Manufacturers Accountability Pjt MAP
SEE LEGAL ARM SHOP (someone said proactive/premptive vs tobacco corps merely defensive --> fail
see legal suppression
SLAPP suit city defraud BS //CEI
see 1st amend exxon BS PARTNER WITH E AND E EVIL?!
see phil goldberg mofo
remember they NAM JOINED OCT juliana?
exxon-texas-courts-critics-climate-crimes
guard uk
exxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.
The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.
A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/16/imperial-beach-california-exxon-mobil-climate-crisis)
The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where the company is headquartered.
Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures.
Rule 202 in effect allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence. They are able to question individuals under oath and demand access to documents even before any legal action is filed against them.
Exxon wants to use the provision to force the California officials to travel to Texas to be questioned by the firm’s lawyers about what the company describes as “lawfare” – the misuse of the legal system for political ends.
Exxon claims in a petition to the Texas supreme court that it is entitled to question the officials in order to collect evidence of “potential violations of ExxonMobil’s rights in Texas to exercise its first amendment privileges” to say what it likes about climate science.
“The potential defendants’ lawfare is aimed at chilling the speech of not just ExxonMobil, but of other prominent members of the Texas energy sector on issues of public debate, in this case, climate change,” the company claims in its petition.
The oil giant’s critics say Exxon’s attempt to use claims of free speech to curtail the first amendment rights of others follows a pattern of harassment toward those who challenge the company’s claims about the climate crisis.
Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, has described the company’s move as “intimidation” intended to make “it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon” whether or not the company wins its case.
Greg Abbott made the unusual move of writing to the state supreme court to advocate on the behalf of Exxon. Photograph: Bob Daemmrich/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
In a highly unusual move, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has written to the all-Republican court – half of whose members he appointed – in support of Exxon. He accused the California litigants of attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Texas-based energy companies on the subject of climate and energy policies”.
“When out-of-state officials try to project their power across our border, as respondents have done by broadly targeting the speech of an industry crucial to Texas, they cannot use personal jurisdiction to scamper out of our courts and retreat across state lines,” Abbott wrote.
In backing its claim, Exxon’s petition to the Texas supreme court gives the example of the Oakland city attorney, Barbara Parker, who in 2017 “issued a press release seeking to stifle the speech of the Texas energy sector or, as she likes to refer to it, ‘BIG OIL’”.
The press release said: “It is past time to debate or question the reality of global warming … Just like BIG TOBACCO, BIG OIL knew the truth long ago and peddled misinformation to con their customers and the American public.”
Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment)
The company also names the then San Francisco city attorney, Dennis Herrera, because he accused fossil fuel companies of launching a “disinformation campaign to deny and discredit” the reality of global heating, and pledged to hold the companies responsible “to account”.
Exxon has, in addition, targeted an environmental lawyer in Boston, Matthew Pawa, who represents some of the California municipalities. The firm describes him as “an outspoken advocate of misusing government power to limit free speech” and alleges that Pawa “recruited” the California cities and counties to sue Exxon.
“Those lawsuits are an affront to the first amendment,” the company claims.
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor and co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, said Exxon had a long history of attempting to bully its critics into silence.
“Now that the arguments have moved into the legal sphere, this feels to me like an extension of the sort of harassment, bullying and intimidation that we’ve seen in the scientific sphere for the last two decades,” she said.
Oreskes said that the legal strategy is also part of a broader public relations campaign to paint the company as a victim of radical environmentalists and opportunistic politicians when Exxon argues that it should be heralded for its efforts to combat the climate crisis.
“Exxon Mobil has for a long time now tried to make themselves out to be the victim, as if somehow they’re the innocent party here,” she said.
The Texas supreme court is considering the case after a lower court backed Exxon’s attempts to use rule 202 against the California officials. The ruling was later overturned on appeal.
The appeal court sympathised with Exxon by acknowledging “an impulse to safeguard an industry that is vital to Texas’s economic well-being” and saying that “lawfare is an ugly tool by which to seek the environmental policy changes” pursued by California municipalities. But the appeal court said the defendants did not have sufficient direct connection to Texas for the case to be heard in the state.
Exxon has ‘a track record of promoting half truths, misrepresentations and in some cases outright lies’
Naomi Oreskes
Exxon has tried to head off climate litigation before with lawsuits claiming that the attorney generals of Massachusetts and New York were violating the company’s rights by investigating it. Those moves were blocked by the Massachusetts supreme court and by a federal court.
If the Texas supreme court allows its rule 202 bid to proceed, Exxon might expect a more sympathetic hearing for its claims in a state court system that has shown deference to big oil.
Exxon is facing a barrage of other lawsuits across the US. A number accuse the company and other fossil fuel firms of breaching consumer protection laws by propagating misinformation about climate science.
Oreskes said Exxon went further than most other oil companies in seeking to hide the evidence of its own scientists collected about global heating and in running a disinformation campaign.
“They’re pushing their freedom of speech as an issue because more than any other company, it’s been proven by people like me and others that they have a track record of promoting half truths, misrepresentations and in some cases outright lies in the public sphere,” she said.
“This is so well documented that unless they can come up with some strategy to defend it, they’re in potentially pretty serious trouble.”
This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story
ref guk
a US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him
This article is more than 2 years old
The mayor of Imperial Beach, California, says big oil wants him to drop the lawsuit demanding the industry pay for the climate crisis
Chris McGreal in Imperial Beach, California
Sat 16 Oct 2021
Serge Dedina is a surfer, environmentalist and mayor of Imperial Beach, a small working-class city on the California coast.
He is also, if the fossil fuel industry is to be believed, at the heart of a conspiracy to shake down big oil for hundreds of millions of dollars.
ExxonMobil and its allies have accused Dedina of colluding with other public officials across California to extort money from the fossil-fuel industry. Lawyers even searched his phone and computer for evidence he plotted with officials from Santa Cruz, a city located nearly 500 miles north of Imperial Beach.
The problem is, Dedina had never heard of a Santa Cruz conspiracy. Few people had.
“The only thing from Santa Cruz on my phone was videos of my kids surfing there,” Dedina said. “I love the fact that some lawyer in a really expensive suit, sitting in some horrible office trying to find evidence that we were in some kind of conspiracy with Santa Cruz, had to look at videos of my kids surfing.”
That’s where the laughter stopped.
The lawyers found no evidence to back up their claim. But that did not stop the industry from continuing to use its legal muscle to try to intimidate Dedina, who leads one of the poorest small cities in the region.
The mayor became a target after Imperial Beach filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and more than 30 other fossil-fuel companies demanding they pay the huge costs of defending the city from rising seas caused by the climate crisis.
Homes along the final stretch of Imperial Beach coast before reaching the border with Mexico. Photograph: John Francis Peters/The Guardian
Imperial Beach’s lawsuit alleges the oil giants committed fraud by covering up research showing that burning fossil fuels destroys the environment. The industry then lied about the evidence for climate change for decades, deliberately delaying efforts to curb carbon emissions.
The city’s lawsuit was among the first of a wave of litigation filed by two dozen municipalities and states across the US that could cost the fossil-fuel industry billions of dollars in compensation for the environmental devastation and the deception.
Dedina says his minority majority community of about 27,000 cannot begin to afford the tens of millions of dollars it will cost to keep at bay the waters bordering three sides of his financially strapped city. Th.. have turned Imperial Beach into an island.
One assessment calculated that, without expensive mitigation measures, rising sea levels will eventually swamp some of the city’s neighbourhoods, routinely flood its two schools and overwhelm its drainage system.
Imperial Beach’s annual budget is $20m. Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was paid more than $15m last year.
“We don’t have a pot to piss in in this city. So why not go after the oil companies?” he said. “The lawsuit is a pragmatic approach to making the people that caused sea level rise pay for the impacts it has on our city.”
That’s not how Exxon, the US’s largest oil company, saw it. Its lawyers noted that Imperial Beach filed its case in July 2017, at the same time as two California counties, Marin and San Mateo. The county and city of Santa Cruz followed six months later with similar suits seeking compensation to cope with increasing wildfires and drought caused by global heating.
Exxon alleged that the sudden burst of litigation, and the fact that the municipalities shared a law firm specialising in environmental cases, Sher Edling, was evidence of collusion.
Exxon filed lawsuits claiming the municipalities conspired to extort money from the company by following a strategy developed during an environmental conference at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, 25 miles north of Imperial Beach, nine years ago.
The meeting, organised by the Climate Accountability Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists, produceda report outlining how legal strategies used by US states against the tobacco industry in the 1990s could be applied to cases against fossil fuel companies.
Dedina was also targeted by one of the US’s biggest business groups at the forefront of industry resistance to increased regulation to reduce greenhouse gases, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a rightwing thinktank, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.
Mayor Dedina looks out to sea. Photograph: John Francis Peters/The Guardian
The manufacturing trade group was behind the efforts to obtain data from Dedina’s phone and documents in 2018. In its public disclosure request to the mayor’s office, NAM called Imperial Beach’s lawsuit “litigation based on political or ideological objections more appropriately addressed through the political process”.
Exxon is attempting to use a Texas law that allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence by questioning individuals under oath even before any legal action is filed against them. The company is trying to force Dedina, two other members of Imperial Beach’s government, and officials from other jurisdictions, to submit to questioning on the grounds they were joined in a conspiracy against the oil industry.
“A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change,”the oil firm claimed. “ExxonMobil finds itself directly in that conspiracy’s crosshairs.”
[
How cities and states could finally hold fossil fuel companies accountable
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-fossil-fuels-cities-states-interactive)
A Texas district judge approved the request to depose Dedina, but then a court of appeals overturned the decision last year. The state supreme court is considering whether to take up the case.
The target on Dedina is part of a wider pattern of retaliation against those suing Exxon and other oil companies.
In an unusual move in 2016, Exxon persuaded a Texas judge to order the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to travel to Dallas to be deposed about her motives for investigating the company for alleged fraud for suppressing evidence on climate change. The judge also ordered that New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, be “available” in Dallas on the same day in case Exxon wanted to question him about a similar investigation.
Healey accused Exxon of trying to “squash the prerogative of state attorneys general to do their jobs”. The judge reversed the deposition order a month later and Healey filed a lawsuit against the company in 2019, which is still awaiting trial.
But similar tactics persuaded the US Virgin Islands attorney general to shut down his investigation of the oil giant.
Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, said the attempt to question Dedina and other officials is part of a broader strategy by the oil industry to counter lawsuits with its own litigation.
“These cases are frivolous and vexatious. Intimidation is the goal. Just making it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon. They think that if they make the case painful enough, Imperial Beach will quit,” he said.
The city’s lawsuit claims it faces a ‘significant and dangerous sea-level rise’. Photograph: John Francis Peters/The Guardian
If the intent is to kill off the litigation against the oil industry, it’s not working. Officials from other municipalities have called Exxon’s move “repugnant”, “a sham” and “outrageous”, and have vowed to press on with their lawsuits.
Dedina described the action as a “bullying tactic” by the oil industry to avoid accountability.
“The only conspiracy is [that] a bunch of suits and fossil-fuel companies decided to pollute the earth and make climate change worse, and then lie about it,” he said. “They make more money than our entire city has in a year.”
The city’s lawsuit claims it faces a “significant and dangerous sea-level rise” through the rest of this century that threatens its existence. Imperial Beachcommissioned an analysis of its vulnerability to rising sea levels which concluded that nearly 700 homes and businesses were threatened at a cost of more than $100m. It said that flooding will hit about 40% of the city’s roads, including some that will be under water for long periods. Two elementary schools will have to be moved. The city’s beach, regarded as one of the best sites for surfing on the California coast, is being eroded by about a foot a year.
Imperial Beach sits at the southern end of San Diego bay. Under one worst-case scenario, the bay could merge with the Tijuana River estuary to the south and permanently submerge much of the city’s housing and roads.
A view of the Tijuana River estuary. Photograph: John Francis Peters/The Guardian
The city has received some help with creating natural climate barriers. The Fish and Wildlife Service restored 400 acres of wetland next to the city as a national wildlife refuge which also acts as a barrier to flooding, and is expected to restore other wetlands together with the Port of San Diego. A grant is paying for improved equipment to warn of floods.
But that still leaves the huge costs of building new schools and drainage systems, and adapting other infrastructure. Dedina said that without the oil companies stumping up, it won’t happen.
“People ask, how did you go against the world’s largest fossil fuel companies? Isn’t that scary? No. What’s scary is coastal flooding and the idea that whole cities would be under water,” said the mayor.
“Honestly, bring it on. I can’t wait to make our case. I can’t wait to take the fight to them because we have nothing to lose.”
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Exxon’s Conspiracy Charges Aim To Derail Climate Lawsuits - DeSmog
by David Halperin, crossposted from Republic Report
Oil giant ExxonMobil is engaged in unprecedented efforts to sue and harass in court the very people who are investigating and suing the company over global warming. Faced with determined efforts by states and localities to hold it and other fossil fuel companies accountable for contributing to, and concealing the evidence of, climate change, Exxon is crying foul, contending that it’s the victim of politically- and financially-motivated conspiracies.
But in reality there are no improper schemes behind the cases against Exxon. Instead, what’s troubling is an apparent effort by Exxon, one of the world’s wealthiest corporations, and its powerhouse corporate lawyers, to avoid a courtroom reckoning by making specious legal arguments and outspending their foes in the legal arena.
Through its attorneys at New York’s Paul Weiss Rifkin Wharton and Garrison, and Texas-based firms Haynes & Boone and Cantey Hanger, ExxonMobil has sued the attorneys general of Massachusetts, New York, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. And the company has recently targeted for depositions and document subpoenas, and threats of more lawsuits, numerous state officials, private attorneys, and advocates.
Exxon’s legal counterattack began after the Massachusetts, New York, and Virgin Islands AGs started investigating whether Exxon misled consumers and investors about the dangers of global warming and the potential impact of those dangers on the company’s bottom line. Investigative reporting in 2015 showed that Exxon scientists have known, and told Exxon management for decades, that burning fossil fuels was heating up the planet, but rather than educate the public on the dangers and change its business strategy, Exxon instead spent millions supporting efforts to question and deny the science of climate change. The state AGs also started investigating whether ExxonMobil has properly accounted for its oil reserves in the wake of global price drops and evidence of global warming.
The Massachusetts AG, Maura Healey, has explained that her investigation focuses “on whether Exxon may have misled consumers and/or investors with respect to the impact of fossil fuels on climate change, and climate change-driven risks to Exxon’s business,” in marketing energy products and in marketing Exxon securities, in violation of the state consumer protection law.
Similarly, New York’s AG, Eric Schneiderman, has indicated that he is investigating whether ExxonMobil’s public statements about climate change conflicted with its internal research, which could have led to “state law violations, including under the Martin Act,” the New York law that prohibits financial deception and fraud. (The New York AG reached settlements with Xcel Energy and Dynegy, Inc. in 2008 and with AES Corp. in 2009 based on those companies’ failures to disclose climate change risks in securities filings.)
In 2016, Exxon launched its response, suing Healey, Schneiderman, and U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general Claude Earl Walker in federal courts in its home region of Dallas-Fort Worth. The suit against Walker succeeded when his small office halted its investigation of the oil titan, but the other two AGs persisted.
U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade approved Exxon’s demand that Healey and Schneiderman submit to depositions by Exxon lawyers — an unwarranted, and virtually unprecedented move, as prosecutors aren’t normally required to face cross examination by people whom they’re investigating. Healey and Schneiderman fought back, seeking an unusual mid-case appeal to the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, after which Kinkeade backed down, cancelled the depositions, and transferred the case to a federal court in New York.
As Exxon continues its efforts to convince a Manhattan federal judge to allow it to depose the two state AGs and, ultimately, to block their probes, it faces a new wave of lawsuits: since September 2017, eight cities and counties in California, plus New York City, have sued Exxon and other fossil fuel companies, alleging harm to their communities from climate change.
Related DeSmog investigation: “There is no doubt”: Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution Was A Global Threat By Late 1970s
The new lawsuits brought by California cities and counties — the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond, and Imperial Beach, plus Santa Cruz, San Mateo, and Marin counties — could pack a powerful punch. The suits allege that ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and others knew for decades that fossil fuel-driven global warming and rising seas threatened human life, but continued to expand their production, while deceiving consumers about the risks. Asserting that this conduct violates various state tort rules — public nuisance, failure to warn, design defect, negligence, and trespass — the suits demand that the companies pay for the costs of environmental harms like damages to seawalls, and dangers from severe weather, droughts, and fires.
These new lawsuits have a stronger chance of success than a 2008 case filed against fossil fuel companies by the small Alaskan community of Kivalina, seeking to recover the cost of relocating their village, which was threatened by rising sea levels. A federal judge dismissed that case, concluding that the village could not trace its injuries to any particular defendant. But today there is much more evidence that global warming is real, accelerating, and caused by burning fossil fuels, and that oil companies knew such information, suppressed it, and sought to counter it. Also, lawyers for the California cities and counties believe that recent scientific advances will make it easier to prove that the specific defendants’ activities harmed or threaten their client communities.
Faced with these mounting challenges to its conduct, ExxonMobil is relentlessly trying to change the subject.
In legal papers and public communications attacking the New York and Massachusetts attorney general investigations, Exxon has charged that various meetings among lawyers, advocates, and charitable foundation officials to discuss climate change liability issues, and communications between such people and attorneys general offices, are evidence of an untoward conspiracy against the company. Exxon further alleges that the AG probes attack the company’s First Amendment rights. “The attorneys general have violated Exxon Mobil’s right to participate in the national conversation about how to address the risks presented by climate change,” Dan Toal, one of Exxon’s lawyers at the Paul Weiss firm told Bloomberg.
Now Exxon and its allies are aiming to tie the new California lawsuits into this alleged conspiracy. The company is seeking to depose more than a dozen California officials, plus private attorney Matt Pawa, in anticipation of a threatened lawsuit alleging violation of the company’s free speech and other constitutional rights. In a January 8 Texas court petition seeking the depositions, Exxon charges, “A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change.”
A recent op-ed by New York business consultant John Burnett attacked some of the California cities and counties for hiring outside lawyers to sue Exxon and paying them on a contingent basis — meaning they get paid if and only if Exxon loses in court or settles — even though this consultant acknowledges that the cities and counties couldn’t afford to pay the lawyers any other way. He calls the arrangement “a perilous new frontier in the world of ambulance-chasing by elected officials.” Similarly, Linda Kelly, general counsel for the National Manufacturers Association, told a reporter, “From Richmond, California, to New York City, activist-driven lawsuits are being filed to undermine manufacturers in America without regard to the facts.”
But these counterattacks on those pursuing Exxon are themselves fueled by false information and unwarranted charges.
I’ve worked for many years in association with some of the people Exxon has claimed are part of the alleged conspiracy. They aren’t conspirators. They generally do their work and make their cases out in the open. A 2012 meeting in La Jolla, California, among private lawyers and climate experts that Exxon repeatedly cites as the birthplace of the secret plot was meticulously documented and photographed by the participants themselves.
There’s also nothing sinister or unusual about scientists, private lawyers, other experts, or simply concerned citizens providing evidence and arguments to state attorney general offices regarding potential legal violations, including, indeed especially, in complex matters involving powerful actors. There’s nothing wrong with state and local law enforcement officials working in parallel on probing a common issue or target — it happens frequently. Nor are public statements by officials regarding those probes proof of political bias or an impingement on Exxon’s First Amendment rights. And nor is it unusual or improper for local governments to hire private lawyers to protect their residents’ interests in court.
The AGs and local officials are doing their jobs — pursuing evidence of law-breaking. If Exxon believes it has behaved properly with respect to climate change, it should use its expensive and talented lawyers to defend itself on the merits, rather than harassing others over invented conspiracy theories.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/watershed-moment-california-enters-climate-litigation-fray/
no lnx
‘Watershed moment’: California enters climate litigation fray
:{By Lesley Clark | 09/18/2023
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) fields questions during an Aug. 28 news conference in Los Angeles. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
California, a top oil-producing state, is suing the oil majors and an influential ally — making it the latest and largest player among a growing number of local governments looking to hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable for the effects of climate change.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses five of the world’s largest oil companies and their subsidiaries, along with the industry trade association the American Petroleum Institute, of waging a campaign to mislead the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels.
“Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D). “Enough is enough.”
The move immediately vaults California to the top of a group of mostly Democratic-led states, including New Jersey, Massachusetts and Minnesota, that have filed lawsuits against the oil giants, as have two dozen local counties and cities.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who was to use a press conference Sunday kicking off the United Nations climate summit and New York City’s Climate Week to tout the state’s involvement, argued the industry has lied about its contribution to global climate change for more than 50 years.
“It has been decades of damage and deception,” Newsom said. “Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells. California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill.”
The industry argued the lawsuit will do “nothing to advance meaningful solutions to climate change.”
“The challenge of our time is developing technologies and public policies so that the world can produce and use energy in ways that are affordable for people and sustainable for the planet,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel to the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an initiative of the National Association of Manufacturers. “It should not be figuring out how to creatively plead lawsuits that seek to monetize climate change and provide no solutions.”
A spokesperson for San Ramon, Calif.-based Chevron Corp., which is one of the five companies being sued, noted the Golden State long has promoted oil and gas development and said its courts “have no constructive or constitutionally permissible role in crafting global energy policy.”
Ryan Meyers, general counsel at API, said the industry has shown over the past two decades that it can deliver reliable energy while “substantially reducing emissions” and its environmental footprint.
“This ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers is nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of California taxpayer resources,” Meyers said, calling climate policy something for Congress “to debate and decide, not the court system.”
The suit comes as the Supreme Court earlier this year boosted a raft of similar cases by rejecting the oil industry’s latest efforts to derail them. Those rulings could pave the way for a flood of lawsuits against the industry to be heard in state courts from Maryland to Hawaii.
The lawsuits still have a long way to go, but if they are successful, the challenges could force the oil industry — like tobacco and opioid manufacturers before it — to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for harming the public.
The Center for Climate Integrity, which has supported local governments suing the companies, hailed the lawsuit as a “watershed moment” in the movement to take on the industry.
“California’s move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters’ days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered,” said the center’s president, Richard Wiles. “Just like tobacco and opioid companies, the oil and gas industry will have to face the evidence of its deception in court.”
The environmental group Fossil Free Media, which has been involved in several anti-fossil-fuel campaigns, said it would launch a new effort to build support for the climate lawsuits — hailing the Golden State’s entry as a game changer.
“California just kicked open the door for every city and state to sue the fossil fuel industry for climate damages,” said the group’s director, Jamie Henn. “After this summer of brutal heat waves and climate disasters, I think the public is hungry for a way to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damage they’ve done.”
New revelations
California’s lawsuit notes the state in 2023 alone has experienced both extreme drought and widespread flooding, along with wildfires, historic storms, and an unusually cold spring and record-hot summer.
The 135-page lawsuit, complete with graphics pointing to fossil fuel emissions as the dominant source of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, largely mirrors the other lawsuits that have been filed from Hoboken, N.J., to Hawaii.
It claims that oil giants knew for years that their products were contributing to global warming, but violated state nuisance and consumer protection laws by running a disinformation campaign to hide those facts from the public.
Some legal analysts have questioned whether the cases can show that the companies are still engaged in deceptive action. But new revelations have continued to emerge.
The Wall Street Journal last week published new internal documents from Exxon Mobil Corp. that showed the company sought to allay concerns about global warming in 2006 even as it argued publicly that the risks justified global action. The documents were part of an investigation by New York’s attorney general.
The industry has waged a yearslong, hypertechnical jurisdictional battle to move the cases from the state courts where they were filed to federal court, where the challenges are believed more likely to falter under the Clean Air Act.
The Supreme Court in 2021 ruled in a climate liability case led by Baltimore that federal judges must consider the industry’s full range of arguments in favor of moving the lawsuits. Though the ruling came after former President Donald Trump had left office, his Department of Justice filed a half-dozen friend of the court briefs in support of the companies’ position.
Multiple federal courts, however, were unimpressed with the arguments, and the industry turned once again to the Supreme Court for relief. President Joe Biden, who on the 2020 campaign trail had pledged to support the litigation, reversed the Trump administration’s position, telling the justices they should decline the companies’ plea.
The court, which only takes a fraction of the cases it is asked to hear, agreed, and in April and May turned down seven industry requests to intervene in the lawsuits.
One case is still pending before the high court: API, Exxon and others in August urged the court to intervene in Minnesota’s case against the industry, warning then that without Supreme Court review, such cases “will continue to proliferate.”
Trump has vowed to block the lawsuits if reelected, pledging in an energy plan he released earlier this month to “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.”
The former president’s plan did not identify which climate lawsuits he would seek to target, but cited a blog post from an advocacy campaign run by the Independent Petroleum Association of America that accuses the Rockefeller Foundation of encouraging municipalities to take oil companies to court.
Since the end of the Trump presidency in January 2021, four more governments — including California — have filed lawsuits against the industry.
The most recent lawsuit was filed in June by Multnomah County, Ore., where 69 people died in a 2021 heat wave. New Jersey and Puerto Rico filed suits in 2022.
Puerto Rico’s lawsuit added a new claim against the industry, accusing it of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which is designed to take down organized crime.
West Coast states until now had been an outlier in the climate litigation.
Long anticipated legal bid
California had been expected to be among the first to file a lawsuit when the Los Angeles Times reported in 2016 that Vice President Kamala Harris, then California’s attorney general, had opened an investigation into Exxon for potentially misleading investors about climate change risks.
No lawsuit resulted under Harris or her previous successor, Xavier Becerra, though Harris claimed on the campaign trail in 2019 that she had taken the company to court.
“They have to be held accountable,” Harris, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for president at the time, said at a CNN town hall. “These are bad behaviors; they are causing harm and death in communities.”
Oregon and Washington, two other left-leaning West Coast states, have not pursued litigation, despite gentle nudging by allies who say the liability lawsuits are an important tool to hold companies accountable for greenhouse gas emissions.
Municipalities in California, however, have been active in the litigation with five California cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, and three counties, including San Mateo, filing some of the first climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies in 2017 and 2018.
The lawsuit represents the latest climate move for Newsom, who has sought to create a role for the Golden State as a climate policy power broker.
The state last month signed an agreement with the Chinese province of Hainan to work together on phasing out fossil fuel vehicles, improving energy efficiency in buildings, and enforcing air pollution and greenhouse gas rules.
That memo came on the heels of another agreement Newsom signed in April renewing a Jerry Brown-era partnership with China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment to encourage policy and academic exchanges.
In addition to Chevron and API, the California lawsuit names Exxon, Shell USA Inc., ConocoPhillips Co. and BP America Inc.
The suit asks the court to order the companies to pay for climate change costs and to establish a fund to help pay for future climate disasters.
It also calls for financial penalties for lying and punitive damages.
It brings seven causes of action, accusing the companies of violating state nuisance and product liability laws, as well as destroying natural resources, producing untrue or misleading advertising, and engaging in unlawful business practices.
This story also appears in Energywire.
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NO lnx guk?
in the spring of 2019, Phil Goldberg, a lawyer and hired gun for a front organization serving some of America’s most powerful oil firms, spotted an opportunity to serve his masters.
The University of Hawaii was holding a conference about a wave of lawsuits against the oil industry, and Goldberg was alarmed the event failed to include representatives from the energy business. So the day before the symposium, he fired off an email to the university demanding that big oil be heard alongside its critics.
The event was to interrogate the oil industry’s decades-long cover-up involving the climate crisis. But a one-sided debate, Goldberg wrote, “does students and the general public a significant disservice.” He insisted the meeting be postponed.
Denise Antolini, associate dean at the university’s law school who organized the conference, said in her 23-year-career as a law professor, she had never received such demands. “Your request to disrupt our public event was quite surprising, especially coming from far across the continent, from someone I’ve never heard of, on behalf of a private client with an apparently direct financial interest in chilling debate about climate litigation,” she replied.
The conference went ahead, but Goldberg chalked up his intervention as a win. He had managed to pressure Antolini into reciting his objections to the conference in her opening statement. He also convinced the university to post his blogs on its website alongside a letter published by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser denouncing the meeting for daring to suggest there was a solid legal case against the oil companies.
Goldberg is part of a network of enablers working to preserve big oil’s power and reputation as it faces a barrage of litigation. More than two dozen cities, states and municipalities allege the industry lied to Americans for decades by downplaying and outright denying that fossil fuels caused climate change. The lawsuits demand companies use some of their vast profits to help pay for the human toll of the climate crisis, including the damage brought by rising seas and increasingly severe weather disasters.
Big Oil “has this ability to really take command of the societal narrative on a whole level that the tobacco industry just didn’t.”
Desperate to avoid costly settlements, the fossil fuel industry relies on front organizations to discredit the litigation and sway public opinion in its favor. So nearly three years ago, the friends of big oil turned to Goldberg, a former Democratic congressional aide and self-described “committed environmentalist,” HIPPIE CHICK to persuade Americans that the companies responsible for the growing climate disaster are now the ones to fix the problem.
Though Goldberg heads an ostensibly independent initiative called the Manufacturers Accountability Project, much of its funding comes from some of the biggest names in the oil business. MAP hired Goldberg to push back against litigation on the fossil fuel industry’s behalf,allowing oil companies to keep their hands clean in the process.
Goldberg is leading a charge in local media to discredit those suing the fossil fuel industry as a “fringe litigation movement” conspiracy of opportunistic politicians, environmental extremists, and money-grasping lawyers who pose a threat to the American way of life. // ENTINE
“There are two goals of this litigation—drive climate policy and wage a public relations campaign against the energy industry,” Goldberg told the Guardian. “It has no foundation legally and, more to the point, is not the right way to fight climate change.” LOMBORGIAN
Karen Sokol, a law professor at Loyola University who specializes in climate litigation, likens the strategy to that pursued by the tobacco industry when it faced litigation over what it knew about cigarettes causing lung cancer. But, she said, the strategy may prove more successful for big oil.
“The fossil fuel industry has this ability to really take command of the societal narrative on a whole level that the tobacco industry just didn’t because, although we were definitely a cigarette culture for a time, not everybody was so dependent on cigarettes in the same way we are on fossil fuels,” she said.
Kert Davies, founder and director of Climate Investigations Center, is scathing about Goldberg’s part in that. “Phil Goldberg is a useful pawn on a much larger chessboard. If he doesn’t know that, it’s a shame,” Davies said. “If he does know his role, it’s worse.”
Outwardly, Goldberg seems an unusual bearer of the torch to snuff out climate lawsuits. The New Jersey-born lawyer characterizes himself as a “progressive, pro-environmentalist” with a long commitment to Democratic causes. With that, he has positioned himself as a voice of reason as he leads the fossil fuel industry’s campaign to distract Americans from the scene of the crime and embrace big oil as a necessity in the struggle to contain global heating.
But Goldberg is also a former coal lobbyist now working as an attorney for a Kansas City law firm—Shook, Hardy and Bacon—that made its name decades ago as the cigarette industry’s attack dog. The legal practice even gained public notoriety for inspiring the fictional law firm of Smoot, Hawking in the satirical book turned film, Thank You for Smoking.
“What a sad and disquieting chapter in the history of an honorable and often courageous profession.”
Shook, Hardy pioneered a strategy toward avoiding corporate accountability—a denial strategy the oil companies followed not many years later. Starting in the mid-80s, the firm convinced cigarette companies to shut down research into the dangers of nicotine, warning it could be used against them in court. It also hired specialists with advanced scientific degrees to cast doubt on the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. The firm’s lawyers soon developed a reputation for probing the lives of people who dared to sue the tobacco firms and for using court procedure to draw out cases until plaintiffs ran out of funds.
All of this so disgusted one federaljudge, Gladys Kessler, that in a damning 2006 civil judgment against the cigarette makers she said Shook, Hardy and other firms played “an absolutely central role in the creation and perpetuation” of a 50-year campaign of deceit.
“They devised and coordinated both national and international strategy; they directed scientists as to what research they should and should not undertake; they vetted scientific research papers and reports as well as public relations materials to ensure that the interests of the (tobacco industry) would be protected,” she wrote. “What a sad and disquieting chapter in the history of an honorable and often courageous profession.”
The chapter cemented Shook, Hardy’s reputation for vigorously defending clients and drew other contentious industries to the firm. And since joining Shook, Hardy in 2003, Goldberg has lived up to its reputation for playing hardball.
Throughout his career, Goldberg has developed an expertise at combatting public accountability lawsuits on the behalf of many embattled corporate clients, includingcoal companies, the asbestos industry, and pharmaceutical companies accused of medical malpractice.
Goldberg has also advised the American Legislative Exchange Council on drafting laws to make it harder to sue big corporations.
Simultaneously over the last two decades, he has led a wing of the Democratic think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, that works to protect corporations from lawsuits and to keep regulatory changes in the hands of politicians who can be influenced by industry money and lobbyists. Goldberg has also advised the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council on drafting laws to make it harder to sue big corporations.
Goldberg’s current defense of the fossil-fuel industry is equally focused.He deflects questions about Big Oil’s cover-up of its own scientific research on global heating by claiming that raking over the past is not going to help find solutions to the climate crisis. He also avoids answering questions about parallels with the tobacco industry’s actions.
Instead, Goldberg has sought to nurture a progressive image with claims to be dedicated to the climate fight but concerned that suing oil companies is getting in the way of solutions. He goes out of his way to say that he “cares deeply about climate change” and, in his answers, returns repeatedly to “the important work that needs to be done on the climate.”
This image was carried through to the Guardian‘s photographs for this article, which Goldberg agreed to pose for only while riding his bicycle. He declined to remove his helmet for any of the pictures.
Today, Goldberg is at the face of a PR campaign to squash climate litigation against Big Oil. He calls his strategy the “iron triangle defense.” One side of the triangle is dedicated toward shaping the public narrative, the second is for pressuring legislatures to write laws that discourage corporate accountability litigation, and the third side influences the judicial process with amicus briefs in cases that might have a bearing on those lawsuits.
A key part of the iron triangle strategy is that its beneficiaries should not be seen as the ones who are pulling the strings. Corporations fighting legal battles learned long ago that Americans are not particularly trustful of executives in suits. So major industries seek to influence public opinion and political action by funding front organizations to work on the behalf of corporate interests, but under a different name.
It was an obvious move for the fossil-fuel industry to turn toward front groups as it grew increasingly alarmed in recent years at a surge in lawsuits demanding compensation for damage caused by the climate crisis. Oil executives feared a repeat of the tobacco industry’s fate when public opinion turned sharply against the cigarette makers, forcing the largest civil settlement in US history.
“Say a new locality files a suit … Suddenly the local press is infiltrated with Goldberg quotes. He fires out op-eds.”
Major oil firms, including Exxon, Shell and Chevron, looked to the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the US’s most powerful business lobby groups, with a long history of creating front organizations at the behest of various industries, to help“combat frivolous, politically motivated lawsuitsagainst energy manufacturers.”
Four years ago, NAM launched a group, the Manufacturers Accountability Project, to take the campaign in defense of big oil on to the streets and into the local media. A year later, it recruited Goldberg to lead the initiative. While much of their strategy is an attempt tointimidate litigants through the legal process,Goldberg’s role is to take the fight to local communities in an attempt to mold public opinion—and potential jurors—before the cases come to court.
From local newspapers to NPR, Goldberg pushes arguments designed to deflect from the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for the climate crisis. “Those of us who care deeply about climate change, our economy, and our way of life must focus our elected leaders on game-changing innovations, not these politically-driven litigations,” he wrote in the New Jersey Globe after three New Jersey senators pressed the state to sue Big Oil to pay up for the costs caused by their deceptions.
Goldberg has pursued similar lines after the attorneys general of Vermont and Connecticut filed cases against the oil industry. “We should be fighting climate change instead of each other,” he reasoned in the local press.
Sokol, the law professor and climate litigation specialist, said she saw Goldberg’s intervention tactics everywhere there is a lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry. “Say a new locality files a suit… Suddenly the local press is infiltrated with Goldberg quotes. He fires out op-eds,” she said. “It’s a concerted battle against this litigation, which in many ways is a testament to how powerful the industry suspects this could be if it’s allowed to have its day in court.”
Still, even in Goldberg’s home state, there are plenty who are not buying it. In 2020, three New Jersey state senators pressed the state to sue Big Oil to pay up for the past and present costs caused by their deceptions.
“Rather than alert the public and help usher in the transition to clean energy, big oil took a page out of big tobacco’s playbook and funded and led a decades-long campaign to lie, deceive, and confuse the public about the science of climate change,” two of the senators, one Democrat and one Republican, wrote in USA Today. “It’s only fair that these fossil fuel companies who got rich while igniting the climate crisis are made to pay their fair share of the costs to our communities.”
nam 2 bak:
https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/oreskes-conway-the-big-myth-free-market-capitalism-climate-change-mont-pelerin-society/
science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, authors of the classic 2010 book :{Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, have released a new book placing that doubt machine into a longer arc of U.S. business and political history.
:{The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: explores an even more ambitious history dating from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.
The book documents how today’s prevailing anti-regulatory and anti-government postures that deride Big Government and cheer for Big Business did not arise simply from grassroots demands. Instead, they arose from well-funded industry campaigns creating what Oreskes and Conway have called a manufactured consensus “quasi-religious belief” in deregulated markets and an accompanying diehard opposition to governmental solutions to public policy problems.
Fighting Public Utilities, Child Labor Laws
One of the first campaigns in that spirit occurred within the electricity utility industry via an organization which eventually became known as the Edison Electric Institute.
What is now colloquially calledEEI, was launched in 1885 as the National Electric Light Association, or NELA. At the time, it “represented more than five hundred of the largest privately owned electrical utilities, accounting for more than 90 percent of U.S. kilowatt output,” according to the book.
In the 1920s, according to Oreskes and Conway, “electricity industry leaders organized one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the United States.” The campaign aimed to persuade the public thatmunicipal-owned electricity was a bad thing, advocating instead for investor-owned utilities. In the end, though, it resulted in higher rates for homeowners and small businesses and bigger profits for company owners and their bankrollers.
The initially unpopular campaign framed its activities under the guise of freedom and market efficiency. NELA’s influence operation — involving rewriting K-12 and university textbooks, courting and funding industry-friendly professors, utilizing astroturf campaigns, deploying sophisticated lobbying techniques to facilitate regulatory and legislative capture, and other deceptive practices — resembles much of the fossil fuel industry’s political pressure that DeSmog has covered and uncovered week-in and week-out for over a decade and a half.
At the time, it was the first of its kind industrial-scale full-court press, and it provided a roadmap for other corporate hegemons in subsequent decades. And NELA’s goal went far beyond merely winning a PR campaign, Oreskes and Conway conclude; it had much deeper ideological underpinnings.
“[U]nlike conventional PR, the aim was not simply to create a positive impression of a particular business or even of the whole industry,” they write. “Rather, the goal—expressed outright in numerous documents—was to change the way Americans thought about private property, capitalism, and regulation” altogether.
Core to NELA’s campaign, Oreskes and Conway wrote, was the idea “that free-market capitalism was the embodiment of freedom, writ large, and that any restriction on the freedom of any business would put us on a slippery slope to tyranny.”
Private ownership of the electricity industry was, up until then, relatively rare in the United States and even more so throughout the industrializing world. But as of 2017, 72 percentof U.S. electricity customers got their power from investor-owned utilities. NELA’s campaign, in other words, changed history as we know it.
Today, its successor EEI and its member companies continue to wage deceptive PR campaigns to fight renewable energy and bolster the continued consumption of fossil fuels.
The NELA campaign’s legacy, however, goes far beyond its sector alone, according to Oreskes and Conway. “Perhaps most importantly, NELA pioneered a strategy of insisting that these claims were true, regardless of the facts,” they wrote.
Broadening their view beyond the fossil fuel industry, Oreskes and Conway also detail how the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) propelled similar efforts across other industries during the same era. Like EEI, fast-forwarding to the present-day, NAM has served as a key node of climate denialism.
But in its earliest days,NAM maintained a different sinister focus, according to The Big Myth: advocating against child labor laws amid what the authors described as a “pandemic” of workplace deaths both among young workers and the adult workforce.The sheer volume of such deaths served as one of the first major wakeup calls in the need for a more active regulatory state, the book maps out.
In making its case for child labor and against regulations protecting children, NAM espoused “that the federal government had no business interfering in business” and called such a notion “socialistic in its origin, philosophy and associations.”
Libertarian Fringe to (Neo)Liberal Mainstream
While both NELA and NAM laid the groundwork for a paradigm that’s alive and well today, their ideas were not adopted globally until the formation of theMont Pelerin Society,a group created in 1947 that like EEI and NAM has received close scrutiny from DeSmog for years. Oreskes and Conway devote a whole chapter of The Big Myth to Mont Pelerin.
Like NELA and NAM, Mont Pelerin’s roots lay in anti-regulatory and business-funded ideology. But unlike them, Mont Pelerin came out of academia and via professors committed to the now globally pervasive neoliberal ideology they created. Mont Pelerin inspired similar groups that are, like it, still active today, such as the Koch Industries-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the University of Chicago’s free market-oriented Economics Department.
Oreskes and Conway point to a legion of like-minded groups arising by the 1970s, riding the momentum of an academic community devoted to neoliberal ideology, and reacting to the gains made in environmental protection and other areas. Formation of these groups accelerated after the metaphorical call-to-arms made in a memo written to theU.S. Chamber of Commerce by the then-tobacco industry attorney and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.
Known today as the Powell Memo, the 1972 letter called for Big Business to undergo “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
The Powell Memo, Oreskes and Conway concluded, spearheaded free market fundamentalist groups such as the Cato Institute, Koch Family Foundations, Scaife Family Foundations, Olin Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society, among others. All of these entities, and the groups they fund or work alongside in coalitions, remain powerful forces within U.S. and global politics.
The Big Myth further highlights how those think tanks and companies also played akey role in defeating the 2009 and 2010 congressional push, led by then-President Barack Obama, to pass a federal, market-oriented climate bill known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Critics would charge that the policy approach taken in the bill, emblematically, embodies the very “market fundamentalist” ethos reigning over U.S. politics for the past 100-plus years.
During the congressional debate over a bill that would haveenshrined the policy lever of cap-and-trade, the Koch-funded Tea Party network also ascended[vid]
previous congressional pushes in the 2000s for what was ultimately a business-friendly climate policy, had enjoyed bipartisan support. But The Big Myth explains how as the Tea Party network took flight, Republican Party support for the climate bill — and broader climate action — eroded to a near-zero level. It has mostly remained there since.
At the same time, the reality of climate change had and has continued to become all the more clear. That reality though, Oreskes and Conway wrote, clashes with the religion of market fundamentalism.
“[H]ad the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market-place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale?” the authors asked of the legion of climate-change deniers who helped to kill the bill. “To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, but now.”
Although this “quasi-religious belief” in the power of the market holds the greatest sway with conservatives, Oreskes and Conway argue that belief in the “magic of the marketplace” has become an intoxicating ideology withinliberal circles too, including within climate policy debates.
“Even in supposedly liberal enclaves like Cambridge, Massachusetts,” where Oreskes teaches at Harvard, “many people think climate change will be best addressed by technological innovation in the marketplace,” the co-authors surmise, perhaps in alluding to the prototypical industry-friendly policies pushed by former Obama Administration U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz — a professor at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The rise of right-wing think tanks helped spread the pro-market, antigovernment gospel across the country and insert what had been decidedly niche views into the mainstream,” the authors explained of the ideology’s spread. Other scholars have referred to this as the “force field” effect, moving the gravitational pull of what’s possible within U.S. politics further and further toward right-wing, corporate-created policy solutions.
The ideological roots of anti-democracy, anti-environmental, and anti-regulatory campaigning explored in The Big Myth also serve as the heart and soul of the book :{Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, written by DeSmog co-founders James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore.
If you have learned from DeSmog’s reporting shedding light on the climate change denial machine, you’ll love The Big Myth, an excerpt from which follows below. The book is a must-read for all students of the sordid history of public relations and governmental capture.
Go grab a copy and checkout some recent interviews on the book, as well, for further background. A video of Professor Oreskes discussing the book can also be seen below.
Excerpt from The Big Myth
In the 1990s, as capitalism was being declared triumphant in many quarters, scientists had proved that man-made climate change was under way.1 Climate change was textbook market failure. It arose from everyday economic activity— using fossil fuels—but was about to impose a huge external cost, inundating major coastal cities around the globe, making hurricanes and cyclones even more deadly than they already were, and dislocating tens or even hundreds of millions of people. It was also textbook environmental injustice, as poor people would almost certainly bear the brunt of a problem created by the rich.
But it also had a textbook answer: putting a price on carbon. Economists called this solution a “Pigouvian tax”—after the Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou, who in the early twentieth century had helped develop the concept of negative externalities. (Pigou also suggested it would be reasonable for governments to subsidize activities that had “positive externalities,” such as education.) The idea of pricing social and environmental costs of carbon was hardly radical; Pigou was firmly mainstream, a respected scholar at Cambridge University, a leading figure in what came to be known as the Cambridge school of economics.2 The obvious benefit of the Pigouvian approach was that it remedied the market failure directly by embedding information—in this case scientific information—into the price of fossil fuels. Then consumers could decide for themselves whether or not to buy more expensive fossil fuels, and producers of alternatives could compete on a level playing field.
The Clinton administration proposed to address climate change through a Pigouvian tax, the so-called “BTU” tax (referring to the heat content of fuels as measured in British Thermal Units).3 But it was opposed—indeed, ridiculed—by a broad coalition of conservatives, including, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and virtually every right-wing think tank in America.4
The notorious Global Climate Coalition, a network of fossil fuel producers and users that in the 1990s successfully prevented the U.S. Congress from ratifying the Kyoto protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, was originally established as a committee of the National Association of Manufacturers. Even though the idea of putting a price on carbon was a mainstream economic approach to market failure, Republicans framed it as just another example of Democrats’ penchant to “tax and spend.” The Wall Street Journal mocked it as Al Gore’s “favorite tax.”5
In his 1979 paper on nonmarket failure, economist Charles Wolf had slipped into his conclusion the idea that one cause of nonmarket failure was “premature but politically effective demands for government action.”6 In the 1990s, many Republicans picked up on this theme, arguing that it was premature to act on climate change. Even at the time, that was wrong: scientists already had a consensus that man-made climate change was under way and likely to be very costly.7 To act in the 1990s would have been appropriate. It would have been timely. But Clinton was unable to generate congressional support for action; Republican opposition made it clear that any proposal to put a price on carbon would be dead on arrival. In 1999, when Vice President Al Gore ran for president on a platform prioritizing climate change, journalist Gregg Easterbrook (brother of Judge Frank Easterbrook) embarrassed him on the campaign trail with a false story that his mentor—climate champion Roger Revelle—had experienced a deathbed conversion and died thinking climate change was not a serious problem.8 (He had not.)
As the 1990s became the 2000s—and scientists declared the evidence “unequivocal”—market fundamentalist did not adjust their views. To the contrary, their opposition hardened.9
In 2006, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, concluded on behalf of the UK government that, yes, fixing climate change would be expensive—perhaps as much as 1 percent of global GDP per annum—but not fixing it would cost much more: at least 5 percent and perhaps as much as 20 percent.10 Here was a solid argument from a man who could scarcely be accused of being any kind of -ist other than an economist. In response, conservatives dug in deeper. Senator Ted Cruz promoted the canard that global warming had stopped; Senator James Inhofe called it a liberal conspiracy to bring down capitalism.11 No matter what solutions were proposed—market-friendly or not—the right wing found reasons to oppose them. The science wasn’t settled (they claimed). It would be too expensive to fix. We could just adapt. It was all a hoax. Often these claims were couched in libertarian terms, as when in 2011 former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed the push to address climate change “the newest excuse to take control of lives.”12
The singular exception to climate denial in Republican Party leadership was Senator John McCain. He and conservative Democrat Joe Lieberman introduced Climate Stewardship acts in 2003, 2005, and 2007 to address the carbon dioxide emissionsthat drive climate change by creating an emissions trading system—a proven mechanism, albeit more complicated than a Pigouvian tax. But when given the chance to use it to address climate change, Republicans refused.13 The 2003 bill failed on mostly party lines, with a few Democrats and nearly all Republicans in opposition. But it was a closer call than many expected, and soon Congress faced intense lobbying pressure against climate legislation, particularly from NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The 2005 version came to a vote and failed 60–38, with only a handful of Republicans voting yea.14 Two years after that, McCain could not even persuade Republican leaders to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor.15
In 2009, Congress tried once more, with the American Clean Energy and Security Act (better known as Waxman-Markey,for its primary sponsors, Massachusetts representative Ed Markey and California representative Henry Waxman). For the fourth time in a decade, Congress had the opportunity to address climate change using a market mechanism, and for the fourth time rejected it. The bill barely passed the Democratic-led House; nearly all Republicans voted against, as did Democrats from fossil-fuel-producing states (and a few Democrats who found the bill too weak). The Senate never brought it to a vote. Democrats concluded they could not overcome the “wall of opposition” they faced from their Republican colleagues, opposition fortified by fierce lobbying.16 One analysis concluded that, in the eighteen months between January 2009 and June 2010, electric utilities, oil and gas companies, trade associations, and think tanks spent at least $500 million against climate change legislation.17 Another study tracing anti-climate lobbying back to 2003 places the figure at closer to $1 billion.18
The fossil fuel industry’s economic interests in preventing climate action have always been obvious; less understood is how it has camouflaged those interests. No one ever said, “I am denying climate change to protect corporate profits.” They said they were protecting jobs, protecting the economy, and protecting free markets from government “encroachment.” They said they were fighting for capitalism and freedom.
But historically, capitalism has never been just one thing: Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century vision of a democratic, distributed marketplace populated by small bankers and businessmen was a far cry from the industrial capitalism that developed in early nineteenth-century England and Germany—with its cruel “Satanic mills”—or the monopolies and managerial capitalism that came to dominate America in the late nineteenth century, much less the globally financed capitalism that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. China has liberalized its markets while continuing to oppress and even murder its ethnic and religious minorities. There are many capitalisms. American market fundamentalists fight for a form of capitalism that is both brutal and ignorant: that brushes aside market failure, anticompetitive practices, and external costs, in part by denying the facts of science, the facts of history, and the necessary role of government in making capitalism work.19
The question is not whether government should set limits that prevent individual autonomy from producing collective harm, the question is where we draw the lines. That is not an economic question, it is a political one. Market fundamentalists have managed to distract from the political aspects of these decisions and frame them as questions of “economic freedom.” Thus, a reasonable response to climate change is rejected as unreasonable “government encroachment.”
All this may make one wonder: was this ever reallyabout capitalism? Or freedom? Or was it all just one long, semi-continuous, shape-shifting defense of the prerogatives of big business? Of freedom for capital and capitalists? Or had the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market- place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale? To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, butnow.
ref bib...
docket
microsoft is a prominent example of an American company walking a public relations tightrope on climate change. It professes a serious commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, touts its clean energy bonafides and vocally supports the Paris Climate Agreement and the dire need to combat a growing climate crisis. But it also remains a member of a trade group, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which has worked for decades to delay action on climate change and defend the fossil fuel companies whose products cause it.
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NAM, in fact, has been so proactive in anti-climate action projects that it draws comparisons to its support for the tobacco industry as it faced a liability battle in the 1980s. NAM, along with other trade groups, backed tobacco companies as they faced hundreds of lawsuits and were charged with racketeering by the federal government for deceiving the public about the catastrophic health hazards of smoking.
NAM has even hired the same law firm that defended the tobacco industry to launch an assault on climate liability lawsuits.
As then, NAM’s member companies face public pressure for supporting those efforts. Microsoft, along with other companies, including Intel and Proctor and Gamble, told Climate Liability News that they disagree with NAM’s actions and policy positions on climate change.
But they have not ended their memberships. While other climate change-denying groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council have suffered membership losses because companies like Google and Apple felt they could no longer be publicly associated with its tactics, NAM has experienced no such repercussions so far.
“The views expressed by NAM do not reflect Microsoft’s position on climate change,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Microsoft is committed to sustainability and addressing climate change. We work with many groups on various technology policy issues and do not expect that any organization’s agenda will align to ours in all policy areas.”
The Trade Group Tango
Whether a company joins—and remains—a member of NAM or any trade group depends on how much it agrees with the association’s activities and how its membership in the association affects its reputation, said Michael Barnett, a professor of management & global business at Rutgers Business School who has studied trade groups.
“[Trade associations] are effective by influencing what others outside the industry think of the industry, like regulators, like customers, like communities,” Barnett said.
Trade groups help shield individual companies from the public relations backlash of lobbying on behalf of their industry. They often work as organizing forces to oppose regulation of industries and to lobby government for favorable laws and policies.
“The member firms want cover, they want that legitimacy, they want an improved reputation, but they don’t want to do those things necessary to gain that,” Barnett said. “It’s sort of like they’ve hired a personal trainer and they want that trainer to say, ‘Eat cake and you’re going to get fit.’”
Sharon Eubanks, a former Department of Justice lawyer who led the government’s racketeering case against the tobacco industry, compared efforts by NAM to defend the fossil fuel industry’s inaction on climate change to efforts by trade groups to back the tobacco companies. She cited the Tobacco Institute and the Center for Tobacco Research, which provided faulty research and inaccurate testimony to support the tobacco industry’s lies about the harms of its product.
“I would say that this group is a little more in your face and direct than the tobacco industry was in what they are doing,” Eubanks said. “They tried to put on a fig leaf, the tobacco industry did, but NAM, there’s no fig leaf—it’s out there.”
NAM has attacked climate scientists, undermined international climate negotiations and worked to delay the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions through the Global Climate Coalition, a fossil fuel front group that operated from 1989 to 2002. NAM and the Global Climate Coalition were so closely intertwined that one recently discovered document instructs members to make dues checks payable to “NAM – Global Climate Coalition.”
More recently, NAM launched its Manufacturers’ Accountability Project to defend big polluters against climate liability suits. Formed in 2017, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project has attempted to discredit municipalities filing suits against oil companies for the damage they’ve caused to the climate.
Last year NAM launched the Main Street Investors Coalition to fend off shareholder resolutions calling for more transparency and action on climate change.
Why Do NAM’s Members Abide Its Backing of Fossil Fuel Companies?
NAM doesn’t publicly list its members, and companies with executives on NAM’s board include large fossil fuel companies with a clear interest in preventing climate liability suits.
At the same time, other board members come from a wide variety of companies, some which appear to have a strong commitment to protecting the climate and have little or no chance of being named in a climate liability suit, including Pella, Microsoft, Intel, Mueller WP, Volvo, Ball, Proctor and Gamble, Corning and Baker Boy, a North Dakota-based donut chain, among others.
Microsoft, which has recently come under fire for joining the Climate Leadership Council, an industry-backed group advocating for a carbon dividend plan that could do away with climate liability suits, has tried to back away from NAM’s work without leaving NAM.
Intel is also carefully distancing itself from NAM’s campaigns to delay action on climate change.
Intels positions don’t always align with NAM’s, said William Moss, an Intel spokesperson.
“In the case of climate change, we have raised it directly with NAM, and state in our climate change policy our support for the IPCC and the Paris Agreement, and our own commitment to reducing our carbon footprint,” said Moss, who added that the overall benefits of Intel’s membership in NAM outweigh its differences on issues like climate change.
“In areas where we may have significant differences, we often publish our position separately so our stakeholders know where we stand,” Moss said.
Proctor and Gamble said its NAM membership is aligned with its general business goals and strategies, but the company does not agree with NAM’s position on every issue.
“We also respect and value the views of our shareholders, especially on topics that are of importance to the company,” said a Proctor and Gamble spokesperson in a statement. “The trade associations of which we are members are aware of our policy positions, including our views on climate policies. We are consistent in the positions we share with external stakeholders as well as in our trade association engagement.”
NAM did not respond to a request for comment, but in a radio interview last year, its president, Jay Timmons, claimed NAM’s 250 board members are “unified in their concern about what lawsuits like this will do to manufacturing operations if they are successful,” Timmons said, referring to climate liability suits.
Guy Moos, president ofBaker Boy, said his company remains a member of NAM because of other membership benefits, not its stance on climate issues.
“In North Dakota, we’re probably wired a little differently because the Bakken oil field is a pretty big deal around here and so I personally don’t take a position of anti-fossil fuel,” Moos said.
Barnett said the more trade associations try to serve a narrow focus, the more difficult it is to retain a broad industry base.
After a recent review of its membership in several trade associations, Shell found it had “some misalignment” with NAM’s climate-related policy positions. While the oil giant announced it would not renew its membership in the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, it said it would “continue to engage with [NAM] and closely monitor our alignment on climate-related topics.”
Shell is facing climate liability suits in the U.S. for the damage its products have done to the climate and for failing to adequately plan for and protect its facilities from climate change. Seven environmental and human rights organizations in the Netherlands have filed suit against Shell for failing to align its business model with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Barnett said fossil fuel companies will continue to accrue liability as long as they deny responsibility for climate change.
The cost of that liability will only increase as more and more evidence comes to light showing they knew about the catastrophic effects of climate change, hid that danger from the public and fought to continue business as usual, he said.
“If you think about companies like Exxon that are facing lawsuits on many fronts now for clearly recognizing the dangers—a la tobacco, recognizing the dangers decades prior to actually admitting it—it becomes a time bomb and eventually it’ll explode,” Barnett said.
This is the third in a series of articles on the trade group coordinating opposition to climate liability suits, the National Association of Manufacturers.
trade Group Gears Up to Discredit Climate Liability Movement
DECEMBER 15, 2017
FILED UNDER: CALIFORNIA CLIMATE LAWSUITS, FEATURED
By Dana Drugmand
In response to a growing wave of climate change lawsuits and legal investigations attempting to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for climate consequences and decades of deception, a large industry trade group is now :{fervently pushing back:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: with an “accountability” initiative of its own.
The :{National Association of Manufacturers:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: (NAM) has launched the :{Manufacturers’ Accountability Project:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, (MAP) which aims to undermine what it calls a coordinated campaign that “jeopardizes the ability of all manufacturers to continue growing and providing jobs to millions of Americans.” NAM identifies those behind the campaign as “trial lawyers, public officials, deep-pocketed foundations and other activists.”
The project is similar to previous industry-backed public relations campaigns against lawyers defending victims dying of asbestos-related diseases, those taking on the tobacco industry and advocates fighting for lead paint removal.
MAP targets the new climate tort cases filed in California, as well as the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general investigations into ExxonMobil. Blog posts on the MAP website call out actions by specific individuals and organizations, including attorney :{Matt Pawa:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, New York Attorney General :{Eric Schneiderman:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, 350.org founder :{Bill McKibben:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, the :{Union of Concerned Scientists:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, the nonprofit news website :{InsideClimate News:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and others.
The project springs fromNAM’s:{**Manufacturers’ Center for Legal Action**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, which alleges that this activist campaign is politically motivated and intended for profit at the expense of American workers. “It has become clear that these activist plaintiffs’ attorneys, sympathetic academics and agenda-driven media outlets are distorting the use of tort litigation to advance their narratives with the ultimate objective of undermining manufacturers and the engine of the American economy,” NAM senior vice president and general counsel Linda Kelly said in a :{press release:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: announcing the initiative.
One of its main arguments is that plaintiff attorneys are bringing these climate cases purely for their own profit and the expense of fighting the claims comes at the expensive of job and wage increases. In a :{November op-ed:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in Investor’s Business Daily, Kelly wrote, “Trial lawyers are waging a reckless assault against American manufacturers in pursuit of a fat payday for themselves.”
Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.
Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law debunked Kelly’s claim that climate cases are driven by trial lawyers seeking a big payday, calling it simplistic and incorrect.
“The challenge with that argument is that these cases are not simply being brought by lawyers. They’re being brought by nonprofit organizations, they’re being brought by state attorneys general, they’re now being brought by cities’ attorneys,” Muffett said. “The most obvious profit motive involves those companies who are being sued, not those who are bringing the investigation.”
“The deep irony is the name of the website and of the project,” Muffett added. “We would welcome them helping us hold those who are most responsible for climate impacts responsible, but that is clearly not their goal.”
The timing of the initiative is also telling. “What is ironic is the launch of this project at precisely the moment when the courts are finally addressing and overwhelmingly rejecting the sort of empty legal arguments that Exxon and its corporate and political allies have been making with respect to the ongoing investigations,” Muffett said.
NAM Intervened in Youth Lawsuit, Then Withdrew
While NAM’s accountability project is new, the trade association is no stranger to litigation. “NAM has a history of trying to use the courts aggressively to oppose regulations the industry doesn’t like,” said Muffett.
Notably, NAM, along with the American Petroleum Institute (API) and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), initially joined the landmark youth climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States as an intervenor on side of the federal government, only to later back out. As the case proceeded and the court required the intervenors to explain their position on climate change under oath, NAM refused and moved to withdraw from the case in May. The court allowed all three intervenors to back out of the case.
Julia Olson, executive director of Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit spearheading the youth case, :{said at the time:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in response to the withdrawal motion: “Over 18 months ago, NAM, like the other fossil fuel intervenors, went to great lengths to become a party defendant in this case. They claimed their members were seriously threatened by our case. Now, faced with significant legal victories by these young plaintiffs, and on the eve of having to take a position on climate science, NAM wants out of this case. We believe the court will determine that there should be consequences for wasting the court’s time.”
Phil Gregory, counsel for the youth plaintiffs, said he’s surprised no one has taken NAM to task for its hypocrisy and the conflicting views among its numerous members regarding climate change. “NAM opposed our case in favor of the fossil fuel companies, yet members of NAM’s board of directors, such as Proctor & Gamble, Merck and Pfizer are claiming in other venues that they’re committed to preventing climate change,” he said. “So they’re talking out of both sides of their mouths.”
“These companies shouldn’t be able to hide behind their trade associations and take contradictory positions.” NAM, he said, “is not only a hypocrite, but it doesn’t have the courage to take a stand under oath.”
https://www.ciel.org/news/ciel-statement-api-afpms-motions-withdraw-landmark-childrens-trust-case-api-afpm-demanded-right-defend-court-now-must/
may 26, 2017
Late Thursday evening, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Fuel & Petrochemicals Manufacturers (AFPM) filed unilateral motions to withdraw as Intervenor Defendants in the landmark Juliana v. United Statesclimate case. This follows a similar move to withdraw by intervenor defendant National Association of Manufacturers last Monday.
Carroll Muffett, President of the Center for International Environmental Law, issued the following statement.
“API and AFPM, in their attempt to withdraw as intervenor defendant from Juliana v. United States, demonstrate precisely the kind of belligerent disregard for consequences that gives rise to the climate crisis underlying the case. The oil and gas industry groups, along with the National Association of Manufacturers, demanded to be joined as defendants against the youth plaintiffs when they thought they could win easily and keep the case from ever being considered on its merits. They argued that the case could not be resolved without addressing the role of oil and gas in climate change—and in the economy. And after forcing their way into the litigation, API and AFPM deployed their immense legal and financial resources to quashing it.
Unfortunately for the oil and gas industry—and fortunately for the rest of us—its gambit backfired. Now that discovery, legal consequences, and public accountability are all on the table, API and AFPM are looking for an escape route, days after NAM sought the same. The fact that the industry groups would so brazenly seek to withdraw without responding to a single discovery request speaks volumes about the potential significance of this case and the oil and gas industry’s reluctance to expose its climate secrets.
“The court should not allow these industry actors tocut and run now that they must engage substantively on issues dealing with their own history of complicity in exacerbating the climate crisis. The plaintiffs and the public have a right to see this case brought to its conclusion. API and AFPM demanded the right to defend themselves in court; now they must do so.”
Karen Savage
In its fight to stave off a wave of climate change-related lawsuits, the fossil fuel industry has found a vocal and unapologetic ally in the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). The 123-year old trade group represents a wide range of the nation’s manufacturing companies, but it has frequently gone to bat for select segments of its membership during major liability battles. Currently, it is Big Oil’s staunchest defender.
The group has filed briefs defending oil companies in liability lawsuits, launched campaigns to discredit the communities filing them, and has worked to stop shareholders from pressing the oil companies to disclose climate risks. In these roles, NAM has put itself front and center in the effort to keep fossil fuel companies from being held liable for their role in climate change, and from paying for the related damages that will run in the hundreds of billions of dollars to communities across the country.
“Taxpayer resources should not be used for baseless lawsuits that are designed to enrich trial lawyers and grab headlines for politicians,” Lindsey de la Torre, executive director of NAM’s spinoff group, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP), said in a statement after Rhode Island filed one of the climate liability lawsuits last year. NAM launched MAP in 2017 as a response to the increasing number of climate liability suits.
Those suits, according to NAM, are a result of a coordinated campaign by activists “to disparage U.S. manufacturers with a focus on America’s largest energy manufacturers.”
MAP is now attempting to convince the American public—as well as judges who might hear those liability cases—that attempts to hold companies accountable for their role in climate change will harm business, said Richard Daynard, president of Northeastern University Law School’sPublic Health Advocacy Institute and chair of its Tobacco Products Liability Project.
“This is essentially the PR front for the defendants in climate litigation,” Daynard said, adding that MAP is also working to discourage municipalities from filing future suits.
“This is all part of a long history of tort reform propaganda,” he said, adding that NAM has worked for decades to reign in all types of liability litigation, including against the tobacco industry.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that NAM’s defense of fossil fuel companies has begun to look increasingly like its support for the tobacco industry in the 1980s. Similar tactics were used when tobacco companies were facing hundreds of lawsuits and were charged with racketeering by the federal government for deceiving the public about the catastrophic health hazards of smoking. NAM has even hired the same law firm that defended the tobacco industry to launch an assault on the climate liability lawsuits.
NAM recently named Phil Goldberg, a former coal lobbyist as special counsel for MAP. Goldberg is a managing partner in the Washington office of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, which gained notoriety for defending the tobacco industry, and is the co-chair of the firm’s public policy group.
Some say Shook, Hardy & Bacon went beyond defending tobacco companies, actively coordinating efforts by its clients to deliberately deceive the public about the ruinous health effects of smoking.
Judge Gladys Kessler, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who found 10 tobacco companies guilty of violating racketeering laws in 2006, said the company’s lawyers “played an absolute central role in the creation and perpetuation” of the companies’ “fraudulent schemes,” calling it a “sad and disquieting chapter” in the legal profession.
Even before Goldberg was hired, MAP had launched an offensive against climate suits, filing friend-of-the-court briefs and intervening in a landmark constitutional suit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. MAP has also submitted public recordsrequests and coordinated apublic relationscampaign todiscredit the municipalities behind the liability lawsuits.
Sharon Eubanks, a former Department of Justice lawyer who led the government’s racketeering case against the tobacco industry, said MAP is launching a direct attack on climate litigation suits.
“It’s very similar what they’re doing, only the tobacco industry at least didn’t come right out and say ‘We’re going to target these lawsuits directly,’” Eubanks said. “They did so indirectly. But NAM and MAP, they’re like, ‘We’re targeting the lawsuits.’”
Michael Barnett, a professor of management & global business at Rutgers Business School who has studied trade associations, said groups like NAM exist to defend the interests of their industry.
“It’s sort of an outsourced arm of those firms, rather than doing it all on their own, there’s strength in numbers,” Barnett said.“There’s some efficiency to having one centralized legal defense that attacks on behalf of the whole industry in addition to each of the individual firms taking on these issues.”
No Stranger to the Liability Battlefield
The addition of Goldberg to MAP’s legal team indicates a continuing commitment to defending NAM’s fossil fuel defendants. In addition to being the go-to law firm for tobacco companies,:{ Shook, Hardy & Bacon has a long history with NAM, partnering as far back as 2007 to support firms facing product liability suits. The firm worked so closely with the tobacco industry to attack the science showing the dangers of smoking it was named in several cases along with their clients, charging them with deceiving the public by fraudulently concealing the health effects of smoking.Oklahoma’s attorney general called Shook, Hardy & Bacon an “aider and abettor” of fraud in one suit.
}:
“[The Department of Justice] considered suing them and making them defendants because they were so much a part of the RICO violations we alleged,” Eubanks said.
“They’re not even hiding from anything, they’re just saying ‘we want to influence what’s happening in these cases the best way that we can.’”
She said she’s seen no evidence that MAP’s tactics are illegal, but they are similar to some of what was alleged in the tobacco cases.
Goldberg did not respond to a request for comment. In a NAM press release he said, “The NAM and its Manufacturers’ Accountability Project are the tip of the spear in the fight against the wave of unfounded public nuisance lawsuits targeting America’s manufacturers.”
Goldberg said climate liability suits get in the way of finding real solutions and “are more about politics than addressing the global challenge of climate change.” He did not elaborate on what the solutions are or how municipalities will pay for the infrastructure needed to protect their residents, costs that are projected to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars nationwide.
A History of Advocating for Fossil Fuel Members
NAM, which was founded in 1895, describes itself as the largest manufacturing association in the United States. It doesn’t publicly disclose its membership list, but its board includes some of the oil and gas industry’s most powerful executives.
Exxon senior vice president and management committee member Neil Chapman joined NAM’s executive committee in 2015, taking over the position vacated by current Exxon chief executive Darren Woods. Chapman, who donated $10,000 to NAM’s political action committee during the 2018 election cycle, also serves as NAM’s southwest regional vice chair.
Chapman and Exxon did not respond to a request for comment.
For decades, the association has promoted climate denial, founding the Global Climate Coalition in 1989 and sharing offices until 1992 while the Global Climate Coalition and its members—primarily energy companies and automobile manufacturers—worked to cast doubt on what was fast becoming overwhelming scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuels drives climate change. The goal was to change the public’s perception and cast doubt on climate science.
The Global Climate Coalition was disbanded in 2002 after several of its largest corporate members pulled out under public pressure to accept that climate change—and the projected catastrophic effects—was an undeniable global threat.
More recently, NAM’s focus has shifted from promoting climate deception to defending member companies from efforts to hold them accountable for years of deceiving the public and damaging the climate.
Along with the American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, NAM in 2015 joined the landmark youth climate lawsuit *Juliana v. United States* as an intervenor on side of the federal government.
Calling the suit a “direct threat to businesses,” the trade associations said the “significant reduction in [greenhouse gas] emissions would cause a significant negative effect on [their] members by constraining the sale of the product they have specialized in developing and selling.” When the court asked intervenors to explain their views on climate change, NAM quickly backed out.
When the liability lawsuits began—and now total more than a dozen from communities across the country and one state (Rhode Island)—NAM responded by launching MAP to “set the record straight and highlight foundations and other activists who have sought to undermine and weaken manufacturing in the United States” by engaging in climate change-related litigation.
MAP came out swinging, claiming that then-New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman’s use of the Martin Act to investigate Exxon for possible climate change-related fraud was “politically motivated.” It demanded New York Mayor Bill de Blasio apologize to New Yorkers for using an outside firm to file its suit against five major oil companies and launched a campaign to highlight what it called de Blasio’s “politically-motivated attacks on manufacturers.”
Eubanks said that rhetoric doesn’t add up.
“Lawsuits are to enforce the law, to ensure that people are following the law and it takes you out of a political process and puts you before a neutral person, a judge,” she said, adding that Shook, Hardy & Bacon also does a good bit of political lobbying.
“They say, ‘We think these matters should be handled by legislation, not litigation, and by regulations that will come out of any statutes that are enacted,” she said. “Then they fight real hard to make sure there are no statutes that come down the pike because regulations come out of regulatory authority, so it sounds real good, but that’s wholly inconsistent with their approach.”
NAM and MAP have made a big deal out of the potential for future RICO charges against the fossil fuel industry—the same racketeering laws that ultimately ensnared the tobacco industry—and contend that a conspiracy is being waged on the other side by a “group of politically motivated activists” who are “trying to take down America’s energy manufacturers.”
“Right now, there are groups of trial lawyers slinking around the country tantalizing elected officials in cities and states with unrealistic promises of jackpot justice if they will only agree to sue energy manufacturers over climate change,” saidNAM president and chief executive Jay Timmons in NAM’s State of Manufacturing Address last week in Houston. “These lawyers—they want to get rich at the expense of manufacturing workers.”
Daynard said this type of messaging is used in an effort to control the narrative around— and media coverage of—climate litigation.
“They have this notion that if they can get continue to get news coverage and establish themselves, they can make sure when cases are filed journalists will look go to them and they can then get in some comment on how this is all worthless crazy stuff stirred up by ‘greedy lawyers’ or ‘ideologically driven NGO’s,’” Daynard said.
To try and substantiate its view that litigation is part of a vast conspiracy—and in what some say is an attempt to have a chilling effect on municipalities that file lawsuits—MAP has also submitted extensive public record requests to plaintiffs in the suits, seeking documents and communication between the municipalities and their attorneys, prior records requests that include those attorneys, certain communication regarding the defendant companies and communication between the municipalities and billionaire Tom Steyer, founder of NextGen, a progressive organization working to stem the risks of climate change for future generations.
When Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin filed the first state-level suit last July, MAP denounced it.
Eubanks said ensuring manufacturers abide by state law is exactly what attorneys general should do.
“We have consumer protection statutes, we have consumer protection agencies, that’s part of what makes this country great,” Eubanks said. “You can’t just come in and roll over people with deceptive and unfair methods of competition, you can’t just lie about things without consequences and we have organizations to protect that. That’s what I find so alarming about this—the whole idea that there’s something wrong with enforcing the law.”
NAM did not respond to a request for comment. De la Torre, could not be reached for comment.
Perhaps NAM’s biggest attack on liability suits thus far has been its accusations against several California municipalities.
Not long after the suits were filed, Exxon went on the offensive, accusing plaintiffs of failing to disclose climate risks to their bond investors.
To try to bolster that allegation, NAM—along with the industry ally Competitive Enterprise Institute—asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether several cities and counties that filed climate suits misled investors when they stated in bond offerings that they couldn’t predict the impacts of climate change.
A report by the former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s municipal bonds division later found the municipalities did not mislead potential investors.
In another instance, NAM partnered with the Chamber of Commerce to back Exxon, filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the oil giant’s quest to stop investigations by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.
New York has since filed a lawsuit against Exxon based on that investigation, alleging the oil giant for years deceived investors by deliberately downplaying the climate risks to its business and long-term financial health. The Supreme Court recently ruled against Exxon’s attempt to stop Massachusetts’ investigation, which now continues.
This is the first in a series of articles on the trade group coordinating opposition to climate liability suits.
This story has been update to more accurately describe the review which found California municipalities did not mislead potential investors.
NEXT UP:
Targeting Investor Activism to Hold Big Oil Accountable
https://www.climatedocket.com/2018/04/13/nam-sec-climate-lawsuits-liability/
apr 2018
Wang
An industry trade group waging a campaign against communities pursuing climate lawsuits against oil companies said Thursday it has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate those municipalities.
In:{ a letter to the SEC:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) said those cities and counties might be misleading investors when they stated in bond offerings that they couldn’t predict the impacts of climate change. In their lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, the group said, those communities included projections of some of the potential impacts, such as the frequency of severe flooding, and the rising costs to adapt to them.
The complaint targets eight municipalities in California that have filed lawsuits, as well as New York City. The tactics are similar to those industry used against legal campaigns to hold companies accountable for the health impacts of tobacco, asbestos and lead paint. This time the industry group is claiming the cities pursuing the suits are the ones hiding or misrepresenting facts about climate change, not oil companies.
“These claims have no merit,” said Matthew Edling, a partner at Sher Edling, the law firm representing several California communities. “If NAM were honest about its interest in accuracy and truth, it would be asking the SEC to investigate fossil fuel companies for suppressing what they knew about climate risks for nearly 30 years. But instead it continues to do the fossil fuel industry’s dirty work.”
A spokesman for New York City said the city stands by the statements it made in bond offerings.He added, “This is yet another bogus attempt to mislead the public about Big Oil’s responsibility for climate change. We are continuing to take climate action to protect New Yorkers from the risks of rising seas, stronger storms, and hotter temperatures, and that includes holding Big Oil accountable for its role in causing climate change while hiding behind a decades-long campaign of deception and denial.”
The letter to the SEC reflects the deepening worry by the group and other supporters of fossil fuel companies over the growing number of climate lawsuits. :{NAM announced late last year:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ff9900;"):}: it had launched an initiative called the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP) specifically to oppose the lawsuits and the investigations of ExxonMobil by the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts. It claims the lawsuits and investigations are politically motivated and seek to enrich lawyers at the expense of American business.
Several California cities and counties, including Marin County and Imperial Beach,:{first filed suit:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: last summer.:{More communities:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, such as San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond, followed suit. New York City:{sued:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in January.
In February, :{NAM said:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:it was submitting public records requests to the cities and counties to seek documents, including contracts with law firms and correspondences, that involved the lawsuits.
NAM’s letter to the SEC followed a similar effort:{by the **Competitive Enterprise Institute**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in February. ExxonMobil made the same claims in:{a January petition:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: to a state court in Texas. That was part of Exxon’s larger effort to fight the climate lawsuits as well as the state investigations. In the petition, Exxon is seeking to depose California city and county officials.[IN TEXAS?!]
An SEC spokeswoman declined to comment on the letter. Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University,:{told Bloomberg:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: that the SEC is unlikely to launch an investigation over the climate risk language in municipal bond documents, noting the agency’s typically:{lax enforcement:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: of the climate disclosure requirement.
trumpista rev dr
Lindsey De La Torre DEPARTED FEB. 27, 2019
Justice (joined: Dec. 3, 2018)
White House Liaison and Senior Advisor to the Attorney General | $169,000
https://mfgaccountabilityproject.org/2018/01/26/former-white-house-advisor-lead-nams-manufacturers-accountability-project/
Former White House Advisor to Lead the NAM’s Manufacturers’ Accountability Project
January 26, 2018
Lindsey de la Torre joins the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as Executive Director of the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP) and Special Counsel to the Manufacturers’ Center for Legal Action (MCLA). A veteran of the Bush White House, the Department of Justice and a Fortune 500 company, de la Torre will work with elected officials, media and the public in support of manufacturers facing baseless lawsuits across the country.
“Lindsey’s arrival could not come at a more crucial moment, with a growing number of public officials joining activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers in a misguided campaign to target manufacturers across the country,” said NAM Senior Vice President and General Counsel Linda Kelly.
“Lindsey brings with her years of legal expertise and a thorough understanding of this growing threat to manufacturers. Her addition to the team will bolster efforts to push back against attacks and shed light on those who would abuse our legal system to further their own political agendas.”
More information about the MCLA can be found here. More information about the MAP can be found here.
Posted in Featured, Press Statements
MAP to Mayors: Misguided Litigation Not the Answer to Climate Change
E&E News: NAM hires ex-DOJ lawyer to fight ‘activist litigation
NAM hires ex-DOJ lawyer to fight 'activist litigation'
Avatar of Maxine Joselow
BY: MAXINE JOSELOW
| 01/29/2018
The National Association of Manufacturers is beefing up its legal team.
The trade association today announced the hire of Lindsey de la Torre as executive director of the Manufacturers' Accountability Project (MAP) and special counsel to the Manufacturers' Center for Legal Action (MCLA).
Spurred by lawsuits against energy companies, the group launched MAP last year to fight what it calls "activist litigation" (E&E News PM, Nov. 13, 2017).
MAP consists mainly of a website that documents alleged instances of special interests filing "frivolous" lawsuits with the goal of disparaging the nation's manufacturing.
Early posts on the website targeted investigations and complaints related to energy companies' alleged attempts to cover up knowledge of climate change.
:{
}:
The posts singled out litigation filed last year by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland against BP PLC, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.
De la Torre comes to NAM after stints in the Bush White House, the Department of Justice and the private sector, according to a press release.
...
E&E News
Continue reading this article.
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nAM Bolsters Legal Team, Strengthens Manufacturers’ Center for Legal Action with New Hires
Tolsdorf Named Litigation VP and Deputy General Counsel; Former White House Advisor de la Torre to Lead MCLA’s Manufacturers’ Accountability Project
by Michael Short [email ]
January 29, 2018
Washington, D.C. – The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is adding two seasoned attorneys to its Manufacturers’ Center for Legal Action (MCLA), the leading voice of manufacturers in the courts. Led by Senior Vice President and General Counsel Linda Kelly, the MCLA engages in a proactive legal strategy to advance policy objectives and strategic manufacturing interests.
Peter Tolsdorf joins the NAM as Vice President for Litigation and Deputy General Counsel, replacing Quentin Riegel who is retiring after 38 years at theassociation. A veteran of a top industry trade association, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and major private law practices, Tolsdorf will lead the NAM’s court room advocacy, which includes direct party litigation as well as a robustamicus program.
“Peter is an accomplished litigator with an impressive background that spans both the public and private sectors,” said Kelly. “Peter is an important addition to our growing legal team and brings a strong record of success to the MCLA’s advocacy on behalf of manufacturers in America.”
Lindsey de la Torre joins the NAM as Executive Director of the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP) and Special Counsel to the MCLA. A veteran of the Bush White House, the Department of Justice and a Fortune 500 company, [NEVER NAMED] de la Torre will work with elected officials, media and the public in support of manufacturers facing baseless lawsuits across the country.
“Lindsey’s arrival could not come at a more crucial moment, with a growing number of public officials joining activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers in a misguided campaign to target manufacturers across the country,” said Kelly. “Lindsey brings with her years of legal expertise and a thorough understanding of this growing threat to manufacturers. Her addition to the team will bolster efforts to push back against attacks and shed light on those who would abuse our legal system to further their own political agendas.”
These new hires follow three waves of staff additions at the NAM over the past six months as part of the association’s ambitious plan to expand its reach and effectiveness. Following last September’s announcement of six new hires and promotions, the NAM earlier this month rolled out a second wave of new hires to its communications and advocacy divisions as well as a third wave of new hires to its government relations and policy divisions.
More information about the MCLA can be found here. More information about the MAP can be found here.
fed soc
The Rise of Environmental Nuisance Litigation: Can Municipalities Sue Oil Companies for Climate Change?
The Cornell Club
6 E 44th Street
New York, NY 10017
Speakers:
David Bookbinder • Lindsey M. De La Torre •Richard A. Epstein
Topics:
Environmental & Energy Law • Litigation
Sponsors:
New York City Young Lawyers Chapter
Public Nuisance, Climate Change, and Municipal Litigation
Oct
24
2018
Wednesday
4:30 p.m.
EDT
Public Nuisance, Climate Change, and Municipal Litigation
Boston Lawyers Chapter
Omni Parker House
60 School St.
Boston, MA 02108
Speakers:
Lindsey M. De La Torre • Steven Ferrey • Philip S. Goldberg • Donald J. Kochan • James R. May • Kenneth Reich
more
Topics:
Environmental Law & Property Rights
Sponsors:
Boston Lawyers Chapter
=== https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/417416-suing-americas-manufacturers-calling-them-a-public-nuisance-wont/ Across the country, the jobs of manufacturing workers are being threatened by trial attorneys and politicians targeting manufacturers with baseless lawsuits based on the legal theory of “public nuisance,” attempting to hold manufacturers responsible for harms that are often far outside of their control. While trial lawyers have pursued such lawsuits for years, there has been a dramatic increase over the past year, as lawyers team up with states, cities and counties to sue manufacturers over climate change. This is why, one year ago, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) launched the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP) to help bring attention to the coordinated campaign behind these lawsuits and has made it clear that they will do nothing to improve the environment but could do serious damage to our legal system and our manufacturing industry.
California Manufacturers and Technology AssociationPresident Dorothy Rothrock has said the law firms are in it for the money. Indeed, the private attorneys representing the municipalities stand to earn hundreds of millions of dollars if they get a favorable ruling in court.
To date, 14 municipalities and one state have filed such litigation against dozens of energy manufacturers.{mosads}
So far, each lawsuit that has been considered in federal court has been dismissed, with the judges finding several flaws in the municipalities’ arguments. In dismissing the cases brought by San Francisco and Oakland, U.S. District Judge William Alsup rightly told the plaintiffs that the court is not the proper branch of government to address the issue of climate change:
“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” Judge Alsup wrote in his opinion. “The Court will stay its hand in favor of solutions by the legislative and executive branches.”
U.S. District Judge John Keenan agreed with Judge Alsup’s logic, dismissing New York City’s climate lawsuit against five of the country’s largest energy companies in July. Another fatal flaw in New York City’s argument, Keenan found, was that the plaintiff was attempting to hold only manufacturers accountable for climate change when it is a problem to which everyone contributes. “Aren’t the plaintiffs using the product?” Judge Keenan asked the city’s outside counsel. “Does the city have clean hands?”
These dismissals are an encouraging sign that the outstanding lawsuits against manufacturers — filed by Rhode Island, Baltimore, Boulder and others — will face a similar fate in the coming months.
It is also encouraging that a growing number of public officials are speaking out against the litigation. For example, in Colorado, the state’s newly elected attorney general Phil Weiser recently criticized the climate lawsuit filed by three municipalities in his state, saying he is “uncomfortable with the litigation because the case for it hasn’t been made.”
Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunterhas also commented on the lawsuits, saying, “In short, the courts are no place to determine national environmental policy. And public nuisance is not a theory the judges should employ in these kind of cases.”
Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murrill said these suits “commandeer the rightful role of Congress to pass policy for the nation and are improper in terms of trying to legislate extraterritorial economic policy from the states in which they originate.”
We will continue to fight on behalf of manufacturing workers whose jobs are at stake. Manufacturing is too critical to the American economy to allow this threat to go unanswered.
NOTE: This post has been updated from the original to correct Judge Keenan’s first name and to clarify the lawsuits that have been dismissed.
Lindsey de la Torre is the Executive Director of the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, a project of the National Association of Manufacturers’ Center for Legal Action. She previously served in the office of Presidential Personnel in the George W. Bush White House and in the Office of Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Dept. of Justice.
TAGS ABUSE OF THE LEGAL SYSTEMCLIMATE CHANGELAWSUITSNUISANCE
https://www.climatedocket.com/2018/06/06/nyc-climate-case-republican-ag/
no lnx
NYC Climate Case Draws Now-Familiar Opposition from Republican AGs
JUNE 6, 2018
FILED UNDER: LIABILITY LITIGATION, NEW YORK CITY LAWSUIT
By Karen Savage
Fifteen Republican state attorneys general have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a motion to dismiss by five major oil companies who are being sued by New York City for climate change-related damages.
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Led by Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill, the amicus brief was filed last week and signed by AGs from Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The same group filed a nearly identical brief in April, urging a U.S. district court judge in California to dismiss climate liability suits by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland.
They filed ahead of next week’s hearing on the oil companies’ motion to dismiss. Both sides will make oral arguments to U.S. District Judge John Keenan on June 13.
New York filed suit against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell in January, asking for billions in damages for infrastructure improvements needed to protect the city’s nearly 9 million residents from rising seas and extreme weather caused by climate change.
The 15 Republican AGs contend that climate change and its effects are “political questions not suited for resolution by any court.” They say the city’s claims fall under what’s known as the political question doctrine, which says courts should not hear cases that can be resolved administratively or through legislation.
Alleging that New York is seeking to “inject its political and policy opinions into the national regulatory scheme best handled through use of the Clean Air Act,” the AGs say the federal courts should not set nationwide energy and environmental policy. They maintain that forcing the defendants to protect a single major city would impede the ability of the five oil giants to provide energy to the rest of the country.
New York City officials declined to comment on the brief.
Lindsey de la Torre, executive director of the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP), said the suits are misguided and praised the AG’s for filing the brief. MAP was formed by the National Association of Manufacturers to oppose the climate suits and state investigations.
“With continued support from the attorneys general, manufacturers can focus their efforts on solutions rather than fighting litigation that legal precedent has demonstrated will ultimately fail,” de la Torre said.
In the both the California and the New York briefs, the AGs list several state and federal policies in which the government is charged with promoting “the very energy production and marketing targeted in this case.”
“Such promotion not only demonstrates the inherently political nature of this issue, but also suggests that States and the federal government themselves could be subject to liability if Plaintiff’s claims are permitted to proceed,” the AGs wrote in the brief.
One such attempt to hold the federal government liable—Juliana v. United States—is set to go to trial on Oct. 28 in Eugene, Ore. In that case, 21 young plaintiffs are seeking to hold the federal government accountable for its role in supporting an energy system reliant on fossil fuels and are asking the court to order the U.S. government to create a science-based plan to stabilize and protect the climate for future generations.
Young plaintiffs across the country have filed similar suits on the state level.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed in support of California climate suits
Three Democratic AGs File Brief in Support of California Climate Suits
May 7, 2018
Cynthia Coffman, Republican attorney general of Colorado, with state Sen. Larry Crowder, opposes climate liability suits
Group of Republican AGs File Brief Opposing Climate Liability Suits
April 24, 2018
Exxon faces fraud charges in Massachusetts
Exxon Uses Anti-SLAPP Law to Claim Mass. Climate Suit Violates Its Rights
November 11, 2020
FILED UNDER: LIABILITY LITIGATION, NEW YORK CITY LAWSUIT
supports net neutrality?
NAM's Manufacturers' Center for Legal Action Seeks to ...
"For more than three years, the NAM's Manufacturers' Center for Legal Action has fought the 2015 WOTUS rule because it goes further than the law allows, even attempting to regulate land that isn't wet. The uncertainty created by this overreaching and unfair rule threatens manufacturing jobs, and it fails to adequately protect clean water.
https://mfgaccountabilityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/MAP-Beyond-the-Courtroom-FINAL.pdf
54 pp nice bubble graf
Climate litigation in the United States has been a nearly 20 year-old effort to turn climate change into a tort litigation issue, not a matter of national energy policy. The litigation campaign has garnered a great deal of media attention, and lawyers continue to pursue plaintiffs to file claims. But every court to consider the substantive merits of these cases, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has rejected them. As these courts have explained, producing and selling energy people need and use every day is neither unlawful nor a public nuisance, and therefore, not a liability concern.
Climate change is a global challenge that needs to be addressed, but this litigation is neither a viable legal option nor productive to bringing about meaningful progress. So, why are these public nuisance lawsuits still being pursued? In short, this litigation is driven by politics and profit. In Beyond the Courtroom, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project follows this political and money trail. After providing a look back at the first round of climate litigation in the early 2000s, the report focuses on the re-launch of these cases in 2017, who has been funding this litigation campaign and how they have recruited cities, counties, state attorneys general and a private industry group as plaintiffs. As the report shows, a handful of nonprofit foundations are providing money to law firms and public relations consultants to generate the litigation. Their goals are to use media attention from the lawsuits to drive the debate on climate public policies and harm energy manufacturers and their supporters politically by publicly blaming them for climate change.
For these parties, winning the litigation is secondary, though the lawyers have secured huge contingency fees in hopes of generating personal wealth from a successful outcome in these cases. This report is designed to serve as a resource for reporters and others following the litigation. The information contained within is well-sourced and contains several previously unreported revelations.
Chapter One provides an overview of the climate litigation campaign, tracing its history and focusing on the key organizations and plaintiffs’ attorneys active in environmental litigation. This chapter also provides an explanation for why these lawsuits have been unsuccessful. The original climate tort lawsuit, American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut (AEP), reached the United States Supreme Court where the Justices unanimously decided that such cases were beyond the judiciary’s purview.
Chapter Two delves into the complex web of organizations that are driving the litigation. The law firms representing the plaintiffs’ in these cases rely on this tightly knit network of academics, foundations and activists to assist with the legal research and generate media attention for the litigation. Although they present themselves as a grassroots movement, as this report shows, they are actually highly coordinated and funded by the same sources.
Chapter Three details the organizations and media outlets operating as the public relations arm of the climate litigation campaign. Their objective is to normalize for political leaders the idea that suing energy manufacturers is an appropriate way to help combat climate change and then to leverage the lawsuits to associate blame with the energy companies.
Chapter Four describes how plaintiffs’ attorneys have traveled the United States to try to convince municipalities and other entities to hire them to file these lawsuits. Trying to get manufacturers to pay for local infrastructure projects aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change may seem appealing to municipalities, but history shows that they are unlikely to succeed and that the litigation could result in wasted time, resources and taxpayer money.
Chapter Five explains the use of contingency-fee arrangements and other financing mechanisms as the plaintiffs’ lawyers seek life-changing wealth from the litigation—all while getting paid by the foundations to bring the litigation in the first place.
Finally, Chapter Six discusses the flawed public nuisance legal arguments, the true motives of the proponents behind the climate litigation and how such lawsuits are often contradictory to their advocates’ asserted goals. This litigation and the efforts to expand public nuisance law are of concern to all manufacturers—not just energy manufacturers. First, energy is critical to manufacturing. Second, all manufacturers are at risk of getting caught up in this public nuisance litigation trend. If one of these lawsuits succeeds, activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers will no doubt target many other manufacturers for these ill-conceived lawsuit...
concl:
There is a disconnect between this rhetorical and the legal claims. For starters, their own pleadings undermine this argument. The pleadings detail broader societal knowledge dating back to the Johnson Administration in the 1960s about climate change, its causes and its impacts. Thus, they acknowledge the U.S. Government, United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and world scientific community had the same or greater knowledge as the manufacturers. In addition, the lawyers are telling the judges that they are not seeking to change the companies’ promotion and sales of fossil fuels. The Rhode Island complaint demonstrates this hypocrisy perfectly. It states that the companies should be liable over “the extraction of raw fossil fuel products . . .; the refining and marketing of those fossil fuel products; and the placement of those fossil fuel products into the stream of commerce.”
But, then says the State is not seeking to “restrain Defendants from engaging in their business operations.” So which is it? Is promoting and selling these fuels unlawful, thereby giving rise to liability? Or, are these actions lawful and can continue? The litigants are trying to have it both ways. In an effort to message this inconsistency, New York City’s lawsuit downplays the allegations of wrongdoing, stating in its briefs that the energy manufacturers should be liable for global climate change merely because their products cause climate change.499 The city suggests the companies should be allowed to continue promoting and selling energy so long as they pay for the damages caused.500 However, the notion that a person or a company can be liable for lawful, reasonable conduct is a non-starter. What this lawsuit is trying to do is impose—not enforce—a penalty on carbon, which is a decision that must be made in Congress or federal agencies, not the courts.
Only the other branches can determine whether to impose such a penalty, how much it should be and what should be done with the funds collected. Judge Alsup, who dismissed the San Francisco and Oakland cases, pointed out this tension.He noted that in the pleadings, plaintiffs’ counsel seemed to limit liability to those who had promoted allegedly phony science to deny climate change.501 But at oral argument, plaintiffs’ counsel said any such promotion remained merely a “plus factor.”502 Vic Sher has clearly made the strategic decision to double down on the demonization message, both publicly and in court. In arguing before the Ninth Circuit in the Oakland and San Francisco cases, Sher suggested that the energy manufacturers can be blamed for climate change because only they—and not the government— knew of the potential impact fossil fuels have on the climate. That simply is not true—even according to his clients’ own pleadings, which detail the government’s knowledge about climate change back to the 1960s. Also, in the Juliana case, the Ninth Circuit found that the federal government has been aware of the relevant climate science theories since at least President Johnson’s administration in 1965. Even beyond the lawsuits, the allegations have demonstrated no legal merit. In 2015, the climate activists, following up on another La Jolla strategy, sought to get their friends in government to “delegitimize” the companies, their workers and supporters as political actors.503
They met with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey to pursue enforcement actions over the alleged misrepresentations. First, the SEC dropped all of its charges.504 Next, the New York attorney general’s case fell apart entirely. The justice hearing it called the allegations of deceit, fraud and other misrepresentations “hyperbolic.”505 Before trial, the justice weeded out the most incendiary claims, and after trial, the New York attorney general’s office withdrew all of its fraud claims.
The justice confirmed this fact, stating, “ExxonMobil would not have been held liable on any fraud-related claims.”506 In ruling for ExxonMobil, the justice noted that the company turned over millions of documents and there were no material concerns. Again, repeating false accusations does not make them true. But climate activists and litigants continue to try to get judges and the public to buy into their mischaracterizations, regardless of how inconsistent they are. As discussed, their goal is to leverage lawsuits for political gain, with demonizing energy manufacturers central to that effort.
Conclusion These contradictions are the most pronounced inconsistencies in the climate litigation campaign, underscoring the weaknesses of the legal cases. As the La Jolla report shows, this litigation was never about winning in court, but leveraging the media surrounding litigation to achieve political reform. They want to “delegitimize,” “weaken,” and “bring down” energy manufacturers.507,508,509 They also, asDavid Bookbinder of the Niskanen Center said, want to control the public’s consumption of fuels by making fuels more expensive: “Given that companies are agents of consumers, however, holding companies responsible is to hold oil consumers responsible.”510 Rather than subjecting consumers—every person, business and government—to these reckless and baseless lawsuits, they should go back to the other option discussed in La Jolla and collaborate with manufacturers oninnovations needed to source and use energy more efficiently. Collaboration and innovation, not litigation, are the only ways to mitigate climate change.
notes start p 36
west va
- By Alex Brown Stateline.org (TNS)
- Apr 17, 2022
https://www.register-herald.com/news/some-cities-states-say-big-oil-should-pay-for-climate-damage
in the waning days of 2021, a grass fire broke out in Boulder County, Colorado. Fueled by extreme drought and high winds, the fire swept through the communities of Superior and Louisville. Within hours, it had destroyed more than a thousand structures — making the Marshall fire the most destructive in the state’s history. The December fire was an extraordinary event, but perhaps a preview of the new normal under the conditions caused by climate change.
Late last month, another fire forced the evacuation of 18,000 residents in and around Boulder. Fortunate winds saved the city from catastrophic damage, but the near-miss — and the timing well outside of the region’s traditional fire season — was a warning sign of what’s to come. “We've already experienced impacts (from climate change), but nowhere near the amount that we're likely to experience in the coming decades,” said Aaron Brockett, Boulder’s mayor. “We have a lot of work to do to make our community more resilient.” Boulder leaders are working to reduce fuel loads in the forests and open spaces owned by the city. They’re seeking to make the neighborhoods bordering those lands more fire resilient. They’re hoping to upgrade fire stations and equipment. And they’re planning projects to reduce flood risk from the severe storms that climate change is likely to bring. That work will cost tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. And local leaders think oil companies should pay for it. In February, the city and county of Boulder, along with San Miguel County in western Colorado, scored a significant win in their legal fight against Exxon Mobil and Suncor energy companies when a federal appeals court ruled that the case would remain in state court. Local governments earned another win last week when a different federal appeals court ruled that Baltimore’s case against oil companies also belonged in state court.
The decisions were the first under new U.S. Supreme Court guidelines, established last May as part of Baltimore’s climate lawsuit, directing appeals courts to take a more expansive look at oil companies’ arguments that the cases belong in federal court. The rulings have been closely watched by the nearly two dozen states, cities and counties that have filed lawsuits likewise seeking payment from fossil fuel companies for the damages caused by climate change. Oil companies, with the backing of some other states, have fought to move the cases to federal court, where they think national regulations around drilling, refining, emissions and air quality would invalidate the legal claims against them. The local governments that have sued say their cases rest on Big Oil’s deception about the harm its products would cause, giving them a foothold under state law to seek damages.
The jurisdictional battle, which more federal appeals courts are likely to rule on this year, will have massive implications for whether the climate lawsuits proceed to local jury trials. If they do, it would set up a high-stakes showdown over the still uncertain territory of legal accountability for climate change — with billions of dollars on the line. Several states and industry groups have weighed in to support the oil companies, arguing that rulings against them could devastate the industry and make energy more expensive. “If it’s in federal court, (the oil companies) win,” said Hannah Wiseman, a professor of law at Penn State University’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. “These cities are wise to the precedent, and they’ve made clear they’re raising issues of state tort law and not arguing for federal climate policy. They're doing a good job of that, and it’s hard to predict how the courts will ultimately come out.”
The governments suing the oil industry come from regions facing sea level rise, wildfires, drought, flooding and severe weather. They cite extensive news reporting — including investigations from the Los Angeles Times, Inside Climate News and The Guardian — that shows oil companies understood the dangers of climate change decades ago but led campaigns to undermine the scientific consensus that their products were contributing to a growing crisis. “By the ‘70s, (oil companies) knew that a lack of action on moving away from fossil fuels would cause dramatic changes to the climate,” Brockett said. “Meanwhile, the burden for repairing the damage falls on local communities, and we don't have the financial wherewithal to bear that burden.” Backers of the lawsuits compare them to landmark cases against tobacco and opioid manufacturers, which resulted in multibillion-dollar settlements over the public health crises fueled by their products and business practices.
“They're just saying, ‘You violated state law, because you deceived us about what you knew about your products in order to sell more of them,’” said Bob Percival, director of the University of Maryland’s environmental law program. “The oil companies are desperate to avoid a public trial that would focus attention on what they knew, when they knew it and how they tried to deceive the public.” The cases mark an unprecedented attempt to assert legal accountability for climate change, a crisis with worldwide causes and consequences.
“The fact that it's a global phenomenon is obviously the thing that distinguishes these tort actions from any case we've seen before,” said Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School, who also serves in an informal advisory group that supports some of the governments’ cases. The oil companies named in the cases argue that federal energy and pollution policies should preempt state claims. Exxon Mobil and Suncor have contended in court filings in the Colorado lawsuit that they followed federal regulations on drilling, refining and distributing fossil fuels.
The companies also assert that the lawsuits are backdoor attempts to establish climate policy through the courts, since Congress has failed to take meaningful action. "On jurisdictional matters, climate change is a national issue that requires a federal solution, not a patchwork of various state-based rulings," saidWilliam Allison, spokesperson for Energy In Depth, a research and public outreach project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a trade group.
Major companies facing the lawsuits — BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Suncor, the American Petroleum Institute,Koch Industries and Shell — did not respond to Stateline’s requests for comment. Supporters of the lawsuits say the cases aren’t about enforcing or enacting policies to reduce carbon emissions, but rather about seeking accountability for what they say are decades of dishonesty that contributed to political inaction on climate change. Many of the cases have been through years of legal wrangling, and the current battle centers on whether they should be heard in state or federal court. Those backing the lawsuits say local juries should hear the cases. “These cases, which are fundamentally about local injuries to communities, should be heard in state court,” said Marco Simons, general counsel with EarthRights International, which is representing the Colorado communities. “Our cases are not about stopping climate change writ large or broader policy issues. They're about paying for damages suffered by these communities.” But some states have weighed in to argue that the cases belong in federal court. For example, Indiana has filed multiple amicus briefs in favor of oil companies, including a recent filing with 13 states in the case brought by Baltimore.
“These claims are displaced by the existing federal regulatory scheme, which tells us the limits in advance on extraction, refinement and use of fossil fuels,” Tom Fisher, Indiana’s solicitor general, said in an interview. “If a court in California decides that Exxon and Chevron are responsible under public nuisance theory for causing global climate change and that requires an injunction to limit their output, that's obviously going to affect Indiana and other states.”
Some business groups, including the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an arm of the National Association of Manufacturers that fights climate litigation, also have urged federal courts to take jurisdiction. “(C)limate policy is federal and regulatory in nature — not one that can be decided by state courts,” Phil Goldberg, the project’s special counsel, wrote in an email to Stateline. TheNational League of Cities, which advocates for municipal governments, takes a different view. “This is really about federalism principles and where cases should be heard if there's a local harm,” said Carolyn Berndt, the group’s legislative director for sustainability.
“The local harm in this case happens to be climate change, and the right court for this is state court.” Although federal judges mostly have ruled that the cases belong in state court, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last May forced federal appeals courts to reevaluate those decisions because they hadn’t considered all the energy companies’ arguments. This February, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the case filed by the Colorado municipalities would remain in state court, the first decision under the new Supreme Court guidelines. Last week, the 4th Circuit ruled that Baltimore’s case against oil companies also belonged in state court. Several other circuit courts have yet to rule under the new guidelines.
“This is an important year,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit that supports communities that are taking on oil companies. “If these cases end up in state court, that’s a really good sign. If one of the circuits goes (the oil companies’) way, that could create grounds for an appeal to the Supreme Court.” While several federal appeals court decisions await, some cases are moving ahead. Last month, a Hawaii Circuit Court judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by Honolulu could proceed to trial even as the jurisdictional issues are still being settled. The case could be the first to reach the discovery phase, an outcome advocates say energy companies have fought tooth-and-nail to avoid. “They absolutely do not want it to get that far,” said Tommy Waters, chair of the Honolulu City Council.
“What are they hiding?” Waters said Honolulu is facing billions in damages from sea level rise alone, and it also requires expensive upgrades to its stormwater infrastructure to handle extreme precipitation. “Our roads are falling into the ocean, homes are falling into the ocean, our beaches are disappearing,” he said. “We simply can’t afford it.” Another case, filed by the state of Massachusetts against Exxon Mobil, also is moving toward discovery. That lawsuit, like most of the cases brought by state attorneys general, focuses on consumer fraud violations. Such lawsuits seek civil penalties, rather than restitution for the costs of climate mitigation. If the local governments prove their cases against the oil companies, the implications would be massive. Courts may have to determine the extent to which a given company is responsible for the climate damages in a particular region. “Science has made great strides in being able to attribute what percentage of temperature rise and what impacts are associated with a particular company's emissions,” said Percival, the University of Maryland professor. “There are now some really distinguished experts who can testify about how to apportion the harm.”
And if some cities and counties are successful, advocates expect a deluge of others to file suits. “If these cases are ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, then every city in the country could follow suit,” said Wiles of the Center for Climate Integrity. “There isn't a city budget out there that couldn't use help from the oil companies for their climate-driven adaptation costs.” Backers of the lawsuits acknowledge that the costs of dealing with climate change nationwide are far more than the oil companies could bear. “If these cases all go to their logical extreme, [the oil companies] all go bankrupt,” said Parenteau, the Vermont Law School professor. “They should.” Others argue that outcome is why the cases should be dropped. “We choose to use energy, which is mostly fossil fuel, because it makes our lives better,” said Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank that advocates for free market principles and is supported in part by oil industry-affiliated groups. “Imagine they win $100 billion in one of the suits. That becomes a per-barrel tax that gets passed on to consumers.”
2022 The Pew Charitable Trusts. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LL
https://www.**desmog.**com/manufacturers-accountability-project/
manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP)
Background
The National Association of Manufacturers(NAM)quietly launched the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP) inNovember 2017 to push back against climate change–related lawsuits affecting the manufacturing industry. The :{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: claim that a “coordinated campaign jeopardizes the ability of all manufacturers to continue growing and providing jobs to millions of Americans.” [1], [2]
*:{E&E:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: News* reported that the MAP campaign was launched to fight “activist litigation” with the goal of fighting “frivolous: lawsuits.” Its initial focus has been on climate change lawsuits against major oil companies.[3]
“We’ve launched what we’ve called the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project and the intention is to push back on the use of lawsuits funded by activists to target manufacturers for a variety of problems, including we’re looking at the climate lawsuits,” Linda Kelly, Senior vice president and general counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and “lead on the NAM’s Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP),” told the :{**Washington Examiner**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in an interview. [2]
:{MAP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: is led by :{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:‘s Manufacturers’Center for Legal Action (:{MCLA:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:), with both MAP and the MCLA headed by Linda Kelly, who is senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary at the National Association of Manufacturers. Shortly after the group’s formation, Kelly wrote an op-ed at :{The Hill:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, suggesting that attorneys have been dragging manufacturers into “fruitless lawsuits” over climate change concerns and that “[t]hese cases can have devastating impacts on entire industries and the jobs they support.” [4], [5], [6]
Stance on Climate Change
2018
NAM CEO Jay Timmons said in a statement that while climate change is a “major problem,” it should not be blamed on the manufacturing industry: [7]
“Climate change is a major problem that we all must work together to solve–but it is inappropriate to blame it entirely on the manufacturing companies that we all rely on,” Timmons said in a statement criticizing Mayor de Blasio for his lawsuit against major oil companies.
Funding
Below is funding information for the MAP‘s parent organization, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), collected from publicly available 990 forms, and from data collected by theConservative Transparency project. Note that not all individual values have been verified by DeSmog. [8]
See the attached spreadsheet for additional information on National Association of Manufacturers funding by year (.xlsx).
NAM as Recipient
| Donor | Total |
|---|---|
| Free Enterprise America | $2,500,000 |
| Freedom Partners | $1,170,000 |
| American Petroleum Institute | $1,163,650 |
| **Intel Corporation** | $1,003,329 |
| **Merck** | $162,220 |
| Dow Chemical Company | $96,119 |
| Alcoa | $91,400 |
| **Norfolk Southern** | $71,590 |
| John Deere | $16,000 |
| Grand Total | $6,274,308 |
NAM as Donor
| Recipient | Total |
|---|---|
| American Chemistry Council | $790,000 |
| **American Justice Partnership** | $520,000 |
| Manufacturing Institute | $300,000 |
| The Manufacturing Institute | $200,000 |
| :{BIPAC:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Business Institute for Political Analysis | $110,000 |
| Heartland Institute | $52,500 |
| National Foundation for American Policy | $20,000 |
| **:{ACCF:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Center for Policy** | $18,000 |
| Council on Competitiveness | $13,500 |
| Congressional black Caucus | $10,000 |
| Associated Industries of Kentucky | $5,000 |
| **Independent Women’s Forum** | $5,000 |
| Congressional Hispanic Caucus | $5,000 |
| Friends of Adam Smith | $5,000 |
| Women’s Policy Inc. | $3,000 |
| Institute for International Econ. | $2,000 |
| Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes | $1,763 |
| Minnesota Chamber of Commerce | $1,500 |
| **American Enterprise Institute** | $1,500 |
| Women in Government Relations | $1,000 |
| Tax Foundation | $1,000 |
| House DC | $1,000 |
| Grand Total | $2,066,763 |
Key People
- Linda Kelly — Senior vice president and general counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and “lead on the NAM’s Manufacturers’ Accountability Project (MAP).”[5], [9]
- Lindsey de la Torre — Executive director. [10]
- Phil Goldberg — Senior outside legal adviser and spokesman. [18]
Actions
January 2019
The National Association of Manufacturershired Phil Goldberg, managing partner of the Washington, D.C., office of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, as special counsel to help MAPfight against climate change lawsuits filed against oil companies. [18], [19]
Goldberg formerly worked as a lobbyist for the coal industry, and his law firm Shook, Hardy :{&:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Bacon has a history of defending the tobacco industry. [20],[21]
Sharon Eubanks, a former Department of Justice lawyer who has worked on cases against the tobacco industry, compared MAP‘s fight of climate litigation suits to tobacco:
“It’s very similar what they’re doing, only the tobacco industry at least didn’t come right out and say ‘We’re going to target these lawsuits directly.’ They did so indirectly. But NAM and MAP, they’re like, ‘We’re targeting the lawsuits.’” [19]
April 2018
:{:{E&E:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: News:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: reportedthat MAP began fighting back against Californian municipalities and cities that had sued more than 20 oil companies. MAP demanded a range of documents including paperwork, cellphone records, payments, and other documents containing the names of the oil companies. [17]
MAP said their goal was to expose details of the lawsuits against the oil companies:
“We really believe strongly in transparency. We think that taxpayers have a right to know what’s behind these lawsuits,” said Lindsey de la Torre, executive director of MAP. She added that “really what this whole effort is about is trial attorneys and politicians raising their public profile at the expense of manufacturers.” [17]
They said they became involved because oil manufacturers have been among those targeted by climate-related lawsuits. De la Torre declined to respond whether MAP gets any funding from oil companies. [17]
Officials from the cities described it as bullying: [17]
“Instead of owning up to the liabilities and culpabilities of issues of climate change, they’re carrying out a very specific and targeted campaign of me and others. That’s very clear,” said Serge Dedina, mayor ofImperial Beach. “This is part of the fossil fuel industry playbook.”
MAP contended that the lawyers representing the cities “stand to gain a lot of money in these lawsuits.” Dana McRae, county counsel for Santa CruzCounty, said that their aim is “ensuring that our taxpayers aren’t on the hook for climate-change-related damages knowingly caused by these fossil fuel companies.” [17]
Our outside counsel only gets paid if we prevail in court, so if MAP and Exxon are so confident that our lawsuits have no merit, let’s just go to trial and see who is right,” McRae said. “If MAP is really so concerned about attorney fees, they should start with the lawyers for Exxon and the other defendants. Those lawyers get paid for every six minutes they work, at rates that are upward of $1,000 an hour or more.” [17]
February 12, 2018
:{MAP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: announced it was launching an ad campaign to attack New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio after de Blasio said he would sue oil companies including BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell in the wake of the devastation caused by climate change. [11], [12]
“Mayor de Blasio’s frivolous lawsuit is a farce and a direct threat to the jobs and livelihoods of manufacturing workers in New York and across America,” NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons stated in a February 13 :{MAP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: news release.[13]
City Hall spokesman Eric Phillips criticized the ad campaign. “Shadowy groups funded by Big Oil won’t keep the mayor from fighting for our planet and city’s future,” he said, quoted by the *New York Post*. [14]
Jay Timmons later**went on *Fox Business News* with Charles Payne**where he discussed de Blasio. ““Another problem that we’re facing and another reason that I’m here in New York today, Charles, is we are fighting against trial lawyers and politicians who want to take down manufacturing. Mayor de Blasio is suing energy companies right now for the subject of climate change,” Timmons said. [15]
December 2017
One of MAP‘s first actions was to criticize the investigation by Democratic state attorneys general investigating what ExxonMobil knew about climate change, although MAP would also target other issues they see as impacting industry’s bottom line. [2]
According to Linda Kelly, “We’re trying to raise awareness of the tactics that are behind these lawsuits and some of the groups that are funding them and how different interest groups are teaming up with state officials, because these lawsuits are being brought by states and by cities and counties, and show this isn’t an organic effort of different states and cities to try to recover damages.” [2]
*:{E&E:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: News* reported that the MAP campaign was launched to fight “activist litigation” and would primarily consist of a website, with the goal of fighting “frivolous: lawsuits.” Its initial target included litigation by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland against BP PLC, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC for damages under state public nuisance law.[3]
Related Organizations
- :{National Association of Manufacturers (:{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:) :(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:600"):}:—MAP is a project of :{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:‘s Manufacturers’ Center for Legal Action (:{MCLA:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:). [1]
MAP Endorsers
The MAP lists a number of endorsing manufacturing organizations on its website including the following: [16]
- Colorado Association of Commerce & Industry (CACI)
- Georgia Association of Manufacturers (GAM)
- Illinois Manufacturers’ Association (IMA)
- Iowa Association of Business and Industry (ABI)
- Kansas Chamber of Commerce
- Minnesota Chamber of Commerce
- Mississippi Manufacturers Association (MMA)
- Associated Industries of Missouri
- North Carolina Chamber
- New Mexico Business Coalition
- The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association
- Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association (PMA)
- South Carolina Chamber of Commerce
- Texas Association of Business (TAB)
- Tennessee Chamber of Commerce & Industry
- West Virginia Manufacturers Association
- Wisconsin Manufacturers :{&:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Commerce (:{WMC:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:)
Contact & Address
MAP does not provide a physical contact address separate from that of the National Association of Manufacturers.
Social Media
- The Manufacturers’ Accountability Project on Facebook.
- @:{MFGP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:roject on Twitter.
Resources
- “About Us,” Manufacturers’ Accountability Project. Archived February 1, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Mm0n5
- John Siciliano. “Manufacturers push back against environmentalists’ climate court strategy,” Washington Examiner,December 4, 2017. Archived February 1, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/klCSZ
- Amanda Reilly. “:{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: campaign aims to fight lawsuits against energy companies,” E&E News, November 13, 2018.
- “:{ILMA:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Participants on :{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Policy Call,” ILMA, December 4, 2017. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/VsUVq
- “Linda Kelly,”National Association of Manufacturers. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/DqWFh
- Linda Kelly. “Activist litigation against manufacturers has gone too far,” The Hill, December 10, 2017. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/omIau
- “National Association of Manufacturers :{CEO:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Jay Timmons: New York’s War on Energy,” Manufacturers Accountability Project, February 14, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/cDcg8
- “National Association of Manufacturers,” Conservative Transparency. Accessed September 21, 2017.
- “Manufacturers: Misguided :{NYC:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Climate Lawsuit Part of Coordinated Activist Campaign,” Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, January 10, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/:{IP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:zmR
- “:{E&E:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: News: :{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: hires ex-:{DOJ:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: lawyer to fight ‘activist litigation’,” Manufacturers Accountability Project, January 29, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/:{AYF:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:xD
- “:{MAP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Launches Ad Campaign to Expose Mayor de Blasio’s Attack on Manufacturers,” Manufacturers Accountability Project, February 12, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/gsCWV
- “New York City sues Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies over climate change,” The Washington Post, January 10, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Scr5I
- “Timmons: Mayor de Blasio Owes New Yorkers an Apology,” PR Newswire, February 13, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/hcyTg
- Michael Gartland. “Ads will attack de Blasio’s lawsuits against oil companies,” New York Post, February 12, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/:{NPN:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:i7
- “:{ICYMI:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:: The :{NAM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:’s :{CEO:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: on Fox Business: ‘We are fighting against trial lawyers and politicians who want to take down manufacturing’,” Manufacturers Accountability Project, February 20, 2018. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/:{CM1XL:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
- “Endorsers,” Manufacturers Accountability Project. Archived February 20, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Rp3Az
- Anne C. Mulkern. “Oil company allies say climate lawsuits were shopped around,” E&E News, April 10, 2018. Archived April 14, 2018. Archive.is URL: https://archive.li/utoKV
- Sue Reisinger “National Association of Manufacturers Hires Special Counsel to Handle Growing Climate Change Lawsuits,” Corporate Counsel, January 23, 2019. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
- Karen Savage. “Battling for Big Oil: Manufacturing Trade Group Leads Assault on Climate Suits,” Climate Liability News, February 26, 2019. Archived February 26, 2019. Archive.fo URL: https://archive.fo/Ep5D6
- “Goldberg, Philip S,” OpenSecrets. Accessed February 26, 2019.
- Mark Hansen. “Shook Hardy Smokes ‘Em,” ABA Journal, October 2008. Archived February 27, 2019. Archive.fo URL: https://archive.fo/qZYiI
Manufacturers' Accountability Projecthttps://mfgaccountabilityproject.org
Washington, D.C. — Phil Goldberg, Special Counsel for the Manufacturers' Accountability Project, issued the following statement addressing the Fourth ...
Missing: arm | Must include: arm
NAM's MCLA Announces Phil Goldberg as Special Counselhttps://www.nam.org › Press Releases
NAM's MCLA Announces Phil Goldberg as Special Counsel. Goldberg to Bolster Manufacturers' Accountability Project for Year of High-Stakes Litigation for ...
NAM's MCLA Announces Phil Goldberg as Special Counsel | NAMhttp://documents.nam.org › Press-Releases › 2019/01
NAM's MCLA Announces Phil Goldberg as Special Counsel. Goldberg to Bolster Manufacturers' Accountability Project for Year of High-Stakes Litigation for ...
Manufacturers' Accountability Project (MAP) - DeSmoghttps://www.desmog.com › Database Entries
Funding. Below is funding information for the MAP's parent organization, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), collected from publicly ...
Missing: arm | Must include: arm
National Association of Manufacturers Hires Special Counsel ...https://www.shb.com › articlenamsccphilgoldbergPDF
Jan 23, 2019 — The association said Goldberg will serve as a senior outside legal adviser and spokesman for the Manufacturers' Account- ability Project, a 2017 ...
2 pages
National Association of Manufacturers Hires Special Counsel to ...https://www.yahoo.com › now › national-association-m...
... counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers, has hired Phil Goldberg, ... adviser and spokesman for the Manufacturers' Accountability Project, ...
Battling for Big Oil: Manufacturing group leads assault on ...https://www.climatedocket.com › 2019/02/26 › national...
Feb 26, 2019 — […] Goldberg, another Shook, Hardy & Bacon partner, is currently special counsel for the Manufacturers' Accountability Project, which was ...
Should big oil pay for climate damage? Some cities and states ...https://www.pbs.org › newshour › nation › should-big-...
6 days ago — And local leaders think oil companies should pay for it. ... the Manufacturers' Accountability Project, an arm of the National Association ...
MFG Accountability (@MFGProject) / Twitterhttps://twitter.com › mfgproject
ShopFloorNAM's Manufacturers' Accountability Project (MAP) will set the record ... Washington, D.C. — Phil Goldberg, Special Counsel for the Manufacturers' ...
Missing: arm | Must include: arm
conagra grocery products company, et al. - Supreme Courthttps://www.supremecourt.gov › DocketPDFPDF
Aug 17, 2018 — Manufacturers' Accountability Project, ... Victor E. Schwartz & Phil Goldberg, The Law of ... The National Association of Manufacturers.
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patrick N. Forrest 3rd degree connection3rd
Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Quest for Justice LLC
Quest for Justice
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Patrick co-founded and serves as the Chief Strategy Office for Quest for Justice LLC (Q4J). Q4J provides technology solutions for self-represented litigants to manage their case and to work with litigation support services providers to get justice in court. Most recently, Patrick helped found and is a Venture Partner in Trust Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in world-changing startups facing significant public policy barriers. Previously, Patrick ran the litigation practice at the National Association of Manufacturers, held positions as a JAG officer with the U.S. Coast Guard, and served as a chief counsel and legislative affairs lead with the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS where he specialized in immigration, refugee and asylum issues. Patrick was an instructor and Senior Fellow at George Washington University, held a Fulbright Research Chair for North America, and was a Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Justice, and Department of Housing and Urban Development.Patrick provides pro bono representation to LGBT asylum seekers. He earned a B.A. from Virginia Military Institute, a J.D. from Syracuse University, and a LL.M. from George Washington University.
Patrick co-founded and serves as the Chief Strategy Office for Quest for Justice LLC (Q4J). Q4J provides technology solutions for self-represented litigants to manage their case and to work with litigation support services providers to get justice in court. Most recently, Patrick helped found and is a Venture Partner in Trust Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in world-changing startups facing significant public policy barriers. Previously, Patrick ran the litigation practice at the National Association of Manufacturers, held positions as a JAG officer with the U.S. Coast Guard, and served as a chief counsel and legislative affairs lead with the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS where he specialized in immigration, refugee and asylum issues. Patrick was an instructor and Senior Fellow at George Washington University, held a Fulbright Research Chair for North America, and was a Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Justice, and Department of Housing and Urban Development. Patrick provides pro bono representation to LGBT asylum seekers. He earned a B.A. from Virginia Military Institute, a J.D. from Syracuse University, and a LL.M. from George Washington University.…see more
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Binh Dang and my op-Ed in Fortune Magazine.
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Thanks Jo. I haven't been working with ALEC.
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ExperienceExperience
Quest for Justice logo
Co-Founder & Chief Strategy OfficerCo-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer
Quest for Justice · Full-timeQuest for Justice · Full-time
Oct 2019 - Present · 2 yrs 7 mosOct 2019 - Present · 2 yrs 7 mos
Quest for Justice provides technology solutions for self-represented litigants to manage their case and to work with litigation support services providers to get justice in court. Quest for Justice provides technology solutions for self-represented litigants to manage their case and to work with litigation support services providers to get justice in court.
U.S. Coast Guard logo
Judge Advocate General (Attorney)Judge Advocate General (Attorney)
U.S. Coast GuardU.S. Coast Guard
Jul 2008 - Present · 13 yrs 10 mosJul 2008 - Present · 13 yrs 10 mos
Washington D.C. Metro AreaWashington D.C. Metro Area
Provide legal defense services.Provide legal defense services.
National Association of Manufacturers - NAM logo
Deputy General Counsel and Vice President Deputy General Counsel and Vice President
National Association of Manufacturers - NAM · Full-time National Association of Manufacturers - NAM · Full-time
Aug 2013 - Sep 2017 · 4 yrs 2 mosAug 2013 - Sep 2017 · 4 yrs 2 mos
The Manufacturers' Center for Legal Action will position the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as the leading voice of manufacturers in the courts. For decades, the NAM has successfully litigated on behalf of the 12 million men and women who make things in the United States. The Center represents the culmination of a proactive legal strategy that advances our policy objectives and safeguards our rights and the rights of our members to advocate for the interests that make manufacturing strong. - See more at: http://www.nam.org/The-Center-For-Legal-Action/#sthash.jMT1YPrB.dpuf The Manufacturers' Center for Legal Action will position the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as the leading voice of manufacturers in the courts. For decades, the NAM has successfully litigated on behalf of the 12 million men and women who make things in the United States. The Center represents the culmination of a proactive legal strategy that advances our policy objectives and safeguards our rights and the rights of our members to advocate for the interests that make manufacturing strong. - See more at: http://www.nam.org/The-Center-For-Legal-Action/#sthash.jMT1YPrB.dpuf…see more
General Counsel & Corporate Secretary General Counsel & Corporate Secretary
Manufacturing Foundation Manufacturing Foundation
Oct 2015 - 2017 · 1 yr 4 mosOct 2015 - 2017 ·1 yr 4 mos
Washington D.C. Metro AreaWashington D.C. Metro Area
The Manufacturing Institute is the authority on the attraction, qualification, and development of world-class manufacturing talent. The Institute studies the critical issues facing manufacturing and then applies that research to develop and identify solutions that are implemented by companies, schools, governments, and organizations across the country. The Manufacturing Institute is the authority on the attraction, qualification, and development of world-class manufacturing talent. The Institute studies the critical issues facing manufacturing and then applies that research to develop and identify solutions that are implemented by companies, schools, governments, and organizations across the country. …see more
Home - The Manufacturing Institute Home - The Manufacturing Institute
The Manufacturing Institute is the authority on the attraction, qualification, and development of world-class manufacturing talent.The Manufacturing Institute is the authority on the attraction, qualification, and development of world-class manufacturing talent.
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George Washington University, Center for Cyber & Homeland SecurityGeorge Washington University, Center for Cyber & Homeland Security
Mar 2015 - 2017 · 1 yr 11 mosMar 2015 - 2017 · 1 yr 11 mos
Washington D.C. Metro AreaWashington D.C. Metro Area
The Center for Cyber and Homeland Security (CCHS) at the George Washington University is a nonpartisan “think and do” tank whose mission is to carry out policy-relevant research and analysis on homeland security, counterterrorism, and cybersecurity issues. By convening domestic and international policymakers and practitioners at all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and academia, CCHS develops innovative strategies to address and confront current and future threats.
CCHS was established in early 2015 and integrates the activities and personnel of the Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) and the GW Cybersecurity Initiative.The Center for Cyber and Homeland Security (CCHS) at the George Washington University is a nonpartisan “think and do” tank whose mission is to carry out policy-relevant research and analysis on homeland security, counterterrorism, and cybersecurity issues. By convening domestic and international policymakers and practitioners at all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and academia, CCHS develops innovative strategies to address and confront current and future threats. CCHS was established in early 2015 and integrates the activities and personnel of the Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) and the GW Cybersecurity Initiative.…see more
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EducationEducation
George Washington University, College of LawGeorge Washington University, College of Law
LLM, Litigation and Dispute ResolutionLLM, Litigation and Dispute Resolution
2003 - 20042003 - 2004
Syracuse University College of Law logo
Syracuse University College of LawSyracuse University College of Law
JDJD
2000 - 20032000 - 2003
Virginia Military Institute logo
Virginia Military InstituteVirginia Military Institute
BA, English Language and Literature/LettersBA, English Language and Literature/Letters
1995 - 19991995 - 1999
VolunteeringVolunteering
Pro Bono CounselPro Bono Counsel
Law Office of Patrick N. ForrestLaw Office of Patrick N. Forrest
Jan 2011 - Present · 11 yrs 4 mosJan 2011 - Present · 11 yrs 4 mos
Human RightsHuman Rights
Pro Bono representation for asylum, refugee, and other immigration related claims.Pro Bono representation for asylum, refugee, and other immigration related claims.
Member Board Of DirectorsMember Board Of Directors
Presidential Management Alumni AssociationPresidential Management Alumni Association
Feb 2021 - Present · 1 yr 3 mosFeb 2021 - Present · 1 yr 3 mos
https://www.presidentialmanagementalumniassociation.org