lawsuits

The Cost of Telling Climate Truths

September 9, 2019 by GregC

Listen to “The Cost of Telling Climate Truths” on Spreaker.

For many years, Dr. Tim Ball has joined us to explain climate science, how the climate is changing, and how those changes differ drastically from with the United Nations, politicians and the media insist are the facts about climate change.

In addition to interviews, Dr. Ball also makes presentations confronting the conventional wisdom among scientists. But instead of responding with a robust debate, the climate change advocates instead ridicule Dr. Ball and they sue him – a lot.

Dr. Ball, who taught climatology at the University of Winnipeg, was the target of multiple lawsuits known as SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) suits. Every contested case against him has been dismissed, with one still pending. And they get dismissed because the plaintiffs refuse to engage Dr. Ball on the scientific merits. But standing up for himself in court has cost Dr. Ball $800,000.

In this podcast, Ball explains the real reason is is sued for defamation. He says it’s because he has the gall to confront a movement that refuses to tolerate any dissension.

“What people should be worried about is the increasing use of the law to silence people,” said Dr. Ball.

Listen to the full podcast, as Dr. Ball explains why the “scientific consensus” is bogus, why climate scientists often stay silent out fear of reprisal, and the ones who do look at the evidence are appalled at what has been allowed to pass for concrete science.

Schwarzenegger’s ‘Shakedown’

March 12, 2018 by GregC

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently announced he would be working to bring forth lawsuits against the big oil companies “for knowingly killing people all over the world,” but a leading policy expert says this sort of legal action is nothing short of a “shakedown.”

Schwarzenegger revealed his intentions at the annual SXSW festival in Texas during an interview with Politico’s “Off Message” podcast.

“This is no different from the smoking issue. The tobacco industry knew for years and years and years and decades, that smoking would kill people, would harm people and create cancer, and were hiding that fact from the people and denied it. Then eventually they were taken to court and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because of that.

“The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people’s lives, that it would kill,” said Schwarzenegger.

He says legal action is coming.

“We are now talking to law firms to go and do exactly the same thing as they’ve done in the tobacco industry, where we sue the oil companies for knowingly killing people all over the world. There’s 7-9 million people dying every year because of pollution because of fossil fuels,” said Schwarzenegger.

Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Christopher C. Horner believes there’s not much sound logic behind this legal effort.

“I think he’s beginning with the seed of something he’s heard somewhere and then just flying off into nutty land,” said Horner. “I know it’s very fashionable, including in the courts in California, to say things where he begins, but it doesn’t make it any more sane.”

Horner also takes aim at the 7-9 million people who supposedly die from man-caused global warming each year. He has no idea where Schwarzenegger gets that number.

“That’s a lot, so I guess he could name 7-9 of them, right? But no, he can’t. They just sort of pull these things out of the ether. There are computer models to do everything this agenda requires, including computer model statistical deaths. They don’t have names or toe tags,” said Horner, who says he does have the names of people who died because of energy poverty, which he asserts is the end result of the climate change agenda.

“We do have names and toe tags and I’ve got a whole Power Point presentation drawn from the English-speaking press about seniors who have died of hypothermia as these policies take root in the UK.

“There are people who are dying from energy poverty, which comes when, as one man put it, this causes your electricity rates to ‘necessarily skyrocket,'” said Horner, quoting then-presidential candidate Barack Obama from 2008.

Horner says this sort of threatened legal action is really just a money grab.

“In essence, this is a shakedown. In 2012, there was a meeting out in -surprise – California, in La Jolla, in which they produced a report. The report said if they could just get one sympathetic attorney general or district attorney to start subpoenaing these people’s documents to use against them, then we could wring this big settlement out of them,” said Horner.

This is not conjecture, says Horner. He says the left openly admitted this strategy until they got called on it.

“The lawyer who started all this for all of these plaintiffs, named Matt Pawa, admitted to Nation magazine that they were tired of waiting for legislation, and so they were going to try to use the courts. He later denied to the Washington Times that he ever said that,” said Horner.

“We caught him, using Freedom of Information Act requests, working with state attorneys general to push this agenda because it was a failed agenda through the proper political process,” said Horner.

But while the total number of people dying from hazardous environmental conditions may not be quantifiable, many climate change activists point to poor air quality in places like Los Angeles, Beijing, and beyond.

Horner says that’s a non sequitur.

“They’ll yell about catastrophic, man-made global warming and immediately shift to cancer and smog. That’s what you call changing the subject,” he said.

“I would change the subject too. It’s not called catastrophic man-made global smogging. You’re talking about a pollutant and a pollution issue for which we have regulatory regimes. You want to reduce smog, go through the smog laws and regulations we have,” said Horner.

“But that wouldn’t really pay off, would it? That wouldn’t pay off the trial lawyers. That wouldn’t pay off your political constituencies through these tobacco-style settlements,” he added.

Horner says the climate change agenda is still dangerous even though activists are not convincing the public or lawmakers to enact their policies.

“No one has ever spent this kind of money and not prevailed, except for the Soviets, as the global warming industry. And it does end up at a number called the bottom of every list. The environment is at the bottom and this is at the bottom of environmental concerns.

“And let me tell you, thank you people like Gov. Schwarzenegger. One of the reasons catastrophic man-made global warming hysteria ranks last is because of this sort of moonbattery. Keep it up. If wee didn’t have you, we’d have to invent you,” said Horner.

Standard Podcast [ 11:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

EPA Sinks ‘Sue and Settle’

October 18, 2017 by GregC

Limited government advocates and property rights champions are cheering Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt for publicly announcing he will scrap the tactic known as “sue and settle” for as long as he is in office.

“We will no longer go behind closed doors and use consent decrees and settlement agreements to resolve lawsuits filed against the Agency by special interest groups where doing so would circumvent the regulatory process set forth by Congress,” Pruitt said in a statement.

So what is “sue and settle?” In short, it’s a way that politicians and bureaucrats shift policy by pretending to be in a legal fight with a political ally and altering a specific rule in order to supposedly avoid a lawsuit.

Patrick Hedger, manager of the Regulatory Action Center at the FreedomWorks Foundation, offers a more detailed description of how this political and legal charade plays out.

“(Government) agencies will sometimes collude with private actors, such as third party non-governmental organizations, non-profits, and other activist organizations in order to facilitate an expedited rule-making process that goes outside the normal rule-making,” said Hedger.

“There will be a faux lawsuit and instead of taking that suit to court, they will settle it out of court, generally behind closed doors, in a process known as a consent decree. That consent decree will force the agency to act in a way that’s normally a lot faster and more aggressive than a normal federal rule-making process,” said Hedger.

Hedger says this bureaucratic maneuver then provides political cover for an administration that wanted to change the rule all along.

“This is a way for agencies to avoid political accountability for controversial decisions. Usually, we’ve seen very expensive and aggressive regulations being passed, particularly environmental regulations. This is a way for agencies like the EPA, in the past, to say, ‘We had our hands tied by this lawsuit,’ even though this was their ultimate political goal,” said Hedger.

Hedger is quick to add that no party is innocent when it comes to using “sue and settle” but some administrations have utilized it much more than others.

“This has basically been a bipartisan practice but it accelerated greatly during the Obama administration,” said Hedger.

He also offered some examples of the more onerous rules established through “sue and settle,” including the Utility Maximum Achievable Control Technology rule.

“It basically forces power plants to put in expensive new infrastructure to achieve extremely stringent emissions standards. That’s estimated to cost almost $10 billion annually. There were Clean Water Act rules that applied to the Chesapeake Bay. Those are estimated to cost anywhere from $18-20 billion per year. All of these were achieved through ‘sue and settle’ litigation,” said Hedger.

Hedger is thrilled that Pruitt declared an end to a practice that subverts the normal rule-making process.

“This is a process that has been used by both Republican and Democratic administrations. This just shows that the Trump administration is very much still committed to getting back to regular order and the proper way of doing things.

“Instead of using this political end around to achieve its own goals, the Trump administration is just trying to bring the government back in line with the Constitution and the Administrative Procedures Act, which is supposed to govern regulations,” said Hedger.

Scrapping “sue and settle” is just one of several moves from Pruitt’s EPA that is drawing high praise from limit government activists. Earlier this month, Pruitt announced what many see as the beginning of the end of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which required substantial decreases in carbon emissions and was considered the death blow to the coal industry.

Earlier this year, Pruitt also started the rollback of the Waters of the United States rule, or WOTUS. That update changed the definition of navigable waterway from one you could actually navigate with a boat and was usually connected to a larger body of water to virtually and standing water in a drainage ditch or even a puddle.

Hedger likes Pruitt’s policies but likes his fidelity to his oath even more.

“I think Administrator Pruitt is doing a phenomenal job of, first and foremost, putting the Constitution first,” said Hedger. “There is a way to achieve a clean environment while also adhering to the rule of law and I think that’s the structure that we’re seeing from Pruitt’s EPA.”

But while Pruitt is making a lot of big moves, Hedger says the next EPA boss could easily reverse it all. He says lawmakers need to get involved.

“This does, at some level, have to fall back on Congress to stop passing these vague laws. Particularly in the case of ‘sue and settle,’ there are parts of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act that encourage that encourage this type of practice. So Congress should go in and clarify that they never intended for this ‘sue and settle’ and consent decree practice to happen,” said Hedger.

Hedger says Pruitt’s moves on process and on existing rules are a breath of fresh air to property and business owners. However, he says much more can be done to relieve the regulatory burden on American families and businesses.

“Right now, there’s so much focus on tax reform, which is good, but if you look at the estimates of the economic burden of federal regulation versus the economic burden of taxes, they estimate that the regulatory burden in this country approaches two trillion dollars per year, which is more than is collected in individual and corporate income taxes,” said Hedger.

Standard Podcast [ 9:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download