Judges shouldn’t write laws that anti-fossil fuel factions can’t get Congress and the People to enforce
Paul Driessen
Earth’s climate has changed many times over the past half billion years. But activists claim that recent or future changes are the result of fossil fuel use and agricultural practices.
These activities increase the level of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (0.04, 0.0002 and 0.00003 percent of the atmosphere, respectively), which are suspected to change the climate and weather. Water vapor, Earth’s complex and chaotic climate system, and powerful solar and cosmic forces combined to bring about the Carboniferous Period (coal age), ice ages, Little Ice Ages, warm periods, and fluctuations in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. probably no longer relevant.
UN, US and EU climate activists, politicians and bureaucrats then blame fossil fuels for heat waves, winters, hurricanes, forest fires, floods, droughts and even abusive husbands. Kamala Harris says man-made climate change is forcing millions of illegal migrants to cross its borders by 2021.
Despite all this, the climate consortium has failed to implement a viable and enforceable international agreement the whole country to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Failed to make the US Congress national legislation – or make a convincing, vigorously debated case that reducing some of the GHGs could stabilize the planet’s temperature and climate conditions that have never been stable.
So the consortium used another cunning strategy: managing fossil fuel technology and agricultural practices into oblivion; ignores the 63% of global GHGs that come from China, India and a hundred other developing countries; and censoring and silencing experts and talk show hosts who show inappropriate facts, data and analysis.
Climate activists have also filed a lawsuit in state court against eight US oil companies whose products together account for a fraction of the 11% of global GHG emissions emitted by the United States.
Nearly three dozen ultra-progressive jurisdictions want judges in friendly states to resolve complex issues that arise and affect every family, business, city, state and country on Earth. Instead of scientific and legislative debate and process, they want judges to punish energy companies for causing “dangerous climate change.”
The litigants claim to be trying to save our planet from climate catastrophe. The real goal is to reduce driving, flying, household heating and cooling, red meat consumption, living standards and free speech, even if doing so with minimal or no impact on emissions or the climate.
They want to avoid a higher federal court that would review their far-reaching claims from a national, international, scientific and economic perspective. He worries that the U.S. Supreme Court could decide whether left-leaning cities or states can circumvent the legislative process and use state courts to enforce radical environmental and social agendas.
There is nothing ethical, legal or constitutional about this crony forum-shopping and backroom dealing. This is another reason plaintiffs panic about the potential intervention of the Supremes, and argue that state judges can competently adjudicate the matter.
To ensure the “competence” of the judiciary, the Environmental Law Institute launched a parallel effort, the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), to ensure that judges receive “authoritative, objective and reliable education about climate science, the impacts of climate change, and how climate science emerges in law.
Of course, as Humpty Dumpty would have told Alice, when the CJP uses a word (such as authority, objective, reliable, science or justice), it means only what it chooses, nothing more and nothing less, because the main question is who wants to be a master – activist litigators and judges, or We the People and our elected representatives.
Having another question, the CJP is funded by the same outfit that funded the climate lawsuit. The JPB Foundation gave $1 million to CJP and $1.15 million to the leftist Tides Foundation Collective Action Fund, which pays the law firm Sher Edling to file lawsuits like this one. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation donated $500,000 to CJP and $150,000 to the Action Fund. And so on.
The left knows the political tactic will fall apart if the nation’s highest court reviews the case. It will be bad for them, but good for our system of checks and balances, for common sense, and especially for reliable, affordable energy, jobs, health care and modern living standards.
More than 80% of our energy still comes from oil, gas and coal. Wind and solar are notoriously unreliable, require expensive backup power, and require twelve times as much raw material per unit of electricity as natural gas generators. They cannot supply petrochemical products, including clothing, cosmetics, fertilizers, paints, plastics, medicines and wind turbine blades.
“Renewable” energy is not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. Manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles and grid backup involves mining for many metals and minerals, in an energy-intensive process that destroys habitats, pollutes air and water, and harms and poisons miners and their families.
Most of the mining is in countries with corrupt governments and very poor families, like the Congo and Myanmar where child and slave labor is widespread. Ships transport these materials to China, the world’s biggest polluter, which monopolizes the global battery production market and uses more coal, slave labor and pollution-intensive processes to produce “clean, green” energy products.
EVs are marketed as “zero emission” vehicles, because they have no exhaust – and people don’t understand this sordid history or that the electricity that charges the batteries usually comes from coal or gas-fired power plants. And battery fires are furious and toxic.
Wind turbines also rely on oil, gas and coal for the metals and minerals in their towers and generators, fiberglass-and-epoxy blades and concrete-and-rebar bases. Solar panels covering hundreds of square miles of former cropland and wildlife habitat are having a similar impact. Sea-based wind turbines harm and kill wildlife, including endangered whales; land based turbines kill millions of birds.
Pleadings and briefs in lawsuits brought in carefully selected liberal state courts can ignore inconvenient facts like these, often preventing judges and juries from considering them.
They can target some American oil companies for alleged climate cataclysms, while ignoring all the oil and coal companies in the world, and countries that emit 89% of greenhouse gases. The state court’s lawsuit fundamentally and preposterously asserts that the production and refining processes used and the products sold by some of these oil companies have caused climate change unprecedented in the history of the Earth and mankind.
The Supreme Court’s latest decision reveals why climate experts and rent-seekers are worried the Court might intervene. West Virginia v. EPA states that, in the absence of clear legislative authority, government agencies cannot issue regulations unilaterally. has a “major” economic or political meaning..
Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v Raimondo reversed the “Chevron deference” rule. A silent or ambiguous statutory text does not give unlimited power to administrative agencies to interpret the law in a way that increases their control over people’s lives and livelihoods.
The decisions of liberal state courts in these climate cases will have monumental consequences — for the environment, the economy, lives and the nation — even if Congress never authorized them or any courts.
The Supreme Court should have intervened here – to ensure that these complex scientific, economic and political issues are examined, debated, verified and voted on – not relegated to biased courtrooms.
Paul Driessen is a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and the author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
Related
