Climate Litigation

Greenpeace Legal End Run to Avoid US Court is Ruled Out of Bounds

Posted on by Ron Clutz

AI generated free pik

Jason Isaac report at The Hill Greenpeace’s attempt to swindle US courts just got harpooned.  Excerpts in italics wtih my bolds and added images.

The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.

It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.

The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference.  The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.

The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear:

Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.

The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction
blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action
that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.

The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most,  The court wrote,:

“ Comity expires when the strong public policies of the forum
are vitiated by the foreign act.”

In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.

This is the right ruling. It is also a narrow one.

The injunction applies to one party in one state. Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace can still pursue the parts of its Dutch action that do not require erasing the North Dakota verdict.

Federal courts have not yet weighed in on whether American courts can block foreign collateral attacks on American judgments. And the federal circuits are split on how heavily international comity should weigh against such injunctions. Other state supreme courts have not taken up the question. The next activist group with a domestic loss and a foreign sympathetic forum will try the same play, just with better lawyers and a cleaner record.

And they have plenty of reasons to keep trying. The European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP directive was sold as a shield for journalists and dissidents in countries with weak speech protections. In practice, however, it is becoming a sword aimed at American energy companies that win in court. The directive’s “manifestly unfounded” standard invites foreign judges to second-guess the merits of American court verdicts. Article 17 invites damages claims for the offense of having sued. The architecture is custom-built for the exact tactic Greenpeace attempted.

The deeper problem is that the activist legal industry has discovered something useful. When the protests fail, when the defamation campaigns get punished, when the juries refuse to play along, there is always another forum, another court, another friendly jurisdiction willing to entertain the argument that American energy infrastructure is itself a kind of crime.

The point is not to win on the merits. The point is to make building anything in this country so legally treacherous that capital flees and projects die. This strategy will work in proportion to how seriously American courts take it.

The North Dakota Supreme Court took it seriously. Other courts must follow. Congress should pay attention too. American companies operating under American law, sued in American courts and vindicated by American juries should not have to fight the same case all over again in Amsterdam, Brussels, or anywhere else.

A federal statute clarifying the authority of American courts to block foreign collateral attacks on domestic judgments would put the matter beyond doubt. The Trump administration’s commitment to energy dominance demands nothing less.

The stakes are not abstract. Every data center humming with artificial intelligence, every factory bringing jobs back from overseas, every home heated through a North Dakota winter depends on the ability of American companies to build, operate, and defend the infrastructure that delivers reliable energy. Strip away the certainty that an American verdict actually means something, and that infrastructure becomes a much riskier bet. Risk premiums rise. Capital gets scarcer. Projects do not get built.

Greenpeace lost in North Dakota. It lost again on May 7. This is all good. But the rest of the country needs to make sure those losses stick and continue, because the next case is already being drafted somewhere, and the activists who brought us a six-year siege of the Dakota Access Pipeline are not going to take this defeat as a final answer.  Neither should we.

 

 

 

 

Fossil Fuel Lawsuits Drive Up Energy Prices

Posted on by Ron Clutz

How to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Change

Power the Future warns of the large scale attack on US energy platform in an article Green Groups’ 600+ Lawsuits Are Driving Up Energy Costs.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

As the Trump Administration meets with oil and gas CEOs to discuss lowering gas prices, there’s a growing question that can’t be ignored: Who is working just as aggressively to stop it?

Green groups have filed over 600 lawsuits targeting energy policies and projects. These efforts are not isolated; they form a coordinated strategy to challenge nearly every aspect of an energy agenda focused on increasing supply and lowering costs.

Organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club,
and Earthjustice openly tout their litigation records.

NRDC alone has reported suing the administration more than 160 times, including efforts that helped halt major infrastructure projects like Keystone XL. The Sierra Club has claimed more than 300 cases during Trump’s first term and over 100 additional legal actions in 2025 alone. Earthjustice similarly boasts more than 200 lawsuits.

This is not routine legal oversight; this is a full-scale attack to reshape U.S. energy policy through the courts.

Many of these organizations operate within a broader network of donors, including foreign billionaires like Hansjörg Wyss, whose funding has supported a range of environmental advocacy initiatives. That raises important transparency concerns: if overseas money is helping fuel legal campaigns that influence U.S. energy policy, the public deserves to know.

“The environmental movement has weaponized litigation to deliberately undermine and slow down American energy production at every turn,” said Daniel Turner, Founder and Executive Director of Power The Future. “These groups operate as a well-funded and aggressive adversary to U.S. energy independence, not as some innocent third party simply looking out for nature. While American families and workers suffer from higher energy costs and lost opportunities, these organizations file lawsuit after lawsuit to block responsible domestic development. It’s time to treat them as the serious obstacle they are and shine a light on who is really pulling the strings behind this coordinated campaign against our nation’s energy industry.”

Economist Wayne Winegarden describes the economic damages done by this litiigation in his Forbes article Fossil Fuel Lawsuits Are A Tax On Consumers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Announcing the state’s lawsuit against energy producers, California AG Rob Bonta claimed it is time to make energy companies pay for “the harm they have caused.” It is one of more than thirty such lawsuits around the country.

As I have argued here, here, and here, these lawsuits are not heroic efforts to safeguard the environment. The filings by cities and state AGs, as well as the dozens of other suits they hope to inspire, will primarily harm families by worsening the affordability crisis that is already harming households across the country. As with any policy that drives up the costs of energy, low- and middle-income families will bear the brunt of the costs.

Of course, harming families and local businesses through higher energy costs is not how the plaintiffs justify their lawsuits. California and other elected officials around the country sell their lawsuits to their local constituents with populist tropes about corporate accountability.

Yet, based on the comments of many of the AGs and plaintiff attorneys, the litigants recognize that one impact from the lawsuits will be higher costs on consumers. For many plaintiffs, imposing larger costs on families and businesses is an intended outcome.

Take comments California’s attorney general made in late April to an environmental group about this litigation. Responding to a questions from the host, he said

“One goal for the litigation is to make oil and gas more expensive as a way to disincentive use of these energy sources and impose billions of dollars in costs that these companies will have to share with their shareholders.”

Higher energy costs harm families’ financial stability. As the Federal Reserve notes, “when gasoline prices increase, a larger share of households’ budgets is likely to be spent on it, which leaves less to spend on other goods and services. The same goes for businesses whose goods must be shipped from place to place or that use fuel as a major input (such as the airline industry). Higher oil prices tend to make production more expensive for businesses, just as they make it more expensive for households to do the things they normally do.”

If the plaintiffs are able to extract a $200 billion settlement from the energy companies, which is much less than what they are asking for, then the price of gasoline would increase by 62-cents a gallon based on my previous analysis relating higher oil prices to higher gasoline costs. That is a more than 17 percent increase in the average price of a gallon of gas as of May 13, 2024.

Further, due to energy’s ubiquitous use, prices would also increase for a wide range of goods such from cell phones to groceries, as well as services, particularly heating and cooling our homes. These higher costs will diminish national economic growth and reduce economic opportunities.

Making matters worse, climate litigation deters companies and investors from allocating their capital toward developing potential clean energy innovations. The deterrent is even larger because technologies that were once heralded as important sources of low-emission energy now face the same serious litigation exposure.

For instance, increasing use of natural gas is an important reason why carbon emissions have been declining over the past twenty years. However, natural gas producers are still targeted in these lawsuits. Given the pollution associated with all energy sources – including solar and wind – the lawsuits send an anti-innovation signal to all potential energy entrepreneurs.

Then there is the lawsuits’ hypocrisy. For example, the California attorney general claims he wants to punish fossil fuel companies because the companies allegedly knew that global climate change was a risk but intentionally hid these risks from the public. But California, the U.S. Government, and governments around the world were also well aware of these risks.

Suing fossil fuel producers for the costs of climate change is economically
damaging, environmentally suspect, and based on dubious claims.

It will also harm families, particularly working families, at a time when they are already struggling with the high cost of living. Ultimately, there are many serious adverse consequences from state and local litigation against traditional energy companies, but no economic upsides should the plaintiffs prevail.

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

 

DOJ Sues Against Minnesota’s Climate Lawsuit

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Climate Change Dispatch reports DOJ Sues Minnesota Over State Climate Lawsuit Targeting Energy Companies.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Justice Department argues the state case oversteps federal authority,
seeks to reshape national energy policy.

The complaint, filed Monday, May 4, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, accuses state officials of trying to impose their own climate policies on domestic energy producers in a way the DOJ says burdens national energy development and intrudes on federal authority.

The underlying lawsuit was filed in 2020 by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries, and Koch subsidiary Flint Hills Resources.

Minnesota brought the case under state consumer-protection laws, alleging that the companies engaged in fraud and deceptive business practices by misleading the public about “climate change and the role of fossil-fuel products in climate change.”

That lawsuit remains pending after years of procedural fights over whether it belongs in state or federal court.

Minnesota succeeded in keeping the case in state court in 2024, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower-court ruling allowing the lawsuit to proceed there.

In its new complaint, the DOJ argues that authority over national energy policy
and major questions involving greenhouse gas emissions rests
with the federal government, not individual states.

The department is asking the court to block Minnesota from pursuing the 2020 lawsuit and prevent the state from bringing similar litigation in the future.

“Climate change lawsuits, like Minnesota’s, artfully plead around federal law while transparently seeking to change national energy policy related to global greenhouse gas emissions and to regulate conduct beyond local borders,” the complaint states.

The federal government’s move to counter climate litigation with its own lawsuit follows an executive order issued last year by President Donald Trump, who directed the DOJ to “take all appropriate action to stop” state lawsuits seeking to “dictate national energy policy.”

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement:

“President Trump promised to unleash American energy dominance, and Minnesota officials cannot undermine his directive by mandating that their woke climate preferences become the uniform policy of our Nation,”

“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

EPA Endangerment Recission More Epic Than Iran War

Posted on by Ron Clutz

William Murray writes at Real Clear Energy The End of EPA’s Endangerment Finding Is a Bigger Deal Than the Iran War.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Two things happened in February that will change the world. The first is the Iran War.

The second is an event so obscure most Americans don’t even know it happened — the Feb. 12 repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This decision puts a knife into the kidney of all the major U.S. climate rules made under the Obama and Biden administrations. It was the legal underpinning for the Green New Deal.

Of the two events, the end of the Endangerment Finding is of a greater consequence, yet 21st Century conventional wisdom — curated and gatekept by social media, the most unwise medium ever invented — makes it hard to fit one’s head around this argument. But here goes.

The Iran War is costing about $1-2 billion a day in direct costs, and several times that in indirect costs from higher energy prices across most of Europe and Asia, though less so in the United States, which is increasingly energy independent.

Meanwhile, the 2009 Endangerment is one of those “regulatory state” workarounds when Congress doesn’t pass a law or the Supreme Court passes on a tough decision. This administrative decision is the foundation of ALL modern climate regulation and global climate diplomacy. Its reversal has the Trump administration crowing about the $1.3 trillion in savings over the next decade to American citizens through cheaper automobiles, among other things.

This has made a lot of the right people unhappy.

In an interview with The New York Times, Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who happened to design the Endangerment Finding for the Obama White House, said the Trump administration wants “to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations. They want to take the federal government out of the business of regulation, period.”

Speaking as someone who worked at the EPA during the first Trump administration, I know Freeman is wrong. Republicans don’t mind environmental regulation based on good incentives that don’t penalize industries that are politically disfavored through no fault of their own.

But there is a human cost to all regulation that is essentially unpriced,
and it is something Freeman and the Left never acknowledge.

Federal regulation itself was invented by the government to improve human lives — think the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, or the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that ended child labor.  The problem is that future choices forgone, which economists call opportunity costs, are nearly impossible to quantify and constrain, thereby stifling innovation and invention in almost unfathomable ways.

Consider the following counterfactual.

If the U.S. Supreme Court had made privacy laws stricter in the late 1990s, sharing pictures of strangers without their permission would have been illegal. This would have disincentivized early camera phone makers, Sharp and Sanyo, from including cameras in the first smartphones in the early 2000s and would have slowed or even undermined Apple’s decision to build the iPhone.

Less than 25 years after the first U.S. camera phone was released, the total value of mobile technologies and services globally exceeds $7 trillion, representing more than 6% of global GDP. Much of these trillions of dollars of newly created wealth exists in the share price of Silicon Valley firms, and the retirement savings of nearly 100 million Americans and the U.S. economy writ large.

What the Endangerment Finding did was create a domestic legal predicate
to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

That predicate, in turn, allowed Democratic administrations to commit America to the Paris Agreement and the broader U.N. climate regime that the U.S. Senate was fooled into accepting when it passed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992.

It’s quite possible that the global climate regime created under UN sponsorship had a similar effect on energy-intensive industries to that a strict privacy law would have had on smartphones, which became the entry point for billions of people into the digital economy.

And now it’s ending.  By undoing the Endangerment Finding, you don’t just repeal a regulation; you repeal the regulatory superstructure that has saddled the United States with trillions of dollars in opportunity costs and billions in explicit costs every year.

Thus, however costly a short conflict with Iran would be, it hasn’t been
nearly as much as the unpriced opportunity costs of
the last 30 years under the UN Climate regime.

Once the U.S. is no longer legally bound at home, it can exit the international framework cleanly. And when America leaves, the dominoes fall in order. Russia, China, India, and Saudi Arabia — none of whom ever believed “the planet is dying” rhetoric anyway — will follow suit. They never saw the climate treaty as anything other than a wealth-transfer mechanism from the West, and now the jig is up for the American Left and the European establishment.

Instead of this transhumanist dystopia, we have the possibility of
returning meaningful heavy industry to the U.S.,
creating over a million good-paying craft jobs,
while still maintaining strong environmental laws.

Indeed, fears of environmental backsliding could be easily remedied by Congress if it were to pass the Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES), introduced in Congress late last year by Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH). The ARC-ES bill would codify into law clear definitions of key terms like “affordable,” “reliable,” and “clean,” ensuring that investment risks are limited to cost-effective infrastructure projects only.

The bill would help America’s most affordable, reliable, and environmentally-friendly energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, remain part of the energy mix — a crucial requirement for American households and businesses.

The fact that neither the ARC-ES nor the Endangerment Finding’s reversal of fortune is anywhere in the news tells you everything you need to know about the current state of global journalism.

This is no slight to the news coverage concerning Iran, which is compelling, but all over the place. It just shows how incentives for informing the public in the 21st century about what truly matters in their lives are weak and getting worse. Perhaps one day someone will invent a better medium for information.

William Murray is a former speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the past editor of RealClearEnergy from 2015 to 2017, and currently the chief speechwriter for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Footnote:  Fed court rejects costly green housing policy

The Biden administration’s obsession with climate change has contributed to the housing affordability challenges Americans face today, and there are many harmful green policies that need to be undone. The Trump administration is taking an ax to several of them, and it just received a big boost when a U.S. District Court repealed a measure burdening low-income and first-time home buyers.

Specifically, on March 5th, an Eastern District of Texas decision vacated a 2024 requirement from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that new homes qualifying for federally-backed mortgages must comply with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Thankfully, the court in Utah v. HUD found the agency’s actions in violation of the law.

The IECC is a spare-no-expense assault on residential energy use – for example, by requiring far more insulation than makes sense and necessitating costlier appliances. A number of environmental organizations advocated for the IECC’s building code dictates, saying they would ensure that “low-income homeowners and residents are prioritized in a climate-aligned future.”

And mind you, this was HUD – not the Environmental Protection Agency – an agency whose core mission is to make housing more affordable. Yet it was trying to impose these expensive environmental requirements on the very Americans who need federal help to qualify for a mortgage. In fact, over 80% of HUD-backed mortgages have gone to first-time buyers with lower credit scores and smaller down payments than those served by conventional lenders.

SCOTUS to Hear Colorado Climate Case, What’s at Stake

Posted on by Ron Clutz

An excellent overview is an article at Energy in Depth (EID) by Kyle Kohli A Turning Point for Litigation Campaign: SCOTUS Takes Up Boulder Climate Lawsuit.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

On February 23, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the City and County of Boulder’s climate lawsuit against two major energy companies. This offers the first real opportunity to rein in the nationally-coordinated climate litigation campaign that has sought to force policy outcomes through the courts that elected officials and voters have repeatedly rejected.

What is the Boulder climate lawsuit?  

In 2018, the City and County of Boulder and San Miguel County filed a public nuisance climate lawsuit against Exxon Mobil and Suncor, seeking financial damages to pay for the costs of climate change. From the outset, the case raised serious questions about whether local governments should be allowed to use state tort law to extract damages for global phenomena driven by worldwide greenhouse gas emissions that have occurred across decades, across borders, and with the full knowledge and legal sanction of federal and state governments.

Woman on a ducking stool. Historical punishment for ‘common scold’ – woman considered a public nuisance. (Welsh/English heritage)

After San Miguel’s case was separated from Boulder’s in 2021, Boulder spent five years fighting jurisdictional battles – all the way to SCOTUS and back – before finally getting a May 2025 Colorado Supreme Court ruling allowing the case to proceed towards discovery and trial.

The companies appealed, and in February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up the case.

What questions will the Supreme Court consider and what do they mean?

The Court will hear arguments on two separate questions –
one that goes to the heart of the entire campaign,
and one that could let the justices sidestep it.

The big one: can state law be used to sue energy companies for the effects of international greenhouse gas emissions on global climate change? This is what the climate litigation campaign has always really been about: using tort law as a backdoor emissions regulator, extracting damages that function as a de facto carbon tax that Congress never voted for and voters never approved.

The companies argue that federal law forecloses exactly this kind of state-law end-run, and that issues of greenhouse gas emissions, interstate commerce, national energy policy, and foreign affairs belong at the federal level — not in a patchwork of state courtrooms where judges can impose wildly inconsistent liability on American energy producers.

The second question – added by the Court at Boulder’s urging – asks whether SCOTUS even has jurisdiction to hear the case right now. If the justices rule narrowly on procedure, the broader preemption question stays unresolved and Boulder’s case will continue in state court.

When will the court hear arguments?

Arguments are expected during the October 2026 term, with a decision anticipated in winter 2026 or spring 2027.

What is the likely impact?

This case has nearly three dozen copycats waiting in the wings. Defendants in similar lawsuits across the country are already moving to pause proceedings – several cases, including a homeowner class action in Washington, have been stayed pending SCOTUS’s decision. Others, in Chicago and Washington state have filed similar motions.

If the Court rules broadly for the energy companies — holding that state law cannot be used to impose liability for global and interstate emissions — it would deal a major blow to the entire national climate litigation campaign, as plaintiffs across the country have sought to use state tort law and to have their cases heard in state court.

That would be an appropriate outcome. Allowing dozens of state and municipal governments to impose state-court liability for inherently global phenomena would fragment national energy policy, chill domestic energy production, and circumvent the democratic process by substituting courtroom judgments for legislative ones.

If the justices punt using the jurisdictional question, Boulder’s case would return to state court, but the underlying legal vulnerabilities of the case would remain.

Where do Colorado leaders stand on the case?

The response to the filing of the [Boulder] lawsuit was met immediately with strong opposition from Colorado state leaders, including the Denver Post editorial board and former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, who also served as Colorado’s Attorney General.

Then-governor John Hickenlooper and one his top administration officials warned that litigation was not the best way to pursue an environmental agenda. Hickenlooper’s predecessor, current Governor Jared Polis, also didn’t support the case and remained silent on the issue throughout his entire time in office.

Conservation Colorado, a leading environmental group in the state, also declined to publicly support the lawsuit and The Denver Post editorial board delivered a sharp rebuke to the lawsuit, writing:

“Without fossil fuels, transportation would stagger to a halt, agricultural productivity would plummet, millions would suffer from cold, heat and hunger, and untold legions would suffer premature death. That’s why any comparison between fossil fuel companies and the tobacco industry, whose product is a health disaster with no redeeming economic value, is so wide of the mark…”

Who did Boulder hire as outside counsel?

Boulder’s attorneys have admitted that their true goals for the litigation aren’t financial damages, but rather achieving preferred public policy outcomes.

A lead attorney for EarthRights International, a nonprofit representing Boulder, said that a key goal of the lawsuit is “to raise the price of the products” like oil and gas to shift the behaviors of companies and consumers. Another attorney long involved with the case, David Bookbinder, was even more direct last year, calling the lawsuit an “indirect carbon tax.”

Officials with the Boulder City Council also undercut their own legal arguments by publicly stating their true goal was achieving political and public policy objectives. In 2021, a memo prepared for a study session outlined the goal of “systems-level change”:

“Boulder has also been a national leader in exploring the use of the legal system in pushing for larger systems-level change. Both through its active participation in multi-jurisdiction efforts — like the Clean Power Plan Plaintiffs group — or its climate liability lawsuit with Boulder and San Miguel Counties against ExxonMobil and Suncor, Boulder has demonstrated that there are a range of different levers cities can take hold of to drive more fundamental systems change.” (emphasis added)

Why did the Supreme Court agree to hear the case this time?

Earlier petitions in similar cases, including Honolulu, never made it past the cert stage. This time, several things changed:

The biggest: the Department of Justice proactively weighed in to explain why the Court should take the case – a reversal from the Honolulu petition, whether the Solicitor General argued against review.

Beyond that, the legal landscape has shifted. Since the Honolulu petition was rejected, ten other cases have been thrown out or withdrawn, while two cases have been allowed to proceed – widening the split among state courts that warrants Supreme Court resolution.

Add in the fact that the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes a final decision, the companies argue, giving the Supreme Court jurisdictional footing to review it.

Does the EPA’s ruling on the Endangerment Finding impact climate lawsuits?

The EPA has maintained the Clean Air Act will continue to preempt state common law claims and statues that try to regulate out-of-state emissions.

As West Virginia’s Solicitor General, Michael Williams, explained:

“Before the Clean Air Act was a twinkle in Nixon’s eye, there was this whole existing body of federal common law that said interstate emissions issues really are issues for the federal government…Ultimately, I think that if you pull the Clean Air Act back, you’re still left with that original preexisting body of federal common law. It’s going to have the same preemptive force that it did before the Clean Air Act ever came to be.”

Some legal observers have noted that revoking the Endangerment Finding could actually help companies in these climate lawsuits. In the case of Boulder, the Colorado Supreme Court rejected defendants’ argument in part because of the Clean Air Act, there’s no federal common law and no preemptions. Without the endangerment finding, there’s a possibility that federal common law could be used in the defendants’ preemption argument.

However, the Endangerment Finding will not go into effect until April 20, 2026 and could change pending legal challenges.

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