The environmental case for Samuel Alito’s $2.9 million oil portfolio

I have spent the last three decades warning you about the climate crisis, and frankly, I am exhausted by the performative purity of the modern environmental movement. The latest hysteria? A new review of financial disclosures by the judicial watchdog Court Accountability reveals that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has gained up to $2.9 million from oil and gas assets since George W. Bush appointed him in 2005.

Predictably, the activists are demanding that Alito recuse himself from an upcoming docket of climate accountability cases involving major fossil fuel firms. They wave this $2.9 million figure around as if it is a smoking gun of corruption. But sure, let’s demand the recusal of the one man on the bench who has actual skin in the game.

I recently sat on a sustainability panel at Davos with the head of equities for a major sovereign wealth fund, and we agreed on one fundamental truth: divestment is dead. If you want to change the trajectory of the carbon majors, you cannot do it by selling your shares and walking away. You have to be in the boardroom. Or, in Alito’s case, you have to be sitting on the highest court in the land, quietly nurturing a multi-million-dollar portfolio of extraction assets so that you truly understand the economic anxieties of the polluter class.

Look at the timeline. Justice Alito did not just buy a few shares of a petroleum conglomerate yesterday to troll the Environmental Protection Agency. He has been carefully holding these assets for nearly two decades. Through the fracking boom, through the Deepwater Horizon spill, through the hottest years on human record, Alito held the line. That kind of long-term asset management is exactly the sort of patient capital we need if we are going to fund the transition to net-zero.

When George W. Bush nominated him to the high court in 2005, the environmental movement was still obsessed with polar bears and ozone holes. Alito, however, saw the future. He looked at the long-term projections of global energy demand and realized that the most effective way to monitor the oil and gas industry was to open a brokerage account. While the rest of us were watching An Inconvenient Truth, Alito was carefully studying the dividend yields of deepwater exploration firms. He was doing the work.

The critics point out that even at the lowest range of estimates, Alito gained almost $400,000 from these investments. My only critique of the Justice is that $400,000 is barely enough to get the attention of a mid-level pipeline lobbyist, let alone force a strategic pivot to renewables. If anything, Alito should be leveraging his judicial immunity to acquire a controlling stake in the Permian Basin. How else is he supposed to hold the industry accountable? By applying the law impartially? Please.

We need judges who understand the existential terror of stranded assets. When the Supreme Court hears the upcoming climate accountability cases—where municipalities are suing oil majors for decades of organized deception—do you really want it decided by a bench of financially insulated coastal elites who have never felt the sting of a volatile crude market? Alito feels every fluctuation in the price of Brent Crude in his own bank account. That makes him an engaged stakeholder.

Linwood understands what the children supergluing their hands to the highway do not. You cannot regulate an industry you do not financially depend on.

Let us talk about carbon footprints for a moment. You probably think you are doing your part because you bought a reusable tote bag and occasionally remember to compost your coffee grounds. Meanwhile, Justice Alito is personally absorbing the scope-three emissions of the entire federal judiciary by maintaining equity in the very companies causing the crisis. He is internalizing the externality.

The financial disclosure forms used by the Supreme Court are famously opaque, requiring justices to report asset values in broad, sweeping ranges. Hence the massive gap between the $400,000 floor and the $2.9 million ceiling. The activists point to this lack of transparency as a fatal flaw in the ethics system. I see it as a beautiful metaphor for climate modeling. We do not know exactly how much Alito has profited, just as we do not know exactly when the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will collapse. The uncertainty is part of the process. You have to learn to live with the variance.

The non-profit Court Accountability, which shared this exclusive analysis with the Guardian, seems to believe that exposing this financial windfall will somehow shame the justice into stepping down from the docket. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the conservative legal movement's relationship with shame. When you have spent twenty years meticulously cultivating a judicial philosophy that equates corporate spending with free speech, you do not recuse yourself when the corporations speak directly into your brokerage account. You turn up the volume. Alito's refusal to step aside isn't a conflict of interest; it is the ultimate expression of his jurisprudence. He is quite literally putting his money where his mouth is.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court is currently in the business of dismantling the administrative state, severely restricting the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. The progressive left views this as a catastrophic power grab by an unaccountable tribunal. But they are missing the larger picture of corporate engagement. By personally profiting from the very industries he is deregulating, Alito is closing the loop. It is a perfect circular economy of judicial influence.

Some of my more hysterical colleagues have accused the Court of greenwashing its decisions—dressing up purely profit-driven deregulation in the language of constitutional originalism. But there is nothing washed about $2.9 million in hard, verifiable fossil fuel capital. Alito isn't pretending to be an environmentalist to win over the public. He is proudly, transparently cashing checks from the entities responsible for the sixth mass extinction. In an era of rampant corporate virtue-signaling, I find his unapologetic extraction-profiteering remarkably refreshing.

If the environmental left really wanted to solve this problem, they wouldn't be begging for a recusal. They would be raising capital. If you do not like Alito's oil and gas portfolio, buy him out. Set up a GoFundMe, pool your resources, and offer the justice $3 million in high-yield wind and solar equities. If you cannot outbid the fossil fuel industry for the loyalty of the United States Supreme Court, that is a failure of your own fundraising strategy, not a failure of judicial ethics.

I was discussing this very dynamic over a plate of ethically sourced scallops in Geneva last month with a former UN climate envoy. He confessed, off the record of course, that the greatest hurdle to the energy transition isn't technology or even political will—it is that not enough powerful people stand to get hilariously rich from it yet.

Alito has solved this problem. He has found a way to monetize the collapse of the biosphere through the American judicial system. We should not be investigating his financial disclosures. We should be studying them. I, for one, would like to know exactly which Texas wildcatters the justice is overweight on. If his stock picks are as aggressive as his dissents on environmental protections, the man is sitting on a goldmine.