https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-11-even-stupider-than-the-stupidest-litigation-in-the-country
I have had several posts on a collection of related cases that I have called “The Stupidest Litigations In The Country.” These are cases where climate hysterics have sued oil and gas producing companies, or the federal government, or both, seeking various extreme punishments ranging from massive damages up to and including an order to end all production of fossil fuels. The asserted grounds vary somewhat from case to case, but a central theme is a claimed constitutional right to a “clean and healthy environment.”
My last update on these cases was a post on April 9. A main subject there was the lawsuit of Juliana v. United States, which is one of the cases where the federal government is the defendant and the goal is to require it to force an end to the production of fossil fuels. The occasion for the post was that, nine years into the litigation, the federal defendant had just launched its third effort to get the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to end the case on the ground of “non-justiciability” — that is, to get the court to rule that such an issue of society-wide energy policy is not a proper subject to be decided by a court. Instead, the Department of Justice was arguing, this sort of question must be left to the political branches of government, that is, legislatures and executives. (On May 1, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit in fact ordered that the Juliana case be dismissed. We’ll see if that sticks. The plaintiffs still have a few litigation options left, including seeking “en banc” review from the full Ninth Circuit, and seeking review from the Supreme Court.)
Meanwhile, be careful what you wish for. If the decision to blame energy-producing companies for everything wrong with the environment is to be left to the political branches, what’s to stop those political branches from jumping into this act?
In the last few days, the legislature in the state of Vermont has done just that. NBC News has the story on May 7, with the headline “Vermont passes bill to charge fossil fuel companies for damage from climate change.”
It looks like little Vermont (population about 650,000) is going to step up to save the planet where all the big players like the federal government and California have failed. The idea here is that the state will force the fossil fuel producers to pay damages to compensate for any losses attributable to “climate change.” If you believe that all extreme weather is the fault of “climate change” (and it appears that they do believe that), then this could add up to some enormous sums. From NBC:
Vermont lawmakers passed a bill this week that is designed to make big fossil fuel companies pay for damage from weather disasters fueled by climate change.
