mfger ctr for leGal action mcla
disambif
see NAM
see MAP
bak
SEE LEGAL ARM SHOP (someone said proactive/premptive vs tobacco corps merely defensive --> fail
see legal suppression
SLAPP suit city defraud BS //CEI
remember they NAM JOINED OCT juliana?
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.
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 from NAM’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.”
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.
5 2017 NEELA B may
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26052017/children-climate-change-lawsuit-fossil-fuel-api/
the country’s most powerful fossil fuel lobbies have asked a federal judge for permission to withdraw from a groundbreaking climate change lawsuit, a stark about-face after the groups voluntarily intervened in the case two years ago and fought assiduously to have it dismissed.
:{
}:
The federal lawsuit, *Juliana et al v. United States*,was brought in August 2015 on behalf of 21 youths, now aged 9 to 21, over the federal government’s alleged failure to rein in fossil fuel development and address climate change. The American Petroleum Institute (API), the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) joined the federal government’s side as intervenors, saying the case was a “direct threat” to their businesses.
It is unusual for intervenors to seek to withdraw from a case. API and AFPM filed withdrawal motions in federal district court in Eugene, Oregon, on Thursday, and NAM filed a similar motion on Monday. It is unclear when federal magistrate judge Thomas Coffin will rule on their requests.
The intervenors and the Justice Department have repeatedly filed motions to have the case dismissed. But federal judges have ruled against them, and the case could go to trial as early as November. In the interim, lawyers for both sides could seek documents from one another and question people under oath through what is known as the discovery process.
Julia Olson, one of the lead counsels for the plaintiffs and executive director of the environmental group Our Children’s Trust, said the industry lobbyists are seeking to withdraw in order to avoid handing over potentially damaging information.
Two separate investigative series in 2015, first by InsideClimate News and then the Columbia University School of Journalism/Los Angeles Times, revealed that the oil industry conducted cutting-edge research on climate change as far back as the 1970s before launching a multibillion-dollar campaign in the 1990s to cast doubt on climate science and delay action to cut fossil fuel emissions.
“After these youths sued the government, the trade associations pleaded their members’ interests would be destroyed if they weren’t allowed to be in the case, but now they are running for the hills,” Olson said in a statement. “Now, they’ve decided they’re better off being on the sidelines than subjecting themselves to discovery.”
The plaintiff lawyers have said they will try to depose key federal officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Tillerson was chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil from 2006 to January 2017 and also served as president of API.
Frank Volpe, an attorney for all three groups, did not answer a request for comment. API also declined to respond.
In their motions, the defendants’ lawyers said withdrawing would streamline the discovery process. “Withdrawal of an intervenor will reduce the number of parties to this proceeding and, accordingly, reduce the amount of discovery, reduce discovery-related motions practice, and avoid the possibility of duplicative discovery efforts and duplicative proceedings,” the defendants wrote in the API and AFPM motions.
The intervenors joined in part because of their concerns that the Justice Department under President Obama might not mount a sufficiently vigorous defense. NAM Senior Vice President and General Counsel Linda Kelly indicated that her group seeks to leave the suit in part because its interests align more closely with the Trump administration.
“As the dynamics have changed over the last several months, we no longer feel that our participation in this case is needed to safeguard industry and our workers,” Kelly said in an emailed statement. “We fully support the efforts of the remaining defendants to push back against the plaintiffs’ ill-conceived legal theory of regulation by court decree, and we are confident they will ultimately prevail.”
The lawsuit is based on a legal concept called the public trust doctrine, which argues that the government holds resources such as land, water or fisheries in trust for its citizens. Climate litigators contend that the government is a trustee of the atmosphere, too. The doctrine’s power flows from the Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and the Vesting, Posterity and Nobility Clauses of the Constitution, the plaintiffs maintain.
In 2015, environmental plaintiffs in the Netherlands,South Africa and Pakistan, as well as Massachusetts and Washington state,won similar human rights or constitutional cases that force authorities to more aggressively cut carbon emissions.
The plaintiffs in Julianaargue that the federal government has known for at least 50 years that combustion of fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and damages the climate. Because it chose to take actions to promote and subsidize fossil fuel use and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions, the government violated their right to protection from environmental degradation under the trust doctrine, the suit alleges.
“The overarching public trust resource is our country’s life-sustaining climate system, which encompasses our atmosphere,” the Julianapleading says. “As sovereign trustees, Defendants have a duty to refrain from ‘substantial impairment’ of these essential natural resources.”
Until their requests to withdraw, the intervenors and the federal government had countered that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue and that the constitutional arguments they used lacked merit.