Tag Archives: climate

“Nuisance” Laws

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The Supreme Court will hear this fall a case that will determine whether States can sue fossil fuel companies for damages related to global climate change.

The state and local government officials argued that fossil fuel companies are liable under nuisance laws.

As Just the News put it, though,

Typically, state nuisance laws are used in disputes with neighbors where an individual may be conducting activities that lower the value of another individual’s property. Legal experts said state nuisance laws are inappropriate to address damages from climate change.

Michael Williams, West Virginia’s Solicitor General, had this, also:

Questions that touch on global energy markets and interstate commerce and foreign policy, those are decisions that really belong in the hands of Congress or at the very least at the federal level[.]

Phil Goldberg, Manufacturers’ Accountability Project Special Counsel, on the broad variety of separate lawsuits currently in the lower courts:

This is throwing a bunch of legal spaghetti up on the wall and seeing what sticks. All these different kinds of the combinations and permutations undermine the idea that there is any kind of legal theory or finding behind these allegations that they may have.

Indeed. The climate funding industry supporters don’t have any serious case in progress or in the offing.

That brings me to related questions: what about all the plaintiffs and law firms behind these “climate” suits? Shouldn’t they be sued under those same nuisance laws for being themselves nuisances with these foolish lawsuits?

Aren’t they also vulnerable under a variety of SLAPP—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—lawsuits? After all, plaintiffs don’t actually expect to win these cases; they’re just suing to intimidate their targets with high and growing costs of defending themselves or to wear them down and force the defendants to change or outright abandon their positions. Plaintiffs here, with the complicity of lawyers, simply repeatedly sue and sue and sue until their goals are achieved.

No They Don’t

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I’ll be brief.

The lede lays out the question.

Companies say President Trump’s climate overhaul makes it tough to frame their future emissions plans and prepare for what they see as inevitable environmental restrictions—particularly as their goals extend beyond the president’s term.

No, they don’t.

Quit planning their future emissions. Quit distorting business decisions away from simple economics and away from what’s optimal for the business’ owners—the shareholders.

Easy peasy, once business managers get up out of their deep defensive crouches and stop cowering in front of climate funding industry pushers.

The hard work, while remaining straightforward, is to engage those duck and cover energies and their existing lobbying budgets to getting the current Congress to codify in statute those Trump moves. Therein lies business planning stability and lower costs for business’ customers.

A Cynically Irrelevant Argument

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Here’s the lede:

A coalition of climate and health organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday in an effort to combat its repeal of a landmark climate finding.

Because of course they do. The landmark climate “finding” that has been repealed is the finding that plant food in the form of atmospheric CO2 actually is a pollutant. That fiction has expanded costs of living for us American citizens for decades, and its removal is good riddance. Nevertheless, the climate funding industry is waxing hysterical over the nation’s turn toward rationality.

Their suit proceeds, cynically, from an irrelevancy. Peter Zalzal, of the Environmental Defense Fund:

Repealing the endangerment finding endangers all of us. People everywhere will face more pollution, higher costs, and thousands of avoidable deaths.

Even were that true—it isn’t—it’s irrelevant. The question is an economic, and so a political, one. Our courts have no jurisdiction for hearing this argument. Our judges and Justices are bound by our Constitution and their oaths of office to uphold and defend it, and by their oaths they’re further constrained to rule based on the text of any statute that comes before them. They cannot, legitimately, rule based on what they wished our Constitution and statutes said, nor can they, legitimately, rule based on their personal views of what’s good or bad for our society.

This sort of suit should be tossed at the outset, with prejudice, and with sanctions on the lawyers and their employing firms for bringing frivolous suits.

It’s a Legal Question

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It’s most assuredly not a medical question, nor is it a climate question. The EPA is going to announce (if it hasn’t already at the time this post is published) a roll-back of its Gina McCarthy-Barack Obama era “finding” that atmospheric carbon dioxide was a pollutant, a finding that enabled the exploding and increasingly intrusive and costly regulatory environment over a host of CO2 emission items.

The final rule, set to be made public later this week, removes the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal greenhouse-gas emission standards for motor vehicles, and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions and reporting obligations for industries, according to administration officials.
It wouldn’t apply to rules governing emissions from power plants and other stationary sources such as oil-and-gas facilities, the officials said. But repealing the finding could open up the door to rolling back regulations that affect those facilities.

Many of those latter regulations do need to be removed, but not all. Sulphur and mercury in smokestack emissions, for instance, still are things, but these are easily controlled—and have been for years—even with now-aging technologies and will remain regulated. CFC impacts on atmospheric ozone is less settled, but will remain regulated until a more definitive answer—by actual scientists, not government bureaucrats with science degrees or degreed folks employed by the climate funding industry—is reached.

The kicker is in this:

Public health and environmental groups have said federal climate regulations help prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year.

Even were that true, it is, or it would be in a properly objective court, irrelevant to the question of whether the McCarthy/Biden EPA finding can be repealed. Notice that: can be, not should be. This is a purely legal question: can one administration withdraw a regulatory finding and associated regulations that a prior administration enacted? Of course it can, and a current administration can rescind such things unilaterally. Only Congressionally-enacted statutes require subsequent Congressionally-enacted statutes to be rescinded. All it takes is judges and Justices who will honor their oaths of office and hew themselves to what our Constitution and the statutes before them say rather than what they might wish they said.

Of course, many of today’s District and appellate judges are badly trained by such claptrap as the chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, used by the Federal Judicial Center to “train” judges on climate systems, attribution science, and methodologies used to link greenhouse gas emissions to specific impacts by representing these things as settled science. The chapter has since been removed from the manual, but not necessarily the separate “training” associated with it, and certainly not the “training” already done.

As the WSJ correctly noted, here come now the climate-funding industry and its fee-seeking lawyers.

Environmental groups have said they would challenge a rollback in the courts, and it could be years before litigation is resolved.

Because of course they will. There’re tons of money to be made from their manufactured climate hysteria, and that income pig trough needs to be protected. There also are fees to be collected from those lawsuits.

Never mind that atmospheric CO2 is plant food, without which humans and plants aren’t the only species that don’t eat.

“Stable Climate”

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Alex Flint and Kalee Kreider, posing as pro-climate adapters rather than as climate mitigators, want us to move toward adapting to our changing climate rather than attempting to mitigate our climate’s changes. That would seem to be a step in the right direction.

However.

Around the world, people are giving priority to higher living standards, economic security, and access to affordable energy above a stable climate.

This is a false dichotomy, leading to their false premise. In truth, we do have a stable climate—stable over human-level time frames—and we have it in conjunction with the potential for higher living standards, economic security, and access to affordable energy. These are not mutually exclusive.

For one thing, the plain fact is that our climate is stable over generations of humans, and that flows from the equally plain geologic fact that our climate is warming predictably, if noisily over thousands- to multi-million year cycles.

Since the end of the last glaciation, some 11,000 years ago, our climate has varied over narrow temperature ranges from the warming period that roughly coincides with the rise of human civilization and persisted into the period of the Roman empire to the Little Ice Age that ran from the early 14th century into the early 19th century. That variability, too, leaves us today still a couple degrees cooler than the geologic warming rate of our planet.

The other thing is that geologic warming rate. Our climate has been warming since the earth formed and stabilized as a solid body because our sun has been warming since it coalesced gravitationally and lit off its core fusion furnace. That warming is governed cyclically by our planet’s not quite circular orbit around the sun, which moves us closer and farther from the sun—not by much but by measurable temperature effects—on a cycle that harmonizes with our planet’s rotational axis precession, a cycle that points our norther hemisphere toward our sun in some seasons and away from our sun in the six months later seasons, a precession that points our northern hemisphere toward the sun in summer, roughly 6,500 years later has our northern hemisphere pointing away from the sun in summer, then after another 6,500 years points it back toward the sun in summer again for a complete cycle of about 13,000 years. That precessional cycle harmonizes with our orbit’s behavior over some hundreds of thousands of years.

Around that lockstep cycling, our climate varies noisily from the presence of an atmosphere that maintains a more stable temperature across days and months—and centuries—while being intermittently impacted by volcanism and meteor strikes. The outcome of those orbital and rotational mechanics and the interactions of volcanism and meteor strikes has produced the geological record of epochs much warmer and colder than today with life being lush in the warm periods, along with epochs of atmospheric CO2 being much higher and much lower than today, with life being lush in both higher and lower CO2 epochs—life has been lush when it was warmer independently of CO2 concentrations with no correlation between the CO2 epochs and the warmer and cooler epochs.

Mitigation always has been a scam to draw Federal funding for pet research projects.

Even though this op-ed’s excuse for shifting to adaptation comes from that false premise, it’s still a welcome step toward economic prosperity and sanity.