Heroic Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Will Protect Judges From 'Corrupt Influence' Of Climate Facts
Ain't that some shit!
Those climate-change denying funsters at a rightwing fossil-fuel-boosting think tank called the American Energy Institute have their knives out for an effort to educate American judges about the basics of climate science, claiming that the group behind the initiative is part of an effort to “destroy America’s economic prosperity” by supporting lawsuits against innocent fossil fuel companies who never did anything wrong.
Despite the identical initials, this “AEI” is not formally linked with the far larger, older, also very rightwing American Enterprise Institute. I’m almost surprised the bigger AEI hasn’t tried to make the upstart — formerly the “Texas Natural Gas Foundation” — knock it off. Or perhaps the larger group, which also aggressively promotes doubt about climate change, doesn’t mind the confusion. The CEO of the American Energy Institute, former Texas state Rep. Jason Isaac, is a bigtime climate denier who recently called New York’s Climate Week conference “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.” Dude will sell you a beer koozy that says “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle” if you want.
As the Guardian reports, the smaller-potatoes AEI is big mad at the nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and its Climate Judiciary Project, which, as ELI’s website explains, aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”
But the fossil-fuel promoters at AEI aren’t fooled one bit, because after all nobody can know what science is, especially if it might endanger oil industry profits. Back in August, the AEI published a not-at-all propagandistic “report” insisting that ELI isn’t teaching judges about objective science, but is actually “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”
The AEI claims that the Climate Judiciary Project is engaged in a very sinister plot, by “[f]alsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about debatable climate science.” You see, the CJP has partnered with more than two dozen cities and states that are suing fossil fuel companies for spreading misinformation about climate change, even though the companies’ own scientists knew how damaging to the climate fossil fuels really were.
So according to the highly dubious logic of the AEI, providing climate education to some 2,000 state and federal judges since 2018 was a way for CJP to brainwash them into believing that climate change is bad and caused by fossil fuels, just in case two dozen out of those 2,000 judges ended up taking a climate lawsuit. That, the AEI report says, constitutes “working over the referees before the game begins.”
In what might be the most hilariously bad paragraph of the report, we’re told that should the plaintiffs win, America will be ruined, ruined:
If the plaintiffs prevail, they will conscript industry into foisting electric appliances, garish lightbulbs, and other progressive amenities into every home. Having passed the Green New Deal in Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act, the far left is trying to further implement it by lawsuit.
Oh no! Electric appliances! Progressive amenities! Garish lightbulbs! We assume they mean those twisty compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs that are mostly disappearing anyway. A US Energy Information Administration report showed that by 2020, LED bulbs already provided “all or most indoor lighting” in 47 percent of US homes, up from just four percent in 2015. The same survey found that only 12 percent of homes rely mostly on CFL bulbs. LED bulbs are available in various tones like “soft white,” “bright white,” “cool white,” and “daylight,” so maybe those are all garish, damned if we know.
And no, the Inflation Reduction Act wasn’t the same as the Green New Deal, which was never an actual piece of legislation but a set of broad policy goals. But it is scary.
The “report” alleges that all of the climate scientists who worked on the CJP’s instructional materials are “activist academics” who are rigging the courts by saying climate change is a fact, and several have even participated in climate lawsuits — excuse me, “climate nuisance lawsuits” that have no merit and will destroy the economy — so that’s also corrupting.
When the AEI released the report in August, it did get some attention in rightwing media like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. It prompted an angry editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (reprinted sans paywall at MSN) suggesting that this effort by “climate alarmists” to influence the judiciary is evidence of a “double standard.” Apparently the libs should be every bit as upset over judges knowing climate stuff as they are about Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s “social connections with conservative donors.” Social connections.
In a nice bit of closing the circle, the Guardian found that the AEI “report” itself was largely prepared by two executives at CRC Advisors, a “a public relations firm chaired by rightwing dark money impresario” Leonard Leo — you know, the Federalist Society honcho and Clarence Thomas’s close friend who gave Thomas’s wife, Ginni, a no-show job, and other nice social connections.
The Guardian piece also makes clear the attacks on ELI and its education program through CJP are part of a larger campaign to delegitimize lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for the damage they’ve done to the climate, including a suit by Honolulu that’s currently headed to the Supreme Court. The Guardian reports that “[s]everal of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.”
Funny how when journalists start tugging at the strings of rightwing influence and misinformation campaigns, the same bunch of dark money groups keep turning up, huh? Seems like that deserves to stay in the spotlight, however garish it might be.
[Guardian / WSJ / Climate Judiciary Project / Photo: Kaibab National Forest]
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Imagine being so mentally addled that you find it easier to believe in Sci-fi conspiracy theories about government weather control machines than the relatively straightforward science around climate change. And the right out in the open conspiracy of the fossil fuel industry to deny it.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who does not believe that climate change is real, earlier this summer voted against a bill containing $20 billion in FEMA disaster aid. The day before Helene hit her home state of
Florida she voted to shut down the government. Today she engaged in false hysterics over what she deems to be the failures for the Federal Govt. to provide adequate relief in the face of Milton's approach.
There are way more clowns in Florida than those at the Clown College in Sarasota.