In April 2023, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who holds stock in seven oil and gas companies, recused himself from voting on a cert petition brought by fossil fuel giants Suncor and ExxonMobil in Suncor v. Boulder County. Boulder is one of dozens of parallel lawsuits being pursued by municipal and state governments seeking damages for decades of Big Oil deception regarding the climate harms that these companies knew their fossil fuel products would cause. Suncor and Exxon hoped that Boulder would allow them to circumvent Alito’s recusal obligations—as their lawyers admitted in an earlier Supreme Court filing, which stressed that the suit was “uniquely positioned” because it had just two defendants and thus was “less likely” than other cases to “present recusal issues.” But Alito did, rightfully, recuse, and without his vote the cert petition failed.
A couple years later, the fossil fuel industry tried again. This time, despite the fact that these were the same petitioners in the same case, they got a very different outcome: Alito declined to recuse himself, and in February 2026, presumably with Alito’s vote, cert was granted. The Court will be considering Boulder in the fall, giving the Court’s rightwing majority a great opportunity to kneecap one of the few avenues remaining to communities seeking accountability for climate harms and deception.
But advocates for fairness aren’t giving up yet. Yesterday, a coalition of watchdog groups—including environmental, civil liberties, and good government organizations—sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee calling for an investigation into whether Alito’s refusal to recuse in this case violates federal law. As the letter states, “If Justice Alito will not take it upon himself to follow the law, which requires his recusal from any proceeding in which his ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’ the Senate Committee on the Judiciary must step in.”
The letter highlights what may be the most interesting aspect of this story: the reversal. What happened between 2023 and 2026 that caused Alito to change course and come to a different recusal decision on the exact same case? There don’t seem to be any substantive changes that could explain Alito’s shift. He still appears to have holdings in many of the fossil fuel companies that stand to gain the most from a court ruling limiting the ability of local communities to sue Big Oil for climate deception. He also has major investments in a high dividend yield fund in which Exxon is the third largest holding.
And that’s not the only point of impropriety. Alito’s billionaire buddy, Paul Singer, has even more riding on this case. Singer is the founder and president of Elliott Investment Management, a hedge fund that has over $2.3 billion invested in Suncor, one of the two petitioners in Boulder. If Singer’s name sounds familiar in connection to Alito, it’s probably because of the 2023 scandal in which Alito failed to disclose gifts from the billionaire, including private jet flights and a luxury fishing trip in Alaska.
So then and now, Boulder has the potential to directly and indirectly benefit both Alito and his billionaire patron. Refusing to recuse from such a case is wildly unethical. As former senior justice department official Lisa Graves put it, “Judges should not be ruling on cases where their ruling could benefit themselves financially. That’s just a core principle of judicial ethics.”
While the underlying ethical dynamics have not shifted since 2023, the political dynamics have, thanks in large part to the efforts of one very powerful man: Leonard Leo. Leo has become infamous as the primary architect of our current far-right Supreme Court. The label fits: He shepherded all three of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks, and his octopus-like network of conservative dark money groups ran the multimillion dollar PR campaigns that provided air cover for their confirmations—as well as for those of Alito and Roberts before them.
Starting in 2024, Leo turned his dark money machine towards another goal: getting the Supreme Court to squash local and state climate accountability litigation. This push has taken many forms. Leo organized Republican attorneys general, whose association he funds, to file amici briefs urging the Court to take up various climate cases. In 2024, a Leo-funded front group called the Alliance for Consumers produced videos and ran social media ads calling for the Court to take action.
In 2025, another front group, the American Energy Institute, launched a campaign to frame climate lawsuits as the “biggest risk” to Trump’s energy agenda. And in 2026, in addition to actively promoting climate denial junk science to judges, a constellation of groups with ties to Leo began coordinating a massive effort to promulgate and pass legislation through Republican-led state legislatures to shield Big Oil from climate liability. This push has most recently culminated in the introduction by Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Harriet Hageman of federal legislation to immunize the fossil fuel industry on a national level.
While we can’t know for sure what motivated Alito’s recusal reversal, we can answer the question of what happened between 2023 and 2026: The far right legal movement and all the dark money machinery behind it sent an overwhelmingly clear message to the conservative members of the Supreme Court that they needed to fall in line and take action to guarantee Big Oil’s continued impunity, ethical obligations be damned.
Of course, if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court were more committed to upholding the rule of law than to answering to political bosses like Leonard Leo, this kind of campaign wouldn’t make a big difference. But justices like Alito function more like Republican politicians than impartial magistrates. They see their primary obligation as advancing the conservative movement’s political and policy goals. So it’s not hard to imagine that, when the head honcho of that movement said “vote for the cert petition,” Alito voted for the cert petition.
But perhaps he might still be made to feel some amount of shame. As the watchdog letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee notes, earlier this year Alito belatedly recused himself from further participation in another Big Oil case, Chevron USA v. Plaquemines Parish, after reporting exposed his financial interest in a party to the suit, ConocoPhillips. Perhaps under pressure from the Senate, he could be pushed to do the right thing here, as well. Of course, it rarely pays to bet on GOP justices acting with honor. But we shouldn’t give up hope that—under a close enough spotlight—they might still be made to act like their ethical obligations count for something.
