https://www.city-journal.org/article/climate-fossil-fuel-energy-lawsuits?skip=1
By Heather Mac Donald
Excerpt:
The Trump administration has declared the “Green New Scam”—as President Trump terms it—finished. The United States will no longer hobble its industrial base with unrealistic renewable-energy mandates while China and India burn coal without restraint, the White House has announced.
Yet while the federal regulatory war on traditional energy has paused, a litigation war has quietly gathered force. Cities and states are now suing American fossil-fuel companies for the alleged climate harms those jurisdictions claim to suffer.
The pace of these suits is quickening. The first multibillion-dollar judgment against the industry could unleash a cascade of similar rulings. Leading climate litigator Benjamin Franta estimates that the potential liability runs into the trillions of dollars.
The effect on the American economy would be dire. But equally catastrophic, from a philosophical standpoint, would be the damage to rationality itself. The causal claims behind the climate-change lawsuits insult reason, repudiating the hard-won gains of the Western empirical tradition. In this respect, the suits embody several signal traits of the contemporary West.
The plaintiffs in the more than three dozen climate suits filed in the United States read like an honor roll of progressive localities: San Francisco, Marin County, Oakland, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Maine, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, among others. Their targets include some of the great industrial concerns of the modern age—ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell.
So far, the cases have turned on questions of jurisdiction. After years of strategizing by climate activists, their foundation funders, and state attorneys general, the first major climate-change action was filed in 2004 in the Southern District of New York. New York City, New York State, and seven other states alleged that CO₂ emissions from five electric-power producers, including Cinergy and the Tennessee Valley Authority, constituted a federal public nuisance by contributing to global warming. (“Public nuisance” is defined as an unreasonable interference with a public right, such as the use of a waterway free from obstruction or pollution.)
