Why has Phil Weiser filed so many lawsuits?

Colorado attorney general — and gubernatorial candidate — says when you’re facing a playground bully, you fight back

by Allen Best

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser wants the Democratic nomination for governor, a campaign that itself nearly constitutes a full-time job. I joked to a friend this week that I had not been to a conference in the last year where he had not spoken about water or energy or something else.

Later that morning, I heard Weiser once again, this time at the Colorado Solar and Storage Association annual conference. As always, he displayed great intelligence and uncommon intensity. He smiles, but rarely.

In his remarks, Weiser laid out his resolve to push back against what he called the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to usurp state authority, renege on prior agreements, and withhold Congressional appropriations. All of this has provoked 56 lawsuits and he suggested a strong record of success.

More are coming. Falling under that latter category is contemplated litigation against the U.S. Department of Energy, which in December declared an energy “emergency” when ordering Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association to keep the Craig No. 1 coal-burning unit available beyond its scheduled retirement.

“Sometimes people say, ‘Why are you having to sue this administration so much?” Weiser said. “Because they continue to do so many illegal things that harm Colorado. I am not someone who says we should try to make nice.”

Weiser used a schoolyard metaphor. “My view is, when you’re up against a bully who’s taking your lunch money, saying, ‘Sure, here you take it,’ is not going to be a good strategy,” he said. His strategy is to “fight back for what is ours” to “make sure that the rule of law is followed.” He called the efforts of President Donald Trump to undermine the development of wind energy “arbitrary and capricious.”

Lawsuits are his tool. He suggested that this approach has been very effective in fighting Trump administration actions — and inactions — in what he described as the efforts to push Colorado and other states back into the 20^th century.

Working with the locals

Weiser also suggested he was capable of a very different posture in some circumstances. That reflection was spurred by a question from Roger Freeman, a former board member for COSSA. pointed to conflicts over siting of utility-scale solar in rural Colorado, a subtheme of the conference.

In his response, Weiser pointed to his efforts to show up in communities. He made specific mention of working with a Rifle-based organization called JOLT (Joint Organizations Leading Transition), which has a constituency primarily in northwestern Colorado and is concerned about what the energy transition means for Craig, Meeker and other communities.

“I would encourage (us) to have as much empathy (and) understanding as we can and listen as hard as we can. It is true that solar provides all these incredible benefits. It is also true that for communities where coal plants are being closed, it is devastating. And it’s important that our leaders and this industry are able to both move forward and for people to feel listened to, supported, and cared about. And when people don’t feel listened to, cared about, or supported by their leaders, they get angry,” he said.

“Right now, we’re at a time of rising culture wars, rising rural-urban divides, and I’ve been very focused on how we bridge those divides, how people make sure they know that I, as a leader, am showing up for them, so we can build trust. Because if you don’t start with this point of shared trust, you’re in trouble.”

As for permitting challenges for renewable energy, some have suggested more muscular state authority. A bill submitted with that goal was watered down upon passage into a compromise. Weiser warned against unnecessary muscle-flexing.

“That is a high-risk strategy for spending a lot of time fighting where, in many cases, if you ask the question differently, ‘How can I help you move ahead in this project,” a lot of them will say, ‘We are overwhelmed. If you can help us with more capacity, we could permit quicker.’”

Weiser then cited his work eight years ago in the opioid crisis. “I was hearing about the devastating opioid crisis that has taken so many lives from us, and I looked into the background. It starts in the boardroom with companies like Purdue Pharma. So we sued Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family. We held the Sackler family accountable.”

In early 2025 that litigation yielded a national settlement of $7.4 billion. In an announcement in January 2025, Weiser said Colorado expected to get nearly $76 million during the next 15 years.

What to do with that money? Some wanted the state to decide how to spend the money. “But I started by reaching out to those local governments, and I asked them the question, ‘What do you need? How can we work with you?’”

In Weiser’s telling, local communities were taken aback and then responded: “Can you get us money to help us do this work quickly without making us go through all these terrible hoops that take forever?”

The resulting plan was to award 90% of the money to local government and regional efforts with the requirement that the money be spent in a transparent way. “There is accountability after the fact to make sure it’s spent the way it’s supposed to be, and we work with them together to solve the problem,” he said.

This approach, he suggested, has had a successful consequence.

“Over the last couple of years, overdose deaths from opioids have gone down by about 25% in Colorado. We can work together with local governments to make this work. But it’s got to involve real trust-building, real listening and collaborative problem-solving.”

Difficulties of permitting

The next question posed to Weiser from the audience hugged the same theme: What specifically could Weiser do (presumably as governor) to reduce the difficulties of permitting for renewable energy projects?

Weiser suggested the need to create more shared and standard approaches. “As I mentioned, we do have this system in which local governments each have authority,” he said. “But I think they are looking for and willing to be helped if they’re seeing the state as a real partner. And so I think there’s a way to reduce it on that front.”

Also, he added, “The state can be a huge pain in the ass and part of the problem, too.”

What specifically does Weiser advocate? He acknowledged that he had no specifics but invited the solar community to share thoughts while also recognizing the growing urgency posed by the need to meet Colorado’s greenhouse gas reduction goals for 2030.

Earlier in his remarks, Weiser said that Colorado is in a “little bit of a dilemma” because of leadership in the executive branch of the federal government “that would like to move America back to the 20^th century when it comes to energy while the rest of the world is moving to the 21^st century.” South Africa, he noted, has briskly moved to having 10% of its total energy from solar power in just the last five years.

The Trump administration, he said, has engaged in “illegal efforts” to keep open more expensive, unreliable and dirty sources of energy in Colorado, a reference to a coal-burning unit at Craig.

The answer, he said, citing former Gov. Bill Ritter, is to “call the clean energy transition what it is, the greatest economic and moral opportunity of our time.”

“We need to both defend the ground that we’ve already gained and continue to move forward,” he said.

Rollbacks are illegal

Trump “rollbacks are not only harmful, but they are illegal, contradicting policy choices made by Congress and violating the sovereign powers of states in ways that are often unprecedented,” Weiser said.

“Just take last month for one particularly painful example. Since 2009 the Environmental Protection Agency, following an earlier Supreme Court decision, had concluded, what pretty much any fair observer would say our changing climate and all the harms it occasions: droughts, wildfires, variable weather and more, is bad for human health. It would seem to be common sense. It is the scientific consensus, and it follows from a prior Supreme Court decision. Nonetheless, disregarding my testimony and others, the EPA said we’re going to undo this endangerment finding. We will be challenging this in court.”

Weiser also cited the Trump administration attempt to end the Clean Air Act waivers that have allowed California — and then Colorado and other states — to adopt more strict vehicle standards, driving the electric vehicle transition.” We’re in court challenging this,” he said.

Use of emergency power by the Trump administration was also cited by Weiser. “When this administration uses the term emergency, I think about the scene from ‘The Princess Bride,’ where Inigo Montoya says, ‘I do not think that word means what you think it means.’”

“Usually, that word had been reserved for natural disasters and accidents like hurricanes or oil spills. But no, this administration says that at a time that oil-and-gas production is at an all-time high. The problem is we’re not producing enough of it, and therefore we need to fast track projects like a plan to move waxy crude oil right along the Colorado River, disregarding the obvious question. Could something go wrong here?”

“We’re challenging this made-up emergency in court to protect our land, air and water. This is at a time when coal plants like the one in Craig are not only dirtier sources of energy, but more expensive and less reliable. This administration’s efforts to intrude on state sovereignty to keep them open is yet another painful and illegal action in this moment and yet another cause for a future litigation that this office will be bringing.”

Power of the purse

Weiser went on to talk about the Trump administration’s efforts to “run rough shod””
over the Congressional power of the purse.

“We never have seen this before in American history. The constitution says the federal government, the executive, will faithfully execute the laws, which means when Congress directs spending.

Before, no administration has said it wouldn’t follow through on the grants if it doesn’t like the state that is to benefit from the spending. “That’s not how our system works.”

Here again, Colorado has sued, this time in February — for $600 million due Colorado for a carbon storage hub in Pueblo sponsored by the Colorado School of Mines, an effort led by Colorado State University to reduce methane emissions, and a project in Boulder involving tandem solar-cell technology.

This is after a previous lawsuit against the EPA to dislodge $7 billion in the solar-for-all program intended to deploy solar projects for low-income and disadvantaged areas. Colorado has already invested $158 million to deliver solar to more than 20,000 low-income households.

Colorado has also won a preliminary injunction in a case involving the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program. “We’re going to continue to stand up against his illegal conduct.”

Policy questions

Weiser shifted gears, so to speak, from trying to protect progress made to “driving in a direction where we know where the future is. And how do we make sure Colorado is an energy leader?” He mentioned several Colorado-centric policy questions:

How to make sure the grid is transparent, accessible and has dispatchable sources of energy. “We need to make sure that that data on where there’s a need for more solar is accessible,” he said.
The value of more distributed energy and storage, as has become evident during the stepped-up electricity shutdowns by Xcel Energy and other utilities during windstorms in the aftermath of the Marshall Fire settlement.
More distributed solar – in yet another case involving litigation.
Flexible interconnection opportunity.

Weiser ended his prepared remarks by assuring his audience of several hundred listeners at the COSSA conference that Colorado “will be one of the bright spots. We are going to support one another, and we’re going to find ways to help us be a national leader in, as Bill Ritter put it, ‘an economic and more imperative.’”

You can read Weiser’s prepared remarks (with footnotes) at the attorney general’s website.

This story was amended because it incorrectly attributed a question posed by Roger Freeman to Chris Hansen.