Biden-Harris Regime Pursues Lawsuits to Hold Oil and Gas Companies Liable for Global Warming

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

What’s next? Is the Biden-Harris regime going to hold Luke liable for destroying the Death Star? Now that we’re holding people liable for fictions, the sky’s the limit, right? The Biden-Harris White House, as vengeful as Hitler when he ordered his rapidly repeating troops to burn Paris and destroy infrastructure all over France, is determined to leave the nation and the world in as chaotic a situation as possible as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House. Now Merrick Garland’s awesomely corrupt and politicized “Justice” department is trying to force some of the largest oil companies in the land to pony up some yuge money to make up for all they’ve done to make the weather change. Yes, really. 

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It's kind of like having to pay for causing distress to Bigfoot, but in this case, it’s Big Oil’s massive carbon footprint. The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday that Garland’s vicious DoJ “quietly weighed in on litigation pending before the Supreme Court this week, siding with liberal cities and states that are seeking to force the nation's largest oil companies to pay billions of dollars in damages for global warming.” Now, the first thing to bear in mind about this is that it’s tantamount to demanding that the oil companies pay billions for hurting the feelings of the imaginary six-foot-tall rabbit that goes with you everywhere.

Dr. Roy Spencer, who is an actual scientist and a leading skeptic regarding the left’s climate change mythology, disputes the central premise of this demand: the idea that the earth is hotter now than it has ever been, and that it’s the fault of human activity. He explains

Since there is so much year-to-year (and even decade-to-decade) variability in global average temperatures, whether it has warmed or cooled depends upon how far back you look in time. For instance, over the last 100 years, there was an overall warming which was stronger toward the end of the 20th Century. This is why some say “warming is accelerating.” But if we look at a shorter, more recent period of time, say since the record warm year of 1998, one could say that it has cooled in the last 10-12 years. But, as I mentioned above, neither of these can tell us anything about whether warming is happening “now,” or will happen in the future.

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Heedless of reality, however, and sticking firmly to the left’s climate dogmas and fantasies, Biden-Harris Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar “filed briefs this week in two related cases: one brought by Honolulu officials in 2020 and another filed by Alabama and 18 other GOP-led states that are asking the court to block litigation against oil companies in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.”

Prelogar wants the Supreme Court to confirm the idea that states can make laws demanding that oil companies pay “the costs of global climate change." She also wants the high court to “allow Democratic states to pursue their individual lawsuits against the various companies.” These actions are, according to the Free Beacon, “just the latest instance of the Biden-Harris administration aligning itself with climate activists' punitive approach towards oil and gas companies.” 

In their own defense, the oil companies are arguing on a technicality, saying that these are issues for federal, not state courts: "This case presents the Court with its only foreseeable opportunity in the near future to decide a dispositive question that is arising in every climate-change case: whether federal law precludes state-law claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate." That’s all very well, but it would be refreshing, and possibly devastating to the Biden-Harris regime’s case, if the companies instead argued that they couldn’t possibly be liable for harm caused by climate change, since the idea of manmade climate change was itself a massive hoax.

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     Related: New UK Play Reveals the Gulf Between the Left’s Fantasies and Reality

There is also a corruption angle, beyond the manifest corruption of the DoJ itself. The Free Beacon notes that “in nearly every case,” these lawsuits against the big oil companies “are being assisted by the California law firm Sher Edling, which was founded in 2016 to wage war on oil companies via novel legal methods.” Sher Edling has “received nearly $14 million in donations wired through the so-called Collective Action Fund for Accountability, a shadowy pass-through group that isn't required to publicly disclose its donors. As a result, wealthy environmental donors are able to remain anonymous while funding the litigation that could dismantle the fossil fuel industry.”

And of course, these cases can and will drag on long past Jan. 20, with the help of the legions of far-left judges that Bill Clinton, Obama and Biden have bequeathed to the nation. Whatever the genuine misdeeds of the oil companies may be, they don’t deserve to be penalized for a fiction, and the American people reduced to penury as the fossil-fuel-based  economy and infrastructure is dismantled. Will the Trump administration be fighting against these lawsuits? We can hope.

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