Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Politicians and trial lawyers in Louisiana are hoping to use the home-field advantage of state courts to shake down oil and gas companies. The alleged misdeed: contributing to coastal erosion and damaging wetlands while producing aviation fuel for the U.S. military during World War II.
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Politicians and trial lawyers in Louisiana are hoping to use the home-field advantage of state courts to shake down oil and gas companies. The alleged misdeed: contributing to coastal erosion and damaging wetlands while producing aviation fuel for the U.S. military during World War II.
Cash- strapped coastal parishes (counties), politically well-connected trial lawyers, and Louisiana’s reputation as what the American Tort Reform Association calls a “litigation hellhole” have created a toxic brew with implications that reach far beyond the Bayou State.
On Jan. 12, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Chevron USA et al. v. Plaquemines Parish et al. The justices will decide (probably by late June) whether companies can be sued in state courts for actions they took on behalf of and under contract with the federal government.
A ruling by the high court allowing a Plaquemines Parish jury’s $744.6 million verdict in April against Chevron under a 1978 Louisiana law to stand would deal a serious blow to the U.S. oil and natural gas sector — precisely when the nation has reemerged as a global energy superpower.
The roots of the high-stakes Supreme Court showdown stretch back over eight decades, when Chevron (then known as Texaco) produced aviation gas (avgas) under contract with the Petroleum Administration for War, a federal wartime agency. In 2013, the state of Louisiana and Plaquemines Parish sued Chevron and other energy companies for damages stemming from the production of crude oil for refining into avgas, alleging that the companies’ drilling and other activities caused coastal erosion.
The whopping $744.6 million verdict handed down last year prompted Chevron and other oil companies, supported by the Trump administration, to petition to have the case removed to federal court. They have good reason to seek a less-biased venue.
“State courts in Louisiana present a substantial risk of local bias against out-of-state defendants,” said Richard A. Epstein, a professor of law at New York University. “The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office entered into a joint prosecution agreement with [Plaquemines Parish] counsel John Carmouche, contractually prohibiting the State from supporting any defense, however meritorious, raised by Chevron. This arrangement erased the attorney general’s independence and improperly aligned the State’s interests with private financial gain.”
“This risk of bias was further evident in the conduct of Judge Michael Clement — a recipient of campaign contributions from Mr. Carmouche and his associated PACs — in a related trial involving identical issues,” Mr. Epstein added.
Congressional efforts to protect private parties, including contractors, from overzealous state prosecutors and courts date to 1815. Hoping to add clarity to those legal protections in 2011, Congress broadened the scope of the standard that allows cases to be removed to federal court to include actions “related to” the fulfillment of a federal contract. This bears directly on the case in Louisiana, where pollution from oil drilling was linked to refining it into wartime aviation fuel.
“The record is clear,” the Washington Legal Foundation and the Atlantic Legal Foundation note in an amicus brief submitted to the high court. “Petitioners’ World War II oil production directly relates to their federal avgas contracts.”
In a vertically integrated company such as Chevron, there would have been no aviation fuel without the drilling.
The implications of tying up wartime federal contractors in state court are not lost on two military leaders who submitted their own brief to the Supreme Court.
“Our nation can ill afford the divisions, confusion, and uncertainty that would necessarily result if disputes arising from wartime decision-making were adjudicated in piecemeal fashion in various state courts,” retired Gen. Richard B. Myers and retired Adm. Mike Mullen said.
Louisiana’s loss of coastal wetlands — caused by hurricanes, sinking land (subsidence), and the diversion of the Mississippi River for flood control — long predates World War II. Targeting a single, deep-pocketed industry as the culprit ignores the complexities of the region’s ecosystem.
“There are over 40 cases pending in state courts that are dripping with political bias and contempt for the defendants,” the American Tort Reform Association points out. If the high court rules to keep the Louisiana case in state court, then it will set a precedent that opens the door to the imposition of ruinous, retroactive liability nationwide.
The Trump Administration’s Fight To Fund Scientists is a December 2025 investigative article by Paul D. Thacker.
The piece argues that the Trump administration’s efforts to reform federal research funding—particularly by capping indirect costs (overhead rates) in NIH grants—aim to redirect more money from university administrators to actual scientists conducting research.
The Trump Administration’s Fight To Fund Scientists is a December 2025 investigative article by Paul D. Thacker.
The piece argues that the Trump administration’s efforts to reform federal research funding—particularly by capping indirect costs (overhead rates) in NIH grants—aim to redirect more money from university administrators to actual scientists conducting research.
The article represents a perspective sympathetic to the administration’s cost-cutting rationale, highlighting long-standing debates over how federal dollars (primarily from NIH, ~$47B annual budget) are allocated between direct research and institutional overhead.
The panic and outrage were palpable last February when President Trump announced plans to trim reimbursement rates for government-funded scientific research.
“This is going to decimate U.S. scientific biomedical research,” Northwestern University biologist Carole Labonne told Bloomberg. “The lights will go out, people will be let go, and these [medical] advances will not occur,” David Skorton, CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, told PBS. “The goal,” University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom warned on BlueSky, “is to destroy U.S. universities.”
The sky has not fallen on American research in the 10 months since. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is still paying the same 50% to 70% in indirect costs – the premium added on top of grants meant to reimburse universities for providing labs and other research infrastructure – because lawsuits have frozen the president’s proposed policy. One Trump official admits this is unlikely to change because the administration will almost certainly lose in court. The current system, which provides the lion’s share of billions of dollars each year for often-unspecified overhead costs to universities, has the backing of Congress. As it stands, there appears to be no momentum, even among Republicans, to reform the practice.
“It’s basically a slush fund,” one NIH official told RealClearInvestigations. “We just don’t like to call it that.”
A RealClearInvestigations analysis of these indirect payments reveals a long, largely forgotten history of concern about taxpayer-sponsored research. Although many researchers have cast Trump’s proposal as an attack on science, this issue isn’t the need to fund research activities that sometimes lead to beneficial discoveries, but whether some of the billions that support the necessary infrastructure and equipment are actually being shifted to purposes such as staffing and buildings that have little or no direct connection to the actual research.
In the late ’80s, Stanford faculty revolted against the university’s high overhead charges for diverting research dollars to a bloated administration and a campus building frenzy. Those concerns are still voiced by some.
“If the universities truly believe that it takes 60-70% of a research grant to provide facilities, utilities, and other basic support, then that is easy to prove by opening the books,” said Sanjay Dhall, a research physician at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I suspect however, that opening the books would reveal that a significant chunk of these funds, or even the majority, are paying an army of unnecessary administrators.”
At a time when the value of college is being challenged because of exorbitant tuition and fees, and the federal government is struggling to rein in debt, the story of indirect funding offers a window into the history of runaway costs and the growing power of college officials. RCI has also learned that NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has been selling a new plan that makes the grant process more competitive for institutions that were overlooked in the past.
Indirect Costs Hard To Define
Distributing over $37 billion in grants every year, NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, far exceeding the European Commission, which spends around $12 billion, and dwarfing the Gates Foundation’s $1 billion.
Every NIH grant a university researcher receives provides two categories of funding: direct and indirect costs. The direct costs include all items the researcher submitted as part of the project’s budget, from laboratory equipment to a percentage of salaries.
Indirect costs are harder to define. The funding goes to administrators, and how they use it is shrouded in mystery. What’s more, indirect rates vary from university to university for reasons that few understand and can explain.
“How do you think Harvard built all those buildings?” one NIH official, a graduate of Harvard Medical School who insisted on anonymity, told RCI. “NIH indirect costs paid for that.”
When Trump first proposed the 15% cap in 2016, Harvard president Drew G. Faust told the student newspaper in late 2017 that she flew to Washington, D.C., to lobby Republicans in both the House and the Senate to stop it. “We’re bringing in quite a bit of money through federal contracts which provide money for a lot of buildings and other infrastructure that makes possible what we do going forward,” a Harvard dean told the student newspaper. “So if that was to all go away, we’d have to sit down and look at that.”
The Trump administration’s proposal to cap overhead at 15% would cost university administrators billions of dollars that they control. Among the many critics was Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the flagship journal Science and a former university administrator. He wrote an editorial last February titled “A Direct Hit” that described the cap as a “ruthless takedown of academia.”
“The scientific community must unite in speaking out against this betrayal of a partnership that has enabled American innovation and progress,” he wrote.
In response to questions from RCI, Thorp said any change to NIH overhead funding should be done in partnership with the scientific community. “Indirect costs are used to secure debt on research facilities and were treated as very secure by banks and the rating agencies,” Thorp said. “Pulling all of that abruptly – without following processes with decades of precedent – is certainly betraying a partnership by putting the universities in difficulty with their lenders and bond ratings.”
Inexorable Rise in Charges
It turns out that concerns over universities possibly misusing federal grant money date back more than half a century, according to Thorp’s own publication. In 1955, the federal government almost doubled the 8% premium paid for university overhead. A decade later, Science reported that Congress lifted the overhead ceiling to 20%, maintaining a flat rate to assure more taxpayer dollars were targeted at scientific research, and less spent on constructing new buildings. Some members of Congress believed that “the universities need not accept the grants if they can’t afford them.” Elected officials also worried that indirect costs would not go to research but to support other university efforts.
“You might be surprised if you read the list of money being spent for research in various universities,” one senator said in a 1963 Science news story. “Not only to pay the teachers, but also to construct buildings and facilities around the school.”
Despite these concerns, lobbyists convinced the government in 1966 to remove all caps, empowering universities to negotiate directly with federal agencies to set their own overhead rates. In 1966, overhead consumed 14% of NIH grant expenditures. By the late 1970s, it consumed 36.4%. When the federal government attempted to backpedal in 1976 to bring “spiraling indirect cost rates under control,” it failed.
Both Republicans and Democrats have long championed increasing NIH budgets, partly because grants for research land in congressional districts scattered across the nation. Republicans have often been the NIH’s biggest supporters. Fifteen years ago, Congress launched investigations into the NIH’s poor monitoring of grants that were awarded to research physicians with undisclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the unfolding scandal, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter pushed through a 34% increase in the NIH’s budget in 2009. During the 2013 government shutdown, the NIH was one of the few agencies that Republicans pushed President Obama to keep open. Two years later, Republicans cut many parts of Obama’s proposed 2015 budget, yet gave the president even more money than the increase he requested for the NIH.
Like some elected officials, academics have also long complained that high overhead harms academic scientists by diverting NIH funding to administrators. In 1981, a University of California researcher published a study in Science, which showed how “Funding has thus been markedly reduced, and this has become a critical factor limiting research support in the United States.”
By 1983, indirect costs accounted for 43% of the NIH grant budget. In response, then-NIH Director James B. Wyngaarden pushed to make more money available for scientists by paying administrators only 90% of what they claimed in overhead.
“[L]egislators tend to sympathize with the investigators who are more interested in seeing federal money spent for equipment and researchers’ salaries in their labs than for light and heat and the services of typists and bookkeepers,” reported Science at the time.
However, Science reported that Wyngaarden was met with stiff opposition from university officials and their allies in Congress.
When Wyngaarden tried to deal with the matter by sending a report to Congress, Science reported, officials from several university lobby groups shut the report down, calling it not “acceptable.”
One of Wyngaarden’s biggest critics was Stanford President Donald Kennedy, whose school was then charging one of the highest rates for indirect costs. Kennedy convened a group to attack cost-saving proposals, stating in a letter, “The NIH proposals to reduce reimbursement of those costs … will directly damage the research effort as a whole.”
This effort appeared to succeed until Kennedy himself became ensnared in a scandal that showed Stanford’s indirect costs charged to the NIH paid for a bevy of personal goods and upkeep on a yacht.
Stanford’s Taxpayer-Funded Yacht
Stanford’s yacht, the Victoria, was valued at $1.2 million and became a symbol of excess, with walnut and cherry paneling, brass lamps, marble counters, and lavish woodwork. Administrators used the yacht as a fundraising venue to wine and dine campus bigwigs. NIH money had paid for overhead to maintain it.
As Congress and federal investigators dug into Stanford’s accounting, they discovered that administrators had also redirected NIH research overhead to pay $2,000 a month for flowers at President Kennedy’s home, $7,000 for his bed linens, and $6,000 to provide him with cedar-lined closets. Another college official had hosted Stanford football parties and charged the NIH $1,500 for booze.
Humiliated in the media, Stanford was forced to lower the indirect rate it charged the NIH from 78% to 55.5%, and federal agencies launched audits of overhead charges at dozens of other universities, resulting in millions of dollars returned to the NIH.
With the politics and the media on his side, Michigan Congressman John Dingell launched reforms to indirect charges. Stanford and other institutions were forced to halt expensive building campaigns. President Clinton proposed a cap on indirect costs in a “concerted effort to shift national spending from overhead to funding research.” As in the past, universities opposed the change, and the White House buckled.
“One way or another, I’ve been involved in controversy about indirect cost rates for about 30 years,” a chancellor at the University of Maryland told The Baltimore Sun in 1994.
Kennedy resigned from the Stanford presidency, as did several of his administrators. Kennedy later joined Science as editor-in-chief – a predecessor to Thorp – while universities’ charges for indirect costs to the NIH eventually snapped back to their former pricing, which continues to this day.
RCI spoke with several academic researchers at institutions scattered across the U.S., working at both private and public-funded universities. None wished to be named about their concerns about how their administrators spend NIH indirect funding, with one professor noting that administrators determine your career, so it makes no sense to criticize their spending habits.
While university presidents say administrators strictly account for NIH indirect funds, the reality appears to be different. Professors who bring in large sums of NIH money, sometimes referred to as heavy hitters, can complain and get some of the indirect costs back from the administrators for their own research and even personal use. At some institutions, department heads can get a cut of the indirect costs to set up slush funds, monies they can dole out to favored professors, or even divert to their own labs.
Professor Dhall said that after he published a March letter in the Wall Street Journal that supported Trump’s cap on indirect rates, he was contacted by colleagues across the country. “They congratulated me on going public and vehemently agreed, in private,” he said.
A congressional staffer who has spent decades investigating problems at the NIH said that nobody truly understands how universities negotiate their NIH overhead rates. And once that money gets to the university, it disappears into a byzantine accounting system that seems designed to confuse government auditors, who rarely inspect university books.
“It’s a complete black box,” he said. “I wish someone could explain it to me.”
Trump’s Play To Change the Game
The Trump administration will lose the fight to cap indirect costs at 15%, a senior HHS official told RCI, because of the universities’ outsize influence. During the first Trump administration, universities caught wind that Trump planned to cap overhead rates. As they had done for over half a century, university lobbyists ran to Congress to complain, only now they sought an alliance with the pharmaceutical industry.
Responding to lobbying pressure, Republicans in the House and Senate inserted a provision into the appropriations bill in 2018 to block Trump’s attempt to change universities’ indirect cost rates. That provision has been included in every succeeding appropriations bill.
While it does not seem likely that Congress will strip the schools in their states and districts of billions of dollars in funding, NIH Director Bhattacharya has been floating his own proposal to revamp indirect payments to make them more equitable in private talks with members of Congress and university leaders. Shortly before Thanksgiving, Bhattacharya gave a dinner talk to the Republican Main Street Caucus, a group of 85 GOP members of Congress who are critical behind-the-scenes players among Republicans now running the House.
A dinner participant recounted to RCI that Bhattacharya noted that more than half of the NIH’s money goes to 20 universities located on both coasts. These elite universities win a lion’s share of the grant money, including indirect costs, because they have the money to attract excellent scientists, in part because NIH money helped them build great infrastructure.
This creates a vicious cycle that guarantees NIH will continue to fund institutions that have already won past NIH money – and which charge high indirect costs. To end this cycle, Bhattacharya wants to break off indirect costs into a separate category of infrastructure grants that universities can compete to win.
During the talk, Bhattacharya said that all the universities in the entire state of Florida now get as much money as Stanford. Yet, there’s no reason Florida could not become a hub for scientific research if the federal government invested in its scientific infrastructure.
If Florida can provide lab space at a lower cost than Stanford, he said, they should get the money. Bhattacharya also wants to make it easier for academics to take their grant to different universities. If a Harvard researcher is offered more space or better facilities at a university in Kansas, because building costs there are cheaper, that professor should be able to transfer his grant.
The NIH already provides specific grants for infrastructure, and the hope is that spreading the billions in indirect costs across the country will gain political support.
“He wants to get this money out to the middle of the country, not just the coasts,” said Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican from Iowa. Dr. Miller-Meeks is one of the few physicians in Congress and said she was impressed with Bhattacharya’s talk at the Main Street Caucus dinner. However, she is uncertain whether Democrats would embrace the new proposal in today’s polarized environment.
“I would think there are members from the center of the country that would like to see more money in their district,” she said.
A spokesperson told RCI that NIH remains focused on ensuring that funding is used efficiently and that direct and indirect costs contribute to scientific productivity. “Bhattacharya’s proposal represents one of several ideas being discussed publicly about how to structure federal support for research infrastructure,” the spokesperson said. “NIH looks forward to continuing to work constructively with Congress on this issue.”
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Hawaii Democrats have advanced a bill that would clear the way for individuals and insurers adversely affected by an “event attributable to climate change” to sue companies and other entities for spreading climate “misinformation.”
Hawaii Democrats have advanced a bill that would clear the way for individuals and insurers adversely affected by an “event attributable to climate change” to sue companies and other entities for spreading climate “misinformation.”
S.B. 1166, introduced by Democratic Hawaii State Sen. Chris Lee, aims to “provide a new, specific cause of action for any person other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” and insurers to file suit against companies or other entities that supposedly misinformed the public about the nature of climate change. Lee introduced the bill on Jan. 17, and it is currently in the hands of the Hawaii House, according to LegiScan. (RELATED: Hawaii Supreme Court Claims ‘The Spirit Of Aloha’ Overrules The Second Amendment)
During his visit to Maui, Biden says he has ‘a little sense of what it’s like to lose a home’ describing when lightning struck his home, which resulted in a small kitchen fire. He jokes about how he almost lost his ’67 Corvette as he talks to survivors of the devastating Maui… pic.twitter.com/xXUnC3kuHz
“The legislature finds that for decades, certain people and entities have spread intentional lies, misinformation and disinformation, and misrepresentations about the connection between climate change and fossil fuel products, as well as how climate change has caused injuries in the State,” the bill’s text reads. “Continued lies, misinformation and disinformation, and misrepresentations by responsible parties pose a threat to the health, safety, and security of Hawaii’s residents and visitors. These parties have long known the dangers of fossil fuel products; however, they have continued to deny and lie for profit … Hawaii has a compelling interest in protecting consumers from lies and misleading information, while also encouraging factual and truthful information on how climate disasters and other harms can be attributed to the responsible parties who have spread falsehoods.”
“These parties have long known the dangers of fossil fuel products; however, they have continued to deny and lie for profit … Hawaii has a compelling interest in protecting consumers from lies and misleading information, while also encouraging factual and truthful information on how climate disasters and other harms can be attributed to the responsible parties who have spread falsehoods,” the bill’s text states.
The amended bill text specifically defines “responsible parties” to include any “firm, corporation, company, partnership, society, joint stock company, or any other entity or association that engaged in misleading and deceptive practices, including lies, or the provision of misinformation or disinformation about the connection between its fossil fuel products and climate change and extreme weather or other events attributable to climate change.” Notably, tribal, state and federal government entities are excluded from the definition.
The bill text specifically cites the Maui fires of August 2023 as an example of a catastrophic event exacerbated by climate change. The fires killed 102 people and caused billions of dollars of damage.
While the bill and many Democrats — including Hawaii Gov. Josh Green — were quick to point the finger at climate change for making the fires worse, multiple instances of human error and official incompetence may have actually turned the fires into a full-scale disaster. Examples of critical mistakes and shortcomings include, but are not limited to, inadequate vegetation management, regulatory sluggishness, fire hydrants running dry, delayed emergency siren activation and a failure by a state agency to promptly divert water that was needed to fight the burgeoning fires.
The bill’s current text specifies that prospective plaintiffs are only permitted to sue under its provisions if they have suffered damages of $10,000 or more due to a “climate disaster or extreme weather or other event attributable to climate change.”
Notably, President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier in April instructing his administration to determine the legality of subnational government efforts to impose “burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance” via legislation or lawsuits. The executive order further instructs the administration to produce actionable options for defanging those policies and lawsuits, most of which are coming from blue states or Democrat-controlled jurisdictions, including from the Hawaiian capital city of Honolulu.
Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment and a voicemail message.
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A county in Oregon has filed a lawsuit against a dozen or so oil and coal companies and their trade association, basically repeating the allegations (and lies) of lawsuits filed in other jurisdictions around the country. All these lawsuits deserve to fail.
A county in Oregon has filed a lawsuit against a dozen or so oil and coal companies and their trade association, basically repeating the allegations (and lies) of lawsuits filed in other jurisdictions around the country. All these lawsuits deserve to fail.
The plaintiffs in County of Multnomah v. Exxon Mobil Corp. et al. are demanding some $50 billion “for damages and equitable relief for harm caused to Multnomah County by Defendants’ execution of a scheme to rapaciously sell fossil fuel products and deceptively promote them as harmless to the environment, while they knew that carbon pollution emitted by their products into the atmosphere would likely cause deadly extreme heat events….”
This is nonsense.
The argument that “Exxon knew” is based on combing through hundreds of thousands of pages of old corporate documents released by Exxon early on during discovery (at the time, many of us said that was a mistake) and selectively quoting those that seem to make damning concessions.
How many times did bureaucrats in Exxon’s vast hierarchy make just the opposite statements, but those are being hidden by the plaintiffs? Given the size of the database and new AI-assisted search tools, scores or even hundreds of opposing statements could be found.
The defense should demand to know if the plaintiffs searched for such statements, if they did what they discovered, and if they didn’t, why not? And then … the defense should do it themselves.
In truth, there must have been an on-again, off-again debate inside Exxon and other fossil fuel companies over the course of many years regarding how seriously they should take the claims of climate alarmists. Encouraging internal debate and discussion is good management. It is not a crime.
The contention that the climate scientists funded by the fossil fuel industry represent “fringe views” is easily debunked, and not merely by referencing the Global Warming Petition Project, signed by 31,478 American scientists. Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch (both alarmists) found only 48% of the respondents to their 2015 survey of scientists said they agree “very much” with the statement that “most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, the result of anthropogenic causes.”
Ditto Bart Verheggen’s 2015 survey that found fewer than half of contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) own reports agree with its claim more than half of the warming since the mid-20th century can be attributed to human activity.
In truth, there is no scientific consensus now and there never was. QED, the fossil fuel industry was not backing scientists with “fringe views.”
The dollar amounts contributed to conservative and libertarian think tanks reported in these suits are always exaggerated, partly by describing amounts given over the course of a decade or longer and partly because oil companies, like virtually all public companies, contributed large amounts to both liberal and conservative public interest groups during this time.
Only a small fraction of those amounts (or none at all) went to studying or advocating on climate change. The defense team should demand to know how much of Exxon’s and API’s largess actually was spent on the climate issue, and if the plaintiffs can’t say, stipulate that it was less than 5%. Then demand to know how that amount compares to the income of ideologically driven groups on the other side of the issue. If they can’t say, stipulate that is less than 5%.
In truth, money contributed to nonprofit groups by the fossil fuel industry to address climate change was trivial compared to the vast amounts spent by other groups engaged in the climate debate.
As independent investigator Russell Cook repeatedly points out, there is no evidence that any of the scientists and policy analysts who accepted money either directly or indirectly from the fossil fuel industry were “paid to lie.” There are no letters or contracts, just innuendo and libels spread by leftist activists.
Probably 99% of the money spent by the fossil fuel companies went to organizations, not to individuals, as was the case when the much-maligned Willie Soon was paid by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and those organizations had policies in place to protect the integrity and independence of their staff.
In truth, most of the scientists and experts engaged in the climate debate benefit financially in some way for the work they do (otherwise they couldn’t do it!) but very few think they are shading the truth in return for that support. They never agreed to do that. They believe they are speaking the truth.
And what about those dollars given to academics and environmental advocacy groups, including those affiliated with the United Nations, to make the opposite argument? Were those contributions made before there was solid evidence that a problem existed? In that case, was the motive to mislead the public into supporting public policies that financially benefited those groups?
Did the funding persist even in the face of compelling evidence that the global warming scare is based on junk science? In that case, was the motive to cover-up their earlier crimes? How much did Greenpeace, Sierra Club, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers, etc. know, and when did they know it?
In truth, the climate alarmism industry was engaging in the very unethical and fraudulent practices that it is accusing the fossil fuel industry of performing.
The actual statements produced and ads run by the defendants and their “front groups” reproduced in this lawsuit are invariably reasonable, compelling, accurate, and data-based. I always chuckle when the plaintiffs reproduce these statements or ads in full since they remain fair and convincing even today, decades later.
The defense in these cases ought to eagerly present more of them, especially the Mobil ads, Patrick Michaels’ excellent newsletter, and Willie Soon’s peer-reviewed research, no less than 100 or 200 pages, and let the judge or the jury decide how credible they are. Then display those articles and ads opposite fundraising appeals from Greenpeace, Environmental Defense Fund, etc. The difference could hardly be more striking.
In truth, the environmental groups are engaged in propaganda and made false claims to advance the agendas of their funders while groups funded by the fossil fuel industry did not.
Lastly, I always look for references in these lawsuits to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change and its five-volume “Climate Change Reconsidered” (CCR) series. I didn’t find a single reference to it in this lawsuit (but I didn’t search the document for it).
Attorney Peter Ferrara liked to say CCR was to climate alarmists “like holy water and a crucifix are to demons.” When he cited CCR in contentious debates online or in email, the other side invariably went silent, unable to admit that such a reference work even exists.
The most recent volume (Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels) lists 117 scientists, economists, engineers, and other experts as authors, contributors, or reviewers. Just the fringe? Maybe, but the previous four volumes each typically listed just as many contributors and thousands of peer-reviewed articles.
In truth, global warming skeptics have just as much intellectual fire power as the alarmists, maybe even more. That’s just a fact.
One hopes the defense teams and the judges (or their clerks) hearing these cases are smart and honest enough to recognize all this.
Joseph Bast is a senior fellow with The Heartland Institute. He was president of The Heartland Institute from its founding in 1984 until his retirement in 2018.
Disclaimer: The Heartland Institute is often mentioned in the lawsuits discussed in this article but it has not been named as a defendant.
For more on climate change lawsuits, click here or here.
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