{"id":261523,"date":"2023-06-10T19:12:06","date_gmt":"2023-06-10T17:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=261523"},"modified":"2023-06-10T19:12:09","modified_gmt":"2023-06-10T17:12:09","slug":"if-its-not-open-warfare-its-collusive-lawfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=261523","title":{"rendered":"If it\u2019s not open warfare, it\u2019s collusive lawfare"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From\u00a0CFACT<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Paul Driessen<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Biden Administration continues waging war on fossil fuels, aided by environmentalists, politicians, and corporations chasing subsidies, competitive advantages, power, and profits. They want to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d America\u2019s energy and economic systems, prevent \u201cclimate cataclysms,\u201d and ensure \u201cenvironmental justice\u201d for some (by inflicting injustices on others).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their weapons include withdrawing huge areas from economic activities; banning leasing, drilling, and pipelines; and imposing regulatory standards so costly or technologically impossible that coal-fired power plants, internal-combustion vehicles, and gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters must be abandoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This open warfare is augmented and amplified by more clandestine \u201clawfare.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Environmentalists have long employed lawsuits to impose by court decree what they cannot achieve via ballot boxes or legislation. The litigation often redefines sloppily or deliberately vague statutory language to impose more onerous standards that can block or bankrupt oil, gas, and mining projects \u2013 and then ignore those standards land- and resource-intensive wind and solar projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An especially pernicious strategy is \u201csue-and-settle\u201d lawsuits, wherein environmentalists collude with friendly federal agencies to create a \u201cdisagreement\u201d over a policy or regulation and sue in friendly courts. The parties then agree to a settlement that\u2019s been negotiated behind closed doors, leaving the public and impacted third parties with no opportunity to address the case\u2019s legal or evidentiary merits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now ultra-progressive states and cities are charging onto this battlefield with more destructive lawsuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Delaware and Rhode Island have joined Baltimore, Honolulu, New York City, San Francisco, and other jurisdictions in filing climate change lawsuits against oil and gas producers, refiners, and sellers in state courts<\/em> \u2013 where they believe they will face more sympathetic judges and juries than in federal courtrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arguments for transferring the cases to federal jurisdiction are compelling \u2013 and were presented persuasively by John Yoo<\/a>, C. Boyden Gray<\/a>, and other experts who reviewed the differing Courts of Appeals decisions and the policy and legal questions surrounding them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fossil fuel \u201cgreenhouse gas\u201d emissions alleged to cause climate change cross state lines and must therefore be governed by federal agencies. Sea level rise, flooding, and other damages allegedly caused by those emissions must likewise be attributed to multiple sources in multiple states and thus must also be the purview of federal<\/em> laws and agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No state, much less any city, should be permitted to set or manipulate national energy, climate, or environmental policies and hold other jurisdictions to their agendas. Different legal opinions among various federal courts require Supreme Court intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Suncor Energy, and other oil company defendants made these and additional arguments<\/a> in asking the US Supreme Court to reaffirm that cases addressing climate change claims are inherently governed by federal law and should be transferred from state to federal courts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the Supremes inexplicably opted <\/a>not<\/em> to review<\/a> the cases at this time. That means these and other cities and states will continue suing energy companies \u2013 perhaps securing verdicts and multi-billion-dollar damage awards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The litigation will create a legal, constitutional, scientific, and public policy nightmare for the nation, businesses, consumers, courts, and states, especially after verdicts have been rendered and bills tendered to scapegoat companies for payment. An already confusing and impenetrable judicial and permitting jungle will become even more perilous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, these complex pollution issues are made vastly more complicated by the basic question of whether carbon dioxide (which humans and animals exhale and plants require to grow, \u201cgreen\u201d our planet<\/a>, and help ensure record crop yields<\/a>) should ever be labeled a \u201cdangerous pollutant.\u201d Even more so by the impossibility of separating \u201cgreenhouse gas\u201d emissions from a few US petroleum companies from:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* all other American oil and gas, coal, agricultural, industrial, transportation, and other emissions;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* human activities worldwide<\/em>, including thousands of coal-fired power plants in China, India, and dozens of other countries that have no obligation or intention of reducing their fossil fuel use anytime soon, thus increasing carbon dioxide levels (deliberately and misleadingly called \u201ccarbon pollution\u201d) in Earth\u2019s global<\/em> atmosphere for decades to come;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* greenhouse gas emissions (and toxic air pollution) from mining, minerals processing, and manufacturing to make the wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, grid-scale backup batteries, transformers, and transmission lines required for a \u201cclean, green, renewable, sustainable\u201d energy future; and<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* climate changes caused by natural<\/em> forces throughout Earth\u2019s past history, now and in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As litigant cities and states pursue billions in penalties and damages from these companies \u2013 supposedly to cover the costs of building levees and stormwater impoundments, raising roads and bridges, and otherwise protecting communities from \u201cincreasing sea level rise\u201d and \u201cmore frequent and intense storms<\/a>\u201d \u2013 they will also have to address other inconvenient truths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, seas have risen naturally 400 feet<\/em> since the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. They are now rising<\/a> at an easily manageable 7-12 inches per century<\/a><\/em> \u2013, and much of the perceived sea level rise is actually due to land subsidence<\/em><\/a> in coastal cities worldwide<\/a>, not rising seas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The litigants and courts will also encounter the bitter reality that the \u201cfundamental transformation\u201d they so earnestly seek means covering the planet with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines \u2026 and the quarries and mines to build them. America already lacks sufficient EV charging stations and step-up and step-down transformers for new homes, and a functional grid. In short order, millions more will be needed to reach Net Zero \u2013 meaning thousands of new mines, quarries, processing plants, and factories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toyota Motor Corp. calculates that \u201cmore than 300<\/a> new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035.\u201d That\u2019s essentially just for new EVs; getting them approved and developed would likely take decades. To say nothing of turning the iron, rare earths, manganese, nickel, and other ores into high-end metals is fossil-fuel-intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting, and dirty. \u201cReaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest,\u201d the Wall Street Journal notes<\/a>. \u201cRefining it \u2026 involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that\u2019s hard to dispose of.\u201d Using little children to mine cobalt<\/a> and processing rare earth elements<\/a> involve legendary ecological and human rights abuses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse, all this is only the beginning of the planetary desecration. We\u2019re talking millions of onshore and offshore wind turbines, billions of solar panels, hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, billions of half-ton battery modules \u2013 and all that goes into making them. We\u2019ll have to replace fertilizers for crops and feedstocks for thousands of products by planting millions more acres infood and fuel crops, destroying more wildlife habitats. Turbine blades chop millions of birds and bats from the sky every year. Offshore turbines disorient whales and dolphins<\/a>, causing many to beach themselves and die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we\u2019ll have to bury the broken, worn-out obsolete panels, turbine blades, and other equipment. The world has already installed some 100,000 wind turbines and 2.5 billion solar panels<\/a>. In whose backyards will the landfills go for all this trash \u2013 and the massive lakes for the waste slurries?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is nothing clean, green, renewable, sustainable, or climate-friendly about any of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Supreme Court \u2013 and courts, regulators and legislators everywhere \u2013 have a lot of work to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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