GAO

GAO Board member Joe Thomas and former Board member Chris Horner got together to discuss recent developments in the climate litigation industry, covered in the media last week at, e.g., here, here, here and here.

A trial hearing that had been delayed several times finally took place on January 20, 2022, in Government Accountability & Oversight’s California Public Records Act (PRA) litigation against the Regents of the University of California. The case involves certain records pertaining to UCLA Law School’s donor-enhanced role in staffing and providing spokespersons for the climate litigation industry. Specifically, at issue…

NHTSA is expected tomorrow to issue new global warming standards dictating what sort of vehicles Americans can drive. GAO is engaged in long-running public-records litigation with Carlson’s employer from whom she took a leave of absence to perform this job, UCLA Law School (technically, Regents of the University of California). That suit seeks certain records sent to or from Carlson…

Full productions from one institution that has produced records showing at least some of the extent to which it is deploying government (taxpayer) resources toward Facebook’s censoring of climate realism can be found here, here and here.

“1001” Reasons Congress Needs More Information A timeline of events surrounding Elizabeth Klein’s appointment as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the Interior sheds some light on the Department’s ethical lapses and raises even more questions. January 21, 2021  Elizabeth Klein, recent-former Deputy Director of the Michael Bloomberg group created to plant activist attorneys in state AG offices to, among…

The Biden Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has released selected, often heavily redacted records pertaining to the conflicts and recusals for Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator, and Acting Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation (i.e., “climate”), Joe Goffman. The recusal statement is notable for what it does and does not include. As for the redactions, they appear to be heavy-handed given past…

Today the public interest law firm Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C., published a paper on behalf of its client the government-transparency group Energy Policy Advocates, titled “Private Funders, Public Institutions: ‘Climate’ Litigation and a Crisis of Integrity”. Minnesota’s “climate” lawsuit and its replica filed the next day in Washington, D.C., like all of these suits, represent transparent attempts to manufacture state jurisdiction for a litigation campaign…

Another fed gov’t campaign to strangle legal businesses’ access to capital From the Senate Banking Committee Republicans, a letter to the Biden White House’s climate-treaty czar John Kerry and the administration criticizing efforts to coerce banks into de-platforming fossil energy companies, and taking aim at a new global warming disclosure mandate on publicly traded companies. Toomey, GOP Banking Members Demand Kerry,…

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s Office led the development of what the Wall Street Journal editorial board called “Biden’s ‘BackDoor’ Climate Plan,” a clever if likely unlawful way to sneak in the Green New Deal under the auspices of controlling ozone — ditching failed climate messaging on “Polar ice caps and the polar bears [which] have become the climate change…

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Claiming Inconvenience, Minnesota AG Ellison Seeks to Keep Court in “Rocks and Cows” Country Away from Scrutiny of Bloomberg-funded Attorney Deal AG Office Claims “No Connection” Between Home County of Employer OAG Targeted and Records About OAG Coordination with Outside Groups to Target the Employer Move comes as OAG refuses to release signed Confidentiality Statement that activists on a Zoom…

GAO and ClimateLitigationWatch readers are familiar with the effort by the State of Rhode Island to sue energy companies in state court for causing climate change, hoping to cash in after the administration concluded that the State’s “Assembly [had] very conservative leadership — don’t care about env’t”, leaving the Governor “looking for sustainable funding stream”. So it should be no…

Within hours of Energy Policy Advocates filing suit against the Minnesota Office of Attorney General this morning (noted by GAO at 10:40, here), in part over a missing contract hiring an outside law firm to sue energy companies for climate change, the Minnesota Office of Management and Budget provided the group with the contract in response to an outstanding records…

The government-transparency group Energy Policy Advocates filed a public records suit in Minnesota today. In July 2020, EPA requested various records pertaining to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s relationship with ‘climate nuisance’ tort law firm Sher Edling, LLP, including a contract which does now apparently exist, which contract a Minnesota good-governance law makes clear required approval but which, apparently, has…

GAO Board Member Chris Horner has a piece in today’s Washington Times about the climate litigation industry and next week’s oral argument in the Mayor and City of Baltimore v. BP p.l.c. An Excerpt: Climate litigation industry comes to SCOTUS Supreme Court will decide whether government donors, ideologues and the trial bar should prevail Increasingly, societal institutions have enlisted as…

From the Washington Times: With a potentially bruising Department of Justice confirmation battles looming, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris now vigorously deny that they would ever direct their Attorney General to do their political bidding or target specific opponents. This would be unremarkable, had they not promised the opposite with equal vigor – and disturbing specificity – during the…

From today’s Washington Times: When Obama made the Paris climate agreement end run Failure to act on its revival guarantees more such adventurism in a Biden-Harris administration Recently, conservatives have called on President Trump to transmit the Paris climate agreement to the Senate as a treaty requiring “advice and consent” before it can in any way bind the United States,…

FOIA lawsuit seeks to highlight just how little ‘advice and consent’ went into the Paris Agreement By Kevin Mooney Getting documents out of a government agency is a heavy lift. That’s what the nonprofit organization Energy Policy Advocates aims to do in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, seeking State Department documents that describe how the Obama administration circumvented the…

Brian Dabbs @BRIANDABBS  Dec. 22, 2020, 8 p.m. Speaking at a virtual G-20 summit last month, President Trump championed his decision to bow out of the Paris climate accord. “I withdrew the United States from the unfair and one-sided Paris climate accord, a very unfair act for the United States,” Trump told leaders of the globe’s biggest economies, all of…