets. The alternate reality described in the complaint may be rhetorically appealing, but it is not how consumers behave, how infrastructure develops, or how competition law is supposed to work.
