Climate Litigation

Lawfare Begins Against Repealing Endangerment Finding–Legalities Outlook

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The expected blowback from invested climatists is underway, as reported by legacy media whose bias is with the alarmists.  Examples:

EPA faces lawsuit over scrapping the ‘endangerment finding,’ a pillar of climate regulation, Scientific American

E.P.A. Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule, NY Times

Lawsuit: EPA revoking greenhouse gas finding risks “thousands of avoidable deaths”, arstechnica

Public health and green groups sue EPA over repeal of rule supporting climate protections, AP News

The legal battle over EPA finding is underway, Axios

U.S. environment agency sued over scrapping scientific rule behind climate protections, CBC

Etc., Etc.

Outlook for the legal proceedings is provided by David Wojick in his CFACT article EPA’s elegant arguments for endangerment repeal.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T Climate- Science.press

EPA’s arguments for repealing the Obama endangerment finding are simple, clear, and strong. So, they have a likely chance of winning in the Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which is where the final decision will be made.

I am working from the lengthy EPA press release which contains what amounts to a summary legal brief of the arguments.

The primary argument is legal and aimed directly at SCOTUS. The release even cites several relevant prior decisions. The gist of these decisions is that agencies cannot find new meaning in old statutes that suddenly gives them enormous new regulatory powers. Such recklessness is called regulatory overreach.

EPA’s argument is that massive overreach is precisely what the endangerment finding did, and it sure looks that way. It was not mission creep, more like mission explosion.

Gas stoves only the thin edge of the wedge.

The statute in question is Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act which lets
EPA regulate harmful tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles.
The Obama endangerment finding is entirely based on this narrow rule.

Here is how EPA puts it:

“The agency concludes that Section 202(a) of the CAA does not provide statutory authority for EPA to prescribe motor vehicle and engine emission standards in the manner previously utilized, including for the purpose of addressing global climate change, and therefore has no legal basis for the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations. EPA firmly believes the 2009 Endangerment Finding made by the Obama Administration exceeded the agency’s authority to combat “air pollution” that harms public health and welfare, and that a policy decision of this magnitude, which carries sweeping economic and policy consequences, lies solely with Congress. Unlike our predecessors, the Trump EPA is committed to following the law exactly as it is written and as Congress intended—not as others might wish it to be.”

This is just the sort of statutory issue the Supreme Court usually deals with.

There is an element of the endangerment finding that is so blatantly wrong that it is hilarious. I would start with it because it certainly makes EPA’s case for repeal, at least in part. EPA mentions it in passing saying this:

“In an unprecedented move, the Obama EPA found that carbon dioxide emissions emitted from automobiles – in combination with five other gases, some of which vehicles don’t even emit – contribute an unknown amount to greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere….”

So they used the tailpipe statute to assess (and then regulate)
gases that tailpipes do not emit. There is clearly no
statutory basis for these endangerment findings.

These are not scientific issues, and SCOTUS does not normally adjudicate science. There are, however, one and a half scientific arguments in case the science comes up. That is, one argument is fully stated in the release while the other is merely alluded to.

Here is the fully stated argument:

“Using the same types of models utilized by the previous administrations and climate change zealots, EPA now finds that even if the U.S. were to eliminate all GHG emissions from all vehicles, there would be no material impact on global climate indicators through 2100.”

This is actually an endangerment finding, namely that there is none.

Here is the alluded to argument:

“….the Obama EPA found that carbon dioxide emissions emitted from automobiles – in combination with five other gases, some of which vehicles don’t even emit – contribute an unknown amount to greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that, in turn, play a role through varied causal chains that may endanger human health and welfare.”

Lancet: A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat.

The several scientific issues here are the reality of the “varied causal chains” claimed in the Obama endangerment finding. These causal issues include a great deal of alarmism.

As science, the endangerment finding is a complex attribution claim, and these are highly speculative and contentious. These causal chain issues may be elaborated in the technical support documents for the repeal. But if they are at least mentioned, as in the release, it creates a placeholder for them, in case they come up during the SCOTUS arguments.

Since 1920, deaths each year from natural disasters have decreased by over 90 percent, not only as the planet has warmed, but as world population has quadrupled.

EPA has mounted some elegant arguments for repeal of the endangerment finding. Stay tuned to CFACT as this drama unfolds.

Footnote on Bjorn Lomborg’s estimates of Climate impact from reducing GHG emissions 

Governments have publicly outlined their post-2020 climate commitments in the build-up to the December’s meeting. These promises are known as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs).

♦  The climate impact of all Paris INDC promises is minuscule: if we measure the impact of every nation fulfilling every promise by 2030, the total temperature reduction will be 0.048°C (0.086°F) by 2100.

♦  Even if we assume that these promises would be extended for another 70 years, there is still little impact: if every nation fulfills every promise by 2030, and continues to fulfill these promises faithfully until the end of the century, and there is no ‘CO₂ leakage’ to non-committed nations, the entirety of the Paris promises will reduce temperature rises by just 0.17°C (0.306°F) by 2100.

♦  US climate policies, in the most optimistic circumstances, fully achieved and adhered to throughout the century, will reduce global temperatures by 0.031°C (0.057°F) by 2100.

♦  EU climate policies, in the most optimistic circumstances, fully achieved and adhered to throughout the century, will reduce global temperatures by 0.053°C (0.096°F) by 2100.

♦  China climate policies, in the most optimistic circumstances, fully achieved and adhered to throughout the century, will reduce global temperatures by 0.048°C (0.086°F) by 2100.

♦  The rest of the world’s climate policies, in the most optimistic circumstances, fully achieved and adhered to throughout the century, will reduce global temperatures by 0.036°C (0.064°F) by 2100.

Overview in Celsius and Fahrenheit by the year 2100

Germany Impaled by Climate Virtue

Posted on by Ron Clutz

“Imagine an argument so airtight about science so settled
over technology so reliable that you have to use censorship
to make sure nobody gives a dissenting opinion.”  @ProctorZ

Thomas Kolbe diagnoses what ails Germany in his article Germany’s Climate Policy Has Moved From Politics To The Courts… And The Economy Is Paying The Price.  H/T Tyler Durden

Germany is the political engine of the Green Deal, yet it continues to fall short of its own CO₂ reduction targets. Now Germany’s Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig has ordered the federal government to tighten its climate targets by the end of March. The ruling follows a lawsuit filed by the German Environmental Aid (Deutsche Umwelthilfe), aimed explicitly at increasing political pressure. Germany is tightening the screws on its own catastrophe.

Germany in 2026: the economy has entered its eighth consecutive year of industrial decline. Companies are shutting down, and hundreds of thousands of jobs have already been lost in the core sectors of the country’s former prosperity—chemicals, mechanical engineering, and above all the automotive industry.

Climate change has struck—or rather, the ideologically skewed and
socially unprecedented self-destructive frenzy of German politics has begun
to shred any remaining hope of a return to normal economic conditions.

The attempt to free the country from conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, and coal through a rapid transition to CO₂-free energy—politically and psychologically inflated into a moral crusade to “save the planet”—has failed.

Given the devastating competitive position of the German economy, which now pays energy prices roughly three times higher than competitors in reference locations such as France or the United States, any rational observer would urgently recommend consigning the entire transformation agenda to the dustbin of failed political hubris and collective delusion.

What remains is damage control:

♦  a rapid return to a market-based energy system,
♦  an end to destructive environmental and social experiments, and
♦  an unavoidable restructuring of the welfare state to reflect new economic realities.

Germany is getting poorer, productivity is falling, and GDP per capita
is declining—realities that even the federal government’s massive
debt-financed spending programs can no longer conceal.

Yet Germany in 2026 is no ordinary country. Its political elite, supported by an affirming media ecosystem, has entrenched itself in a self-referential system of emissions-centered economic control—a system now reinforced by judicial authority.

In its ruling, the court mandated that the government sharpen its environmental targets. Under current conditions, a gap of at least 200 million tons of CO₂ would remain by 2045, which must now be eliminated across Germany’s entire economic structure.

Judges who effectively substitute political objectives for democratic
deliberation are now setting the framework for Germany’s continued decline.

The lawsuit was brought by the German Environmental Aid—an organization already known for launching the first serious legal assault on Germany’s automotive industry during earlier battles over particulate emissions in city centers. The pressure on Germany is now coming from within: from a taxpayer-funded NGO complex that appears determined to politically delegitimize key industries, with the state apparatus firmly on its side.

According to Deutschlandfunk, a leaked draft from the SPD-led Environment Ministry outlines a new climate program aimed at achieving climate neutrality by 2045. Spanning more than 330 pages, it appears the government anticipated judicial escalation and preemptively prepared the groundwork for a revised climate law. Political conflict has been outsourced to the courts, to the relief of Berlin’s climate hardliners amid worsening economic conditions.

Among the core measures is the intensified “heat transition” in the building sector. The ministry proposes increasing subsidies for low-income households—up to 40 percent of costs—for heating replacements and heat pump installations. A generous solution for the climate-policy establishment, conveniently rolled out during an election season.

The leaked strategy signals a general increase in transformation pressure. No fundamentally new instruments are introduced; instead, property owners are placed under tighter time constraints to replace heating systems.

Climate policy and financial affordability are colliding ever more sharply. Amid a prolonged recession, the government is deliberately provoking social conflict while attempting to pacify it through ever-expanding subsidies.

Germany’s public debt, at roughly 65 percent of GDP, still appears moderate by European standards. In Berlin, this is interpreted as ample room to finance the transformation through rising debt while simultaneously increasing pressure on the private sector.

Environment Minister Carsten Schneider speaks optimistically of new “climate jobs.” The overall picture, however, increasingly resembles political farce. A state that secures public consent for its transformation agenda through debt, subsidies, and higher taxes acts obscenely and invites long-term economic damage.

Plans even include methane measurement programs for livestock, modeled after New Zealand—yet another blow to farmers. German emissions policy is entering a manic phase, blurring the line between real policy and political satire.

The subsidy machine continues to spin. The government plans to support 800,000 electric vehicles in the coming years. Credit resources remain abundant after Chancellor Friedrich Merz effectively neutralized the constitutional debt brake with the previous parliament. By 2040, electric vehicles are supposed to account for 70 percent of Germany’s car fleet—despite the absence of any credible plan for supplying the required electricity.

Artificial, technocratic necessity has replaced political debate. From the outset, it was clear that the supposed softening of the combustion-engine ban was mere political theater—a sedative for citizens gradually awakening to the scale of the green ideological disaster.

The energy sector faces further tightening. Dozens of reserve gas power plants are to be added, while existing plants are to be converted to hydrogen capability. Offshore wind projects abroad are being accelerated. These measures amount to desperate rescue attempts for a failed energy transition—an assessment implicitly acknowledged even by the Environment Ministry itself. Model-driven hope has replaced rational judgment.

Technocrats Deliver Catastrophes

Germany’s climate policy, entangled in a feedback loop with Brussels, has ossified into an auto-referential system marked by a narrow temporal vision and growing argumentative poverty. Looming over it all is the threat of further litigation by the German Environmental Aid should the final legislation fail to meet its standards.

Germany now finds itself in the grip of green ideologues who have subordinated all parties behind an ideological firewall. The environmental lobby’s greatest success came when it elevated the Net Zero target to constitutional status.

How much greater must the economic pressure become before a majority forms
—even in front of this firewall—to dismantle this manifest political folly?

Cal Laws Compell PC Climate Speech, Exxon Sues for Free Speech

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tim O’Brien explains the climate lawfare in his PJ article Is California Attempting to ‘Suicide’ Big Oil and Write the Suicide Note? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Sometimes big corporations are their own worst enemies. They say things and do things that at the moment sound good and perhaps win an immediate PR battle, but those same words or positions can come back to bite them later. Such is the case for ExxonMobil. 

Back in 2006, almost 20 years ago, the company’s then-CEO Rex Tillerson told the New York Times that a company report had acknowledged the link between the consumption of fossil fuels and rising global temperatures, saying, “We recognize that climate change is a serious issue.” He then added, “We recognize that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors affecting climate change.” 

This massive gesture of appeasement was a major concession, and it awarded a huge victory to climate alarmists. In that same article, the Times suggested that if Tillerson was successful, ExxonMobil would “no longer be the oil company that environmentalists love to hate.” 

Climate Activists storm the bastion of Exxon Mobil, here seen without their shareholder disguises.

How’d that work out? Did they back off of ExxonMobil and other big oil companies as a result? No, they ramped up the pressure so steadily and so heavily that over the years, “climate change” activists led ExxonMobil by the nose. It went full bore into “sustainability,” and it even supports the Paris Agreement, also known as the Paris Climate Accord. 

After years of incremental surrender to the left, the company now finds itself in the position of having to sue the state of California over a pair of 2023 “disclosure laws” that amount to the state mandating what companies can and cannot say about certain climate change matters. 

Last week, the company sued California in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on claims that Senate Bills 253 and 261 “trumpet California’s message.” The message in question, apparently, is that big oil and other major companies are “uniquely responsible for climate change.” In its lawsuit, Exxon Mobil said it considers this sort of message as “misleading.” The suit challenges both laws on grounds that they are First Amendment violations. The intent of the litigation is to stop these laws from going into effect in 2026. 

The climate alarmists and their entire sector are portraying the laws as requiring basic “climate-related transparency.” 

But if you dig into these laws, it reminds me of that old saying about free speech. It goes like this: “Communist China believes in free speech. So long as you say what the government likes, you can say whatever you want.” That pretty much sums up this situation.

More specifically, ExxonMobil contends that to comply, it would need to
rely on “frameworks that place disproportionate blame
on large companies like ExxonMobil.”

Senate Bill 253

Gov. “Slick” Newsom signed Senate Bill 253 (the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) into law in 2023. It requires big companies to disclose a wide range of emissions, and not just the stuff coming out of their industrial pipes and smoke stacks. They’d even have to report “direct and indirect emissions” that would include quantitative measurement of and a cost for employee business travel and product transport. 

I’ve seen some of this type of internal tracking and reporting up close, and it’s ridiculous. It’s all in line with ESG measurements and processes that are inconsistent at best. Just as often, it’s a scoring system built on “Wild A** Guesses.” 

Senate Bill 261

Senate Bill 261 (or the Climate-related Financial Risk Act ) gets even more pointedly at the First Amendment issues at play. This law requires businesses that generate more than $500 million per year to “disclose” the financial impacts and risks they face from climate change, and how they will respond. 

More to the point, ExxonMobil said that if it even tried to comply with this law, it would have to guess on things it can’t even know about in advance. Essentially, it would have to try to predict the future and put those predictions on its own website. 

At the same time, the suit points out that Exxon doesn’t even have
any crude oil or natural gas exploration, production, manufacturing,
transport or refining operations in California. 

On the First Amendment issue, in ExxonMobil’s case, the company is expected to argue that both laws require companies to speak publicly in specific ways. The laws don’t simply mandate that the company disclose factual data on past activities and results, but rather that it must speculate in ways it cannot reasonably and responsibly do. 

This is “compelled speech.” While the First Amendment protects the right to speak, it also protects the right not to have the government force you to speak, or to incorporate the government’s desired message. This is known as the “compelled speech doctrine.” While it is usually described as it pertains to individual rights, there is some history of commercial businesses running into this same issue.

What all of this amounts to is it seems that as industries go, California is attempting to “suicide” Big Oil, and it even wants to write the suicide note for the industry.

Placing Melissa in History

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Climatic media has fallen in love with Melissa, many of them blaming “climate change”, i.e. CO2 for her strength and destructive power.  No surprise that Imperial College London (who foisted its covid pandemic models upon us) reports that its IRIS model confirms a “rapid attribution” claim.  No doubt there will be more such yada yada at Belem COP to stir up the faithful.

For the rest of us, let’s remember the saying attributed to George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  For example, Melissa belongs to a class of stong Atlantic hurricanes going back almost a century.  Here’s a table of them along with peak sustained winds and the CO2 levels at the time.

Peak Wind CO2 Level
Hurricane Year mph ppm
“Cuba” 1932 175 308
“Labor Day” 1935 185 310
Janet 1955 175 314
Camille 1969 175 325
Anita 1977 175 334
David 1979 175 337
Allen 1980 190 339
Gilbert 1988 185 352
Andrew 1992 175 356
Mitch 1998 180 367
Wilma 2005 185 380
Rita 2005 180 380
Katrina 2005 175 380
Dean 2007 175 384
Felix 2007 175 384
Irma 2017 180 407
Maria 2017 175 407
Dorian 2019 185 411
Milton 2024 180 425
Melissa 2025 185 428

Note that all twenty hurricanes had winds ranging between 175 to 190 mph, going back to 1932.  Meanwhile CO2 has increased from 308 ppm to 428 (2025 ytd).  Note also the absence of such storms in the decade 2007 to 2017 despite CO2 adding 23 ppm in that period. The correlation between high wind speeds and CO2 concentrations is an insignificant 0.18.

Then there is the Global Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) report that includes the effects of both minor and major storms, combining strength and frequency.

I added an overlay of CO2 to illustrate how unlikely is a link between CO2 and storms.  Finally from Roger Pielke Jr. a chart showing ACE strength per hurricane:

The charts show that 16 is the average ACE per hurricane, in North Atlantic since 1900 and Globally since 1980.  The trend is not upward, and in North Atlantic appears currently lower than the past.

See Also:

Devious Climate Attribution Studies

 

Climate Lawfare Circus Update

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

What are the most notable climate activists litigation defeats in 2025? Response from perplexity.ai

In 2025, climate activists experienced several major litigation defeats in the United States, especially in their attempts to challenge President Trump’s climate and energy policies at the federal level and to anchor climate protection as a constitutional right.

Key Litigation Defeats

♦  Young climate activists and their legal team from Our Children’s Trust faced a significant setback in federal court in Montana while seeking to block three of President Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels. Despite a previous win at the state level, legal experts indicated that the lack of explicit environmental protections in the U.S. Constitution made success in federal court extremely unlikely, with Judge Dana Christensen leaning toward dismissal of the lawsuit known as Lighthiser v. Trump.​

♦  The Supreme Court declined to hear Juliana v. United States, a long-running youth-led climate lawsuit, ending the federal court battle after a decade. This rejection marked the conclusion of a pivotal effort to make climate protection a constitutional right in the United States, moving activists to seek remedies through international legal bodies instead.​

♦  Multiple states and the federal attorneys argued in Montana that overturning Trump’s orders would undermine the democratic process and risk national energy security. The lack of constitutional language guaranteeing a right to a “clean and healthful environment” at the federal level proved a decisive barrier to the activists’ arguments.​

♦  With federal options closed, activists petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging U.S. violations of international law for climate harm, but outcomes remain pending and U.S. jurisdiction over international tribunals is limited.​

Landmark Litigation Losses and Developments

Courts have started recognizing corporate responsibilities regarding emissions but continue to hesitate imposing mandatory emission reduction targets, reflecting ongoing legal and evidentiary hurdles for plaintiffs. Notable cases from 2025, such as Milieudefensie v. Shell and Lliuya v. RWE, ultimately resulted in losses for claimants but set significant legal precedents confirming that corporations can, in principle, be held liable for climate harm.​

Climate-washing litigation targeting misleading corporate environmental claims saw a high success rate—over 60% of such cases resulted in court victories for plaintiffs in 2024, according to recent reports summarized in 2025. However, the number of these cases dropped sharply compared to the previous year.​

In the governmental context, landmark litigation sought to enforce national and international climate commitments, referencing human rights and environmental standards. A recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion concluded that states ignoring fossil fuel regulation are committing internationally wrongful acts. While not binding, this opinion is expected to empower future climate litigation and enhance compensation claims for vulnerable nations.​

Procedural and jurisdictional challenges remain. For example, in People v. JBS USA Food Co., a New York court dismissed a case on jurisdictional grounds, highlighting ongoing obstacles to holding companies accountable for generic net-zero marketing claims without robust, actionable plans.​

In high-profile U.S. litigation, a court denied Tyson Foods’ motion to dismiss a greenwashing case, stating that future-looking net-zero claims must be backed by solid evidence and current technology—not just promises of technological advancement.​

What are the key legal reasons defeating climate lawsuits?

The primary legal reasons defeating climate lawsuits include statutory displacement, lack of standing, the political question doctrine, difficulty proving causation, preemption by federal law, and inadequate legal remedies. Courts often find that existing statutes like the Clean Air Act preempt common law claims, making it impossible for plaintiffs to address climate issues through federal court-made legal principles if a federal statute already covers the matter—even if the statute does not offer a complete solution. Additionally, lawsuits face defeat when courts decide that climate policy decisions should be made legislatively rather than judicially, treating them as ‘political questions’ beyond the judiciary’s purview.​

Statutory Displacement
Courts frequently rule that federal environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air Act, preempt or displace claims brought under federal common law. This means plaintiffs cannot use nuisance or other tort claims to address climate harm when statutes exist, limiting the options for federal climate lawsuits.​

Standing and Causation
Many lawsuits are dismissed due to lack of standing, meaning plaintiffs cannot sufficiently show a direct, personal injury caused by the defendant’s actions. Additionally, climate change causation is global and diffuse, making it challenging for plaintiffs to link their harm to a specific company or government action and demonstrate that a court-ordered remedy would meaningfully address the injury.​

Political Question Doctrine
Some courts view wide-scale climate regulation, emission reductions, and related damages as issues that require policy choices reserved for legislative or executive branches, not judicial intervention. This doctrine precludes courts from adjudicating matters they see as inherently political in nature.​

Preemption by Federal Law and Removal to Federal Courts
Efforts by energy companies to move cases from state to federal courts—where precedent is often less favorable to climate plaintiffs—also contribute to the defeat of many lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the grounds for companies to fight climate lawsuits, making it easier for them to have cases dismissed at the federal level.​

Inadequate Legal Remedies
Courts can find that litigation is not the proper tool for addressing climate change, as tackling global warming requires international cooperation and extensive policy changes—beyond what a court order can achieve. This challenge is reflected in rulings that climate harm is not redressable through the available legal frameworks.​

 

Litigation Updates from Sabin Center

Federal Court Said Puerto Rican Municipalities’ Climate Claims Against Fossil Fuel Industry Were Time-Barred

The court found that there was “overwhelming evidence of public knowledge of articles, reports, and cases making the connection between Defendants and Plaintiffs’ claims” so that by September 2021, four years after the 2017 hurricanes, the plaintiffs knew or should have known both that they suffered injury and also whom to sue.

Maine Federal Court Remanded State’s Climate Case Against Fossil Fuel Defendants to State Court and Granted State’s Motion for Costs and Fees

The court found that the defendants failed to satisfy the requirement for federal officer removal that any action by the defendants under a federal officer’s authority have a sufficient “nexus” to the conduct charged in Maine’s complaint—i.e., the defendants’ acts of “deceiving consumers and the public about climate change.”

Eighth Circuit Said Department of Energy Exceeded Authority with Rule Intended to Incentivize Electric Vehicle Production

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a 2024 final U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) rule that changed the methodology for determining the equivalent petroleum-based fuel economy values for electric vehicles (EVs). The rule preserved and then gradually phased out a “fuel content factor” that “artificially inflates” EVs’ fuel economy to increase adoption of EVs.

Wisconsin Federal Court Said Environmental Review Considered Climate Consequences of Land Exchange for Completed Transmission Line

The court concluded that even though the transmission line project had been completed and placed in service in September 2024, on the merits the court rejected arguments that the exchange violated the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997 and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Massachusetts Federal Court Said Climate Working Group Did Not Qualify as Exception to Federal Advisory Committee Act but Found that Environmental Groups Did Not Establish Irreparable Harm Warranting Preliminary Injunction

The court denied the environmental group plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction requiring the defendants to provide them with the Climate Working Group records; the court found the plaintiffs’ inability to draw on the records in comments on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rescission of the 2009 Clean Air Act endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gas emissions did not constitute an irreparable informational injury.

Charleston Elected Not to Appeal Dismissal of Climate Case

August 2025 dismissal of its lawsuit seeking to hold fossil fuel industry defendants liable for the harmful effects of climate change.

The Exception, a wrong and morally hazardous ruling in Montana

Montana Trial Court Awarded Held v. State Youth Plaintiffs Attorney Fees and Costs

The Montana District Court awarded the youth plaintiffs who prevailed on climate change-based Montana Constitution claims against the State of Montana and other State defendants more than $2.8 million in attorney fees and almost $100,000 in additional costs.

See Also:

No Right to Stable Climate in Our Holocene Epoch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Climate Lawsuits in Montana

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ed Berry provides an update and background on climate lawfare in his home state.

There have been three climate lawsuits in Montana from Our children’s Trust:

  1.  Barhaugh v Montana in 2011.
  2.  Held v Montana in 2022-2023.
  3.  Lighthiser v Trump in 2025.

There has been little change in the wording of these climate lawsuits. HvM still has AG Bullock’s name in it even though Montana elected him Governor as of 2012. The science argument in these three climate lawsuits has not changed.

They all claim the government is damaging the physical and mental health of children by allowing human CO2 emissions to continue.

But the schools and parents are damaging their children’s mental and health brainwashing them to believe human carbon emissions are destroying the planet.

The fundamental science issue in all climate lawsuits is whether these unstated hypotheses are true or false:

(1)   Human CO2 causes all the CO2 increase above 280 ppm.

(2)   This CO2 increase causes global warming.

(3)   This global warming causes the plaintiffs claimed damages.

The plaintiffs assume these three hypotheses are true, and they will admit it in court. Otherwise, they would have no basis for their claims.

To prevail, the defense needs to prove only one of these hypotheses is false. In fact, it is easy to prove all three hypotheses are false in a court of law.

Here’s a critical point that few people understand:

The scientific method says it is impossible to prove a hypothesis is true so the alarmists cannot prove these hypotheses are true. The plaintiffs have the burden of proof.

However, we can prove these hypotheses are false by showing they make one false prediction or contradiction with data. This is the key to science.

This is what parents and teachers and media should be teaching the kids.

1.      Barhaugh v. Montana

Barhaugh v. Montana: Petition for Original Jurisdiction, Montana Supreme Court, 2011, was the first climate lawsuit in Montana.

To justify its petition to the Montana Supreme Court, BvM says on page 5:

  • “Through the normal litigation and appeals process, this issue would likely take a minimum of two to three years just to reach this Court, in contrast to the average 60 days needed to resolve original proceedings.
  • “Considering the scientific evidence cited by the Respondent, there is not enough time to effectively arrest the effect of human-caused climate change unless immediate action is taken.”
  • “Climatological “tipping points” lie directly ahead and drive the urgency of taking action:
  • “The further we look into the future, the worse the costs of inaction will become. The longer we do nothing, the greater the risks of an irreversible climate catastrophe, such as a massive rise in sea levels, which could make the world unable to support anything like the current levels of population and economic activity. The costs and risks of inaction are overwhelmingly worse than the moderate and manageable costs of an immediate effort to reduce carbon emissions.”

Barhaugh v. Montana justified its petition to the Montana Supreme Court by predicting an irreversible climatological “tipping point” would occur in the next three years.

The Petition is based upon its assumption that the three unstated climate hypotheses are true. Assuming these hypotheses are true, the plaintiffs claimed certain damages. But all their claims are based on their assumption that their three hypotheses above are true.

The Intervention led by Dr. Edwin X Berry of Bigfork, Montana, prevented the Montana Supreme Court from ruling in favor of the Petition.

Berry’s Intervenors presented evidence that contradicted the Petition’s assumptions.

Their evidence constrained Montana Attorney General Bullock’s reply to the Court because he could not go on record disputing the Intervenors’ evidence that the Petitioners’ claims about climate science may not be true.

Montana AG Bullock wrote:

  • This disputed record is just one example of the factual determinations this Court would need to make to rule for Petitioners.
  • In addition, it would need to address, among other issues, the current state of climate change science; the role of Montana in the global problem of climate change; how emissions created in Montana ultimately affect Montana’s climate; whether the benefits of energy production must be balanced against the potential harm of climate change; and the concrete limits, if any, of the alleged “affirmative duty.”

The Montana Supreme Court ruled:

  • As the State points out, the petition incorporates factual claims such as that the State “has been prevented by the Legislature from taking any action to regulate [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
  • The State posits that the relief requested by Petitioners would require numerous other factual determinations, such as the role of Montana in the global problem of climate change and how emissions created in Montana ultimately affect Montana’s climate.
  • This Court is ill-equipped to resolve the factual assertions presented by Petitioners. We further conclude that Petitioners have not established urgency or emergency factors that would preclude litigation in a trial court followed by the normal appeal process.

The court could not determine whether the Petitioners or the Intervenors were correct about climate because, in the court’s view, there is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to decide the case as a matter of law.

The Court rejected the Barhaugh v. Montana Petition.

Quentin Rhoades, Attorney for the Intervenors, wrote that the Montana Supreme Court ruled against the Petitioners because,

  • “There is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to allow a court to decide the case purely as a matter of law.

Rhoades concluded,

  • “This establishes once and for all, at least as far as Montana law is concerned, climate science is decidedly not settled.
  • “And not only is it the highest court of a sovereign state, but it ruled that there is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to allow for them to decide the case purely as a matter of law.” 

2.      Held v Montana

Montana AG Knudsen should have dismissed Held v Montana based on the now-proven-false climate prediction of Barhaugh v. Montana and the Montana Supreme Court ruling.

The Montana Supreme Court ruled in 2011,

  • “There is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to allow a court to decide the case purely as a matter of law.”

Consensus has no bearing on scientific truth. Montana’s AG Knudsen should have known this because all trial lawyers learn it.

Republican AG Knudson should have argued that consensus proves nothing in science. The only relevant proof in science is proof that a hypothesis is false.

Yet AG Knudsen stipulated “consensus” was valid at the beginning of the HvM trial:

  • “for the purposes of trial, there is a scientific consensus that earth is warming as a direct result of human GHG emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.”

AG Knudsen’s “consensus” stipulation contradicted the Montana Supreme Court.

AG Knudsen’s climate stipulation put him to the left of former Democrat AG Bullock.

On 9/16/2025, Matthew Brown, of the lying Associated Press, wrote about HvM:

  • Young climate activists and their attorneys who won a landmark global warming trial against the state of Montana are trying to convince a federal judge to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels.

No, they did not “win.” Montana AG Knudsen purposely LOST Held v Montana as Montana WEF man ordered him to do.

Knudsen produced NO defense, NO relevant expert witness, and NO challenge to the plaintiffs’ expert witness claims. He laid on the grass and let the opposition trample on Montana.

Knudsen’s purposeful loss of HvM is the worst betrayal by an elected official of the people who voted for him that I have ever witnessed.

3.    Lighthiser v Trump

Lighthiser v. Trump uses the same bad science as Barhaugh v. Montana and Held v Montana.

On September 17, 2025, I traveled to Missoula and sat in on part of the Lighthiser v Trump trial. In my view, Trump’s attorney made good arguments to dismiss LvT. Now, we wait for the judge to decide whether to dismiss LvT.

If LvT continues, I encourage Trump’s attorney to use the arguments that I describe in my other articles to prove hypotheses (1), (2), and (3) are false. They are easy proofs to make in court.

If the LvT trial continues, Trump’s attorney should plan to prove hypotheses (1) and (2) are false and as a bonus prove that (3) is also false. This defeat would remove the influence of the climate fraud on politics.

Comment:

September 17 and 18, 2025, was a two-day injunction hearing in the case of Lighthiser v. Trump, in the Federal District of Montana Butte Division.  While federal Judge Dana Christensen listened to a few more of the plaintiffs’ witnesses and closing arguments, he was mulling over a few difficult legal questions regarding the plaintiffs’ injunction request. [Source: Missoula Current]

“In your motion, it says you want a preliminary injunction from me prohibiting the defendants from implementing these three orders. What exactly does that look like? I enjoin them, and what else do I do?” Christensen asked plaintiffs’ attorney Julia Olson during her closing statement. “Let’s assume these defendants elect to continue to implement policy favoring fossil fuels regardless of what I say. What will I do then?”

Olson said the defense attorneys hadn’t contested the statement that the central purpose of the executive orders is unleashing fossil fuels. But in his closing statement for the defense, DOJ attorney Michael Sawyer said that wasn’t the only thing the plaintiffs had to show. They have to prove they have standing by showing how they’re harmed by the executive orders and how that harm might be relieved by an injunction and eventually a ruling. That last part, known as redressability, was perplexing Christensen, and Sawyer weighed in, saying such an “unprecedented” injunction would be too difficult to police.

“If there were to be a preliminary injunction, there would be numerous requests back here. Every time an agency action is issued that plaintiffs didn’t like, that they thought was too friendly to fossil fuels, they’d be back here again,” Sawyer said. “What we have here is hundreds of lawsuits packed into one.”

The Defendants Brief in Opposition to Plantiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction is here.

In addition to the AG Montana and US DOJ, the submission was joined by AGs from:

Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Guam

 

Alarmists Fail to Refute Realistic Climate Report

Posted on by Ron Clutz

They shoot, they miss, we score.  David Wojick reports on the laughable failure of alarmists in his CFACT article Attack on DOE Climate Report is a comedy of criticism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The DOE science report saying the impact of CO2 on climate is exaggerated was quickly followed by a massive alarmist report. The alarmist report claimed to refute the DOE report, and the press dutifully reported it doing that.

On close inspection, I find this claim to be not even close to true. In fact, it looks laughable. Mind you, this is a preliminary finding, as the two reports together run about 600 pages. I just took what is arguably the key DOE chapter and compared the two reports on that.

This is the chapter on CO2 sensitivity, which is how much warming will occur (in theory) if the atmospheric concentration doubled. It is a convenient metric that is widely used to assess the potential adverse impact, if any, of increasing CO2.

I first looked at the DOE report, then at the alarmist report, anxious to see how they claimed to falsify the DOE version. What I found instead was that they did not disagree with a single thing the DOE report said. No falsification, no refutation, not even a simple disagreement. Nothing! I could not stop laughing.

On reflection, this is not surprising, because what the DOE report says is simple and well known. They point out that:

♦  the range of sensitivity estimates is getting bigger, not smaller;
♦  some of the models have gotten so hot that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)        no longer accepts their results; that
♦  observation-based estimates are a lot lower than the model estimates; and that
♦  sensitivity could be lower than the IPCC suggests.

Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models. Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa.

There is lots of criticism in the alarmist report to be sure, but it is all editorial, not scientific. Basically, the alarmists wish the DOE report said something else — which is no surprise. They say the report “misrepresents” the science (because it is not alarmist), even though everything it says is true.

They list six specific criticisms. These six are scientifically irrelevant, but some are actually wrong. For example, they say the DOE report ignores that there are multiple lines of evidence, when in fact the chapter begins with a discussion of that very fact.

More deeply, they say the report ignores Transient Sensitivity (decades) in favor of Equilibrium Sensitivity (centuries). This is astoundingly wrong, because the chapter finishes with a section making the point that Transient Sensitivity is both better and much lower than Equilibrium Sensitivity. It is a primary point of the chapter.

In both cases, “ignores” is their word, not mine, and clearly wrong. Conversely, they also attribute claims to the DOE report that are not made. Assuming things not stated is a common tendency among those who disagree.

The alarmist report is grandly titled “Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report” and is available here

The DOE report – “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” – to be found here. 

The alarmist site proudly lists some of the ridiculous press coverage it received. For example:

“85 climate scientists refute Trump administration report downplaying climate change” (The Hill)

“‘Not scientifically credible’: Scientists repudiate Trump administration climate report” (LA Times)

“Climate scientists file a public, point-by-point rebuttal of Trump admin report casting doubt on climate change” (CNN)

This is alarmist nonsense personified, a perfect example of why
the EPA Endangerment Finding should be revoked. It’s all hype.

See Also:

DOE Climate Team: Twelve Keys in Assessing Climate Change

Nature Study Rigged to Shakedown Big and Little Oil

Posted on by Ron Clutz

in this video, John Robson deconstructs the recent attempt to indict hydrocarbon fuel producers and deprive the world of 80% of the primary energy it needs.  The transcript is in italics with my bolds and added images.

This just in. Canadian companies convicted of burning up planet after show trial. Hydrocarbon bureaucrats sentenced to economic death. As you see, this breaking news caught me on the road here in this hotel. But somebody has to say something. So for the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is our quick reaction response to the pseudoscientific claim that Canadian companies are destroying the earth a bit.

And that response is that this court has no legitimacy at all. What it’s doing is no more science than what Lysenko did. It’s politics in a wig and ugly politics at that. According to a media friendly study in Nature, complete with its own lurid press release, sorry, news article:

The weather attribution wizards have nailed not just human CO2, but yes, individual firms for causing bad weather, and they shall be sued into extinction. After all, this new weather attribution was invented to bypass the tedious necessity of detecting trends in weather before explaining them, for the very purpose not to facilitate understanding, but to facilitate lawsuits.

As Roger Pielke Jr. recently growled while examining a hatchet job on the US Department of Energy skeptical red team climate report, he said, quote, “In my areas of expertise, he had found numerous statements that were simply false. among them that world weather attribution was not created with litigation in mind.”And how does he know that that claim is false? Because he did actual research, including finding a quotation from WWA’s chief scientist, Fredericke Otto:

Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.”

Of course, it was. And here we go. As the Nature propaganda said:

Legal experts say it’s a line of evidence that could feed into climate litigation that focuses on specific events such as the 2021 heatwave that hammered the US Pacific Northwest in 2021. Already, a county government in Oregon has filed a 52 billion US civil lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for contributing to that event.

So, it’s revealing, and not in a good way, that the Nature Study itself credits upfront “approaches promoted by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative and other Methods.”

Alarmists don’t love Weather Attribution because it conducts fair trials. They love it because it convicts everybody with roughly the subtlety of Andrey Vyshinsky or Lavrentiy Beria. But it is not science. As Patrick Brown pointed out this January, their tricks for stacking the jury box include, in this case, in order to attribute droughts to human evil and folly, they overwhelmingly studied places where drought had increased, even though globally there were more places where it decreased. You know, just in case their models let them down, but they’re not likely to. [See Beware Claims Attributing Extreme Events to Hydrocarbons]

As we noted in June, dizzy with success, the fellow travelers at CNN touted a study where:

 “Using a combination of scientific theory, modern observations, and multiple sophisticated computer models, researchers found a clear signal of human-caused climate change was likely discernable with high confidence as early as 1885.”

That is before the invention of the internal combustion automobile. Now, the obvious implication here, and the correct one, is that these models would find such a signal anywhere because we’re told that in 1885, atmospheric CO2 was around 293 parts per million, just a whisker above the 280 parts per million that alarmists wrongly believe was constant in pre-industrial times. That very small change couldn’t possibly have measurably affected the weather. Such a fluctuation is very obviously noise, not signal. Especially when it’s coming from ice cores whose bubbles take decades or even centuries to seal.

Yet the source here tells us that in 1885 it was 293.3 parts per million.  And this mathiness looks impressive, but it’s actually another key warning sign that something that is not science is lurching about in a stolen lab code. Real science deals in uncertainties. It shows error bars. Fake science bludgeons the public with spurious decimal places. According to the CBC’s credulous take:

“I was surprised that even the smallest carbon majors were actually very substantially contributing to the probability of the heat waves, said Yan Quilkai, a climate scientist at ETHZurich, who led the study.”

Oh, come now. Surely you suspected your rigged models would convict the defendant of a serious crime. After all, it’s what they’re for. And here we go. The study allegedly found that major oil companies alone caused more than half the supposed 1.3° C warming since pre-industrial times. And that of that share, Canadian companies caused 0.01°C.

I mean, one might retort, De minimis non curat lex ( The law does not concern itself about trifles.) if not educated in a government school, but instead in Latin or in sound constitutional and legal principles. Or you might say, get the heck out of my lab if you’ve been educated in science because there is no way, no way at all that 0.01 out of 1.30 is signal and not noise here.

Now to his credit or that of the shattered remains of his conscience, nature’s Jeff Tollefson does admit that:

“despite the eyepopping estimates for responsibilities allocated to individual carbon majors, the uncertainties remain high in many instances in large part because the most extreme heat waves are statistically rare.”

Yeah, indeed they’re so rare that there’s no statistically sound way of determining how likely they are. As we pointed out in our turning down the heat waves fact check video with regard to that 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome that the alarmists so love:

“The heatwave could be viewed as virtually impossible without global warming. But it was virtually impossible with it as well. Sometimes weird things happen.”

What’s more, World Weather Attribution’s gleeful attribution of it to humans and our carbon original sin was eventually submitted to a serious journal and so rubbished by one of the reviewers that they had to add a bunch of disclaimers saying that of course they couldn’t really know. But did it dent their popularity or their self-confidence? Hooha. This study in Nature says,  “The median estimate indicates that climate change has also increased the probability of heat waves by more than 10,000.” 10,000 what? we ask. Percent? Times?

But it gets worse because this kind of talk suggests that they know how common and intense heat waves were around 1850, and how common and intense they are now. But they don’t. They have no idea. There weren’t systematic measurements of daily temperature in most of the world even into the mid 20th century. And the proxies when you go further back certainly give no idea how common or intense they were even a century ago, let alone 500 years.

So they’re making it up, then hiding it with decimals, saying in a spreadsheet attached to the study that, for instance, Cenovus Energy alone increased the probability of an early 2009 heatwave in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania’s northern provinces by 1.01% and its intensity by, get this, 0.0003°C. Four decimal places. As the Duke of Wellington once said, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

It’s also anti-scientific to claim to give a change in global temperature to two decimal places over the last 175 years when nobody knows the temperature anywhere to within one decimal place a century ago. And another thing we actually do know that during the Holocene era the earth has cycled regularly between warmer and cooler periods including down from the medieval warm period into the little ice age and back up after 1850.

So at least some of the warming since must by any logical standard have been natural. In which case they’re blaming oil companies alone for more than the entire human contribution. But the attributors duck this absurdity by absurdly assuming that it’s basically all on us. The chutzpah here is astounding. But it’s exactly the kind of thing they do.

And if you use the same warped modeling to assess the shares of some other human activity, you’d dependably get a searing indictment. And in fact, if you used it on all of them, I’ll bet you you’d get over a 100% of that 1.3 degrees C, never mind if whatever smaller share actually wasn’t natural. But they don’t run that kind of test because what they’re doing isn’t science. They’re not seeking truth and testing theories ruthlessly. They’re zealots shrieking about enemies of the people.

They also write:

“with reference to 1850 to 1900, climate change has increased the median intensity of heat waves by 1.36°C over 2000 to 2009, of which 0.44°C is traced back to the 14 top carbon majors and 0.22°C to the 166 others. These contributions correspond respectively to 32% and 16% of the overall effect of climate change.”

And again, it sounds precise, all right, but climate change is a statistical description of changes in long-term weather. It isn’t a causal force. So, they don’t even know what climate change is. And all those double decimals swirling around trying to hypnotize you are a dead giveaway that they’re in over their heads or worse. And it is worse because they also don’t know what science is. They don’t do counterfactuals and consider what extreme events might have been prevented by warming as well as caused by it.

And they’re certainly not comparing known extreme events today with known extreme events in the past. Instead, they take what did happen and sometimes what didn’t, match it against invented scenarios to prove that we caused bad weather. And then they say, “Gotcha.” when the computer Julie says, “Yes, we caused bad weather.” And then they speed dial their lawyer.

That CBC item included the usual guff from the usual suspects, including Naomi Oreskes. It said,

“referring to previous research from her and other experts showing major oil companies knew about the impacts of carbon emissions and the dangers of global warming decades before countries started enacting climate policies.”

Right? Trotsky was a conscious agent of fascism and imperial oil has been trying to incinerate the earth for half a century and now it’s been proved to two decimal places to the satisfaction of people in the media who barely survived grade 10 math. So, while speaking of people not doing science when it is their job, let us also mention people not doing journalism when it is their job.

CTV, for instance, pounced on the supposed study and shrieked, “These Canadian companies among humanity’s biggest carbon emitters study says.” But the study says nothing of the kind. And in fact, nor really does the story, which includes this bit:

“The 14 largest carbon emitters were led by fossil fuel and coal producers from the former Soviet Union and China, followed by oil companies Saudi Aramco, Gasprom, and Exxon Mobile. Together, they made the same contribution to climate change as the remaining 166 entities, according to the study.”

So, Canada’s eight enemies of humanity actually ranked between 70th and 163rd. And together, they supposedly warmed the planet by 0.01°C over nearly two centuries. Which means if they kept at it for another 1750 years, they might warm the place by 0.1° C. And anyone who tells you they can calculate the impact on the weather of such a trivial change is a charlatan and a rogue. And journalists who parrot such claims without any attempt to do basic math, let alone probe how the authors think they know these things, or what other views exist, belong at Pravda, not in free world newspapers.

Now, before concluding, your honor, we wish to say one thing directly to the prisoners currently slumped in the dock or on the lam. The CBC reported that it:  “reached out to several carbon majors mentioned in the story, but they either declined to comment or didn’t respond by publication time.”  Likewise: “Nature also reached out to the following companies for comment on the study’s findings, but did not receive a response. BP, Shell, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, and Coal India.” 

And what indeed could they say? The hydrocarbon energy companies have for too long and with too few exceptions followed a strategy of appeasement, confessing on the science and groveling on the policy, endorsing net zero in the hope of being the last one shot. But since everybody gets shot, it was always a terrible plan. And with the execution fast approaching, it’s time to abandon it.

Of course, if you honestly believe that your product is destroying the Earth, you should say so and get the heck out of that line of work. But if you don’t believe it, stand up for yourselves and not just by saying that the other companies are worse. Because these climate fanatics are not going to stop. They plan to destroy you using pseudoscience to win lawfare. They intend to sue you into oblivion. You, the companies that the rest of us rely on to avoid starving and freezing, and then they’re going to wonder why it got dark all of a sudden. And darkness at noon in the lab definitely has something to do with it.

So, please don’t just stand there. Say something.
Plead not guilty because you’re not and they are.

For the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson and that’s our quick response to this Nature study indicting oil companies for setting the planet on fire.

Swamp Lawfare Update: Reported Demise of DOE Climate Report Premature

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

As expected, climatists were aghast at content in the DOE Climate Review, and the usual suspects complained to the court (Massachusetts, no surprise) on a technicality.  The legal maneuvers are twisted, also usual when deployed by wealthy obstructionist pros like EDF (Environmental Defense Fund) and UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists).  After some digging, I found the documentary trail with excerpts highlighted below and links in red to official docs for those interested. Source: Court Listener Environmental Defense Fund, Inc. v. Wright (1:25-cv-12249)

The Complaint 

The Climate Working Group worked in secret for months to produce a report for DOE and EPA that would provide justification for their predetermined goal of rescinding the Endangerment Finding. In May, unbeknownst to the public, the group transmitted its report to EPA, and EPA then relied extensively on the report in preparing its proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding.

It was not until the same day that EPA released that proposal, July 29, that the existence and work of the group was made public. Secrecy was so important to Defendants that when the New York Times asked one of the group’s members in early July about his role at DOE, the member obscured his work for the group and simply said that he is an “unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it.”

But federal law does not permit agencies to create or rely on such secret, unaccountable groups when engaged in policymaking. In the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), Congress mandated transparency in the establishment and operation of any federal advisory committee, including by requiring that the group’s formation be promptly disclosed and that its meetings, emails, and other records be open to the public. Here, Defendants did not disclose the Climate Working Group’s existence until months after it began working, and not a single meeting or record has been made public other than the group’s report. Defendants also violated FACA’s prohibition on stacking an advisory committee with adherents of only one point of view; the Climate Working Group’s members were all chosen for their skepticism of climate science, and the group does not have a single member that agrees with the consensus of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community on the effects of climate change.

The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists bring this action to enjoin Defendants’ flagrant violations of FACA, to bring transparency to the Climate Working Group’s work to date as the law requires, and to compel Defendants to follow the law if they wish to rely on outside scientific advisors to justify their actions going forward. If DOE and EPA wish to establish an advisory committee for the enormously consequential purposes for which they have put the Climate Working Group to use, they must comply with the rules that Congress has prescribed.

Defendants’ Response

Plaintiffs invoke the Federal Advisory Committee Act (“FACA”), and contend that the Department of Energy (“DOE”) and Secretary Christopher Wright violated its requirements in establishing the now-dissolved DOE Climate Working Group (“CWG”). But the true goal of their lawsuit is not promoting openness and transparency in public decision-making. While Plaintiffs complain that they only recently learned of the CWG’s existence, DOE released its Report publicly weeks ago, and the Government provided opportunities for public comment on the CWG’s work.  Instead, as the introduction to their Complaint makes clear, Plaintiffs’ objective is to delay and prematurely undermine a contemplated future policy decision by a different agency: namely, EPA’s proposed reconsideration of its 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding. Their sole hook for that relief is that EPA cited the CWG report—among numerous other sources—in a notice of proposed rulemaking (“NPRM”). That gambit fails at every level. Plaintiffs’ requested relief is foreclosed by Article III, the scope of FACA, and equitable principles.

More broadly, Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction or, in the Alternative, For Summary Judgment or Consolidation Under Rule 65(a)(2), ECF Nos. 15-16, fails for at least three different reasons. First, Plaintiffs fail to establish that they are likely to succeed on the merits, because the CWG is not an entity covered by FACA; the statutory requirements are inapplicable to groups assembled to exchange facts or information with federal officials. In all events, most of Plaintiffs’ claims are now moot due to the CWG’s dissolution.

Second, Plaintiffs have identified no imminent irreparable harm requiring judicial intervention at this early juncture. They face no harm (irreparable or otherwise) from the prospect of ongoing work performed by the CWG because the group has already been dissolved. And EPA’s upcoming September 22, 2025, deadline for public comment on its NPRM poses no harm, because Plaintiffs are free to raise their concerns about the CWG report via public comment. Nor would any alleged harm stemming from an inability to comment be irreparable. Plaintiffs request that this Court ultimately issue declaratory relief finding the CWG unlawful and an injunction preventing Defendants from relying on its work. Either remedy would fully repair any injury suffered by Plaintiffs from the FACA violations they allege if they ultimately prevail on the merits, rendering a preliminary injunction unnecessary.

Third, Plaintiffs have not shown that the balance of the equities or the public interest weighs in their favor. These factors favor allowing the Government to use the information provided by the scientists of the CWG, promoting dialogue based on honest scrutiny and scientific transparency in the public sphere, and not prematurely pretermitting an ongoing rulemaking process. Even if the Court were inclined to grant some relief, the remedies sought by Plaintiffs are overbroad. Even when a FACA violation is proven on the merits, injunctions preventing the use of committee work are a highly disfavored remedy, as declaratory relief can fully remedy all injuries alleged. Plaintiffs have certainly shown no entitlement to such an extraordinary remedy at the preliminary injunction stage. And because the CWG has been dissolved, no practical purpose is served by an order compelling it to comply with FACA’s procedural requirements going forward. Nor is extension of the comment period on EPA’s NPRM warranted or proper. Plaintiffs cannot circumvent the Clean Air Act or APA finality requirements by alleging a FACA violation in order to indefinitely delay a pending rulemaking with which they disagree.

Plaintiffs’ Reply

For months, Defendants brazenly violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act. They constituted the Climate Working Group (CWG) in secret, had it meet in secret to produce a report with advice and recommendations for policymakers, and then provided the report to EPA in secret for use in a proposal to rescind EPA’s Endangerment Finding. Defendants present no serious argument that they did not violate FACA in taking all of these actions. Instead, when these actions were challenged in court, Defendants purported to dissolve the CWG the day before their opposition was due, and in their filing the next day, they argued that the dissolution mooted the case and left the Court powerless to provide relief for their many legal violations.

But the rule of law is not a game of catch me if you can. DOE, EPA, and the CWG violated FACA with every action they took producing and utilizing the CWG Report, and those unlawful actions continue to harm Plaintiffs in myriad ways. Indeed, Defendants do not dispute that the CWG lacked fairly balanced views—including views representative of those held by Plaintiffs—and was subject to inappropriate influence from Secretary Wright. The continued existence and use of the CWG Report produced with these legal infirmities significantly harms Plaintiffs, and there are multiple forms of declaratory, injunctive and Administrative Procedure Act relief that this Court may enter to redress these injuries.

Amicus Brief American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce

Amicus writes to explain why censoring the CWG Report in EPA’s ongoing rulemaking is inappropriate and beyond the power of this Court.  The extraordinary request for censorship here should fail for multiple reasons, but AmFree covers five.

First, Plaintiffs lack standing to seek relief against EPA because censoring the study would not redress any cognizable Article III harm. See Nat. Res. Def. Council v. Peña, 147 F.3d 1012, 1020–23 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (so holding). Second, the Clean Air Act strips district courts of power to enjoin EPA’s actions in ongoing Clean Air Act rulemaking proceedings or to control the agency’s rulemaking docket, making courts of appeals (in this case, the D.C. Circuit) the “sole forum” for these disputes. See 42 U.S.C. § 7607(b), (d)(8). Third, censorship remedies are not available under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) or through a writ of mandamus, because such an order does not compel a discrete action required by FACA. Fourth, censoring the government’s use of the CWG Report is punishment that exceeds this Court’s remedial equity jurisdiction. Fifth, Plaintiffs cannot show irreparable harm because they have adequate avenues for judicial relief namely, challenging EPA’s rulemaking record in the D.C. Circuit, after a final rule.

Plaintiffs “are champing at the bit to challenge EPA’s anticipated rule [repealing] carbon dioxide emission[]” standards for new motor vehicles. In re Murray Energy Corp., 788 F.3d 330, 333 (D.C. Cir. 2015) (Kavanaugh, J.). “But courts have never reviewed proposed rules, notwithstanding the costs that parties may routinely incur in preparing for anticipated final rules.” Id. at 335. This Court should not do so here.

What’s Next for CWG

Steven Koonin writes this excerpt in Climate Change Dispatch article

Our report is the first from Washington in years that deviates from the narrative of a climate headed for catastrophe. That these findings surprised many speaks to a governmental failure to communicate climate science accurately to the public.

Reports like ours may draw a lot of anger, but our work accurately portrays important aspects of climate science.

Our work has attracted strong criticism, despite its grounding in established science. Almost 60,000 comments were submitted to the Federal Register during the month after its publication, and the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists filed a lawsuit to prevent the Energy Department or Environmental Protection Agency from using the report in decision-making.

Most of these challenges have no scientific backing.

Though scientists supporting the so-called consensus on climate change have organized several serious critiques, these at most add detail and nuance to our findings, without negating the report’s central points.

They still merit a response, which will form the next round in an overdue public debate on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate policies must balance the risks of climate change against a response’s costs, efficacy, and collateral effects.

Reports like ours may draw a lot of anger, but our work accurately portrays important aspects of climate science. Acknowledging the facts is essential for informed policy decisions.

Mr. Koonin is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”

Killer Climate Lawsuit on Shaky Ground

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Washington Free Beacon reports on shaky case to make climate change a killer First-Of-Its-Kind Lawsuit Blaming Oil Companies for Woman’s Heat-Wave Death Failed to Mention Her Heart Disease. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

‘The diagnosis and likely treatment for it is highly relevant,’
doctor tells Free Beacon

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit accusing some of the nation’s largest oil companies of causing global warming and therefore causing a Washington woman’s 2021 heat-wave death left out one critical detail: she had been diagnosed with heart disease.

Juliana Leon’s death certificate, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows she had been diagnosed with hypertensive cardiovascular disease, a condition that stems from unmanaged high blood pressure and increases the risks of heart failure and sudden cardiac death. The medical examiner for King County, Wash., determined that the condition contributed to her death, meaning it wasn’t the direct cause of death, but made her more vulnerable to it.

The wrongful death lawsuit Leon’s daughter filed earlier this year against oil companies, however, failed to make a single mention of her underlying condition. It instead focused entirely on the direct cause of death: hyperthermia.

The revelation, which has not been reported until now, is relevant because it could explain why Leon succumbed to the high temperatures that hit the Pacific Northwest in June 2021, according to doctors interviewed by the Free Beacon. And it is important too because of the lawsuit’s potentially wide-reaching impact. If successful, the lawsuit could lead to dozens of similar wrongful death suits and even future criminal homicide prosecutions against the oil industry.

The lawsuit—the first instance of a case attempting to put oil companies on the hook for heat-related wrongful death—is part of a coordinated effort nationwide to use the courts to cripple the oil industry and usher in a green energy transition. Activists say such litigation will hold the industry accountable, while critics say it is designed to bankrupt the industry, something that would have devastating economic impacts.

“The main reasons for hyperthermia under these conditions include medications or skin conditions impairing the ability to sweat. People with hypertensive cardiovascular disease are likely to be taking such medicines,” said Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and a clinical lecturer at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

“I think the diagnosis and likely treatment for it are highly relevant,” she continued. “A body temperature as high as 110 is extremely unlikely without impairment in the body’s temperature-regulating mechanism, at least under the circumstances here. Most people will have dehydration, but not heat stroke, during a heat wave. This lady likely had both.”

Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the founder of a private surgical practice in Arizona, agreed that the diagnosis could be relevant.  Singer told the Free Beacon:

“Having hypertension and its cardiovascular stigmata, depending on severity, might affect a person’s risk of succumbing to hyperthermia. But it’s the hyperthermia that kills,”

Lawyers representing Leon’s estate and daughter did not respond to requests for comment.

Leon died on June 28, 2021, during an extreme heat wave, which ultimately claimed the lives of 100 people in Washington, state data show. According to the wrongful death lawsuit, Leon died in her car after the vehicle’s air conditioning system broke and as outside temperature exceeded 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Her internal temperature rose to 110 degrees Fahrenheit right before she died.

Two weeks earlier, Leon had undergone bariatric surgery, a weight-loss surgery that helps reduce the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure. As a result, she had been on a liquid diet in the two weeks leading up to her death. In fact, Leon died in her car on her drive home from the doctor’s office where she was informed that morning that she may begin to eat soft foods again.

Still, the lawsuit blames seven oil companies for her death, arguing that they knew their products caused global warming decades ago, but continued selling them anyway. The lawsuit states that the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t have occurred without human-caused global warming.

A study published in the American Meteorological Society’s journal Weather and Forecasting last year found that there is “little evidence” greenhouse gases amplified the heat wave and emphasized that weather forecasts for the event were “highly accurate.” “Global warming may have made a small contribution, but an extreme heat wave, driven by natural variability, would have occurred in any case,” it concluded.  Singer told the Free Beacon:

“You don’t need climate change to have a heat wave. Humans have been experiencing heat spells since the beginning of recorded history,”

The Free Beacon reported last week that an environmental group funded by the powerful Rockefeller Family Fund is quietly steering the wrongful death suit. According to legal filings, Leon’s daughter quietly appointed a climate activist to serve as the agent for her deceased mother’s estate. Those documents were authored by lawyers at the Rockefeller-backed Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit leading the coordinated, nationwide plan to “drive divestment” from and “delegitimize” the oil industry through litigation.