Climate Lawfare Is Stalling America’s Energy Future

Escalating conflict and tensions in the Middle East have once again underscored how vulnerable global energy markets are to geopolitical shocks. In U.S. policy circles, every conversation and debate touches on this issue and highlights the need to build more of each energy source to catch up with the rapidly rising demand.

At BlackRock’s 2026 Infrastructure Summit, government officials and private-sector leaders repeatedly emphasized the need to build more energy infrastructure to meet rising demand. Yet a growing obstacle is slowing that effort: relentless litigation that delays or stops energy and infrastructure projects altogether. A new report by the American Council for Capital Formation looks at various forms of ‘lawfare’ that have been used against projects or private firms, with the ultimate goal of making them uneconomical. Such litigation creates negative effects that ripple through every part of the economy. 

There are three major avenues of litigation that have been heavily utilized: the strategic use of the existing laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and related permitting statutes to delay or halt project development, a growing wave of state and local climate liability actions, and legacy and coastal damage suits, as exemplified in Louisiana. While at first, their goals might seem unrelated, their end results are the same: Subpar infrastructure, an economy held back, higher prices and a widening affordability crisis.

Recent research by the Breakthrough Institute focuses on NEPA, a key law that requires agencies to study the environmental and social impacts of their actions before undertaking them. Between 2013 and 2022, 387 NEPA cases were brought before the U.S. appellate court system, resulting in an average delay of 4.2 years in project start dates. In a follow-up report, the Breakthrough Institute expanded the count of court cases to include over 1,400 cases filed in U.S. District and Circuit Courts and showed that a meaningful subset (7% of projects) of the projects remained in litigation for more than six years, reflecting a long tail of extended delays.