The federal government has all but stopped issuing and enforcing unrealistic clean energy mandates, especially while China and India burn as much coal as they can stuff into their furnaces.
However, as Heather Mac Donald points out, the litigation war against deep-pocketed fossil fuel companies is just beginning.
"The first multibillion-dollar judgment against the industry could unleash a cascade of similar rulings," Mac Donald writes in City Journal. "Leading climate litigator Benjamin Franta estimates that the potential liability runs into the trillions of dollars."
Needless to say, if that prediction holds, some of the largest companies on Earth could fail, sending millions of people into poverty. Since "renewable" technologies would be nowhere near ready to pick up the slack for several decades, people would starve and freeze to death in the name of climate change.
Climate warriors found themselves stymied in federal court. Despite dozens of lawsuits alleging that fossil fuel companies were contributing to a "public nuisance" by creating greenhouse gases, the Supreme Court dismissed a suit in 2011, holding that the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate greenhouse gases. This prevented the Greens from making an end run around the feds and the Constitution.
But the climate hysterics were nothing if not persistent. They started inundating state courts with their "public nuisance" suits.
"The plaintiffs in the more than three dozen climate suits filed in the United States read like an honor roll of progressive localities: San Francisco, Marin County, Oakland, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Maine, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, among others," notes Mac Donald. "Their targets include some of the great industrial concerns of the modern age—ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell."
Every suit blames a particular set of companies for a particular set of climate harms in a particular locality. (The roster of energy defendants varies from case to case, though ExxonMobil is almost always included; the plaintiff governments never explain how they chose their preferred subset of evildoers while ignoring other, similarly situated, firms.)
One can accept the broad outlines of climate-change theory and still reject the plaintiffs’ core causal claims. Indeed, that very theory makes the claims implausible. Under the prevailing scientific account, global warming results from a century and a half of cumulative CO₂ emissions from industrial activity. According to that theory, when trillions of CO₂ molecules accumulate in the upper atmosphere, they affect how heat escapes into space. Importantly, the planet’s atmospheric energy balance is global; it is not set by any one city or state’s emissions. Carbon dioxide disperses horizontally and vertically across Earth; it does not hover over its source. One CO₂ molecule is indistinguishable from another and cannot be traced to its point of origin.
The climate hysterics sue on the most idiotic basis you can imagine. One U.S. case involved 16 Montana youths, aged five to 22, suing the state, claiming that it had "destroyed their prospects for a normal adult life and had inflicted climate-related trauma on them," explains Mac Donald.
Montana is a beautiful state, one of America's natural wonderlands. What kind of "climate-related trauma" could be inflicted on a bunch of kids? This is what passes for deep legal thinking among the climate hysterics.
The causal claim in Held v. Montana is absurd. Global warming is not a local phenomenon. Moreover, even if the extra CO₂ purportedly generated by Montana’s regulatory negligence could be geotagged and traced to the state, it would be trivial compared with the cumulative emissions of every other global source over decades. Nevertheless, in 2023, the plaintiffs in Held v. Montana prevailed.
Naturally, that success has started a "Children's Crusade" of lawsuits in other states based on the same nutty premise.
It gets even nuttier.
"In 2022, Native Hawaiian youth sued Hawaii’s Department of Transportation, claiming that it had jeopardized their tribal identities by allowing the state’s transportation sector to rely on fossil fuels," Mac Donald writes. "That reliance, they said, caused their insecurity about their indigenous heritage."
If you're that insecure about your heritage, you should probably sue your parents, your schools, and your tribe. Why pick on Exxon? Deep pockets, of course.
In 2013, a self-employed (though not self-funded) climate activist published data on carbon emissions from 180 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers. Richard Heede’s Carbon Majors project claims that 90 energy companies accounted for two-thirds of global greenhouse-gas emissions between 1751 and 2016. According to the climate lobby, the Carbon Majors database makes it possible to assign precise responsibility to individual emitters for specific harms. If company X contributed Y share of total CO₂ emissions over time, the argument runs, then it should bear Y share of climate-related damages in any given locality.
But attribution science is scientific in name only. Its lesser flaws include the absence of a consistent scientific method and its origin as a litigation tool. The emissions data underlying the Carbon Majors project are patchy, at times unverified, and inconsistent, spanning wildly different time frames. Nor does reliance on historical market share make the task of assigning causation for alleged anthropogenic global warming any more coherent.
It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to debunk his kind of pseudo-science. It's not based on science at all. It's based on politics. And all one has to do is find a suitably biased left-wing judge who sees themselves on a crusade to save the planet from evil fossil fuel producers. The millions of dollars spent fighting this nonsense only raises the price of energy for all of us.
