- Biggest recruit yet for climate recoupment suits: NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio sues blaming five oil companies for Superstorm Sandy [Seth Barron/City Journal, John Timmer/ArsTechnica, WSJ; Stephen Bainbridge on parallel divestment effort]
- California cities/counties suing oil companies: climate change will be our ruin. Same cities/counties selling bonds to investors: risk? what risk? [Andrew Scurria/WSJ; John O’Brien/Forbes] Santa Cruz joins several other Bay Area counties in action [Nicholas Ibarra, Santa Cruz Sentinel]
- Can’t spell “Oedipal” without “O-i-l”: Rockefeller heirs bankroll #ExxonKnew crusade against great-granddad’s company [Reeves Wiedeman, New York mag]
- Same article takes disbelieving tone about possibility that state AGs’ campaign might trample anyone’s First Amendment rights [memory refresher] More about that in this Margaret (Peggy) Little and Andrew Grossman 2016 Federalist Society podcast and my Twitter thread about it;
- National Association of Manufacturers launches legal initiative to push back against industrywide and attorney-general tort, nuisance, and public-recoupment suits, notably on climate and lead paint [John Siciliano, Washington Examiner; Linda Kelly, The Hill; NAM’s Manufacturing Accountability Project and its coverage of the art of “climate attribution,” the early failed Kivalina suit (more on which), origins of Global Warming Legal Action Project]
- Pssst, Vice — in profiling Steve Berman you might want to be aware that a few other attorneys claim some minor role in also having “won a $200 billion settlement from tobacco companies in the 90s” [compare claims of lawyers organizing opioid suits]
Filed under: Bill de Blasio, climate change, Exxon, First Amendment, opioids, Steve Berman
2 Comments
Re: climate change suit for specific events. (Sandy storm damage)
Individual weather events happen, or don’t happen for myriad reasons. It’s going to be difficult to assign blame to any particular puff of CO2 for causing a cyclonic rotation of a giant air mass originating in Africa, and crossing the atlantic.
It is the epitome of bias to attempt to find causality for outlying data, while accepting that median data (really nice weather) somehow has no causality. If the number of growing days should increase in an agricultural area, does the energy sector get to demand a percentage?
gasman, you are not nearly cynical enough. All DeBlasio needs is (1) a judge who will let his case pass the motion to dismiss stage (and these exist in spades), and (2) experts who will say “industry” “caused” Super Storm Sandy (and these exist in spades). And even though any rational analysis would say that those “experts” are full of hooey, “full of hooey” becomes nothing more than defense experts’ opinion, which differ from plaintiff’s experts, so we have an issue of fact, which defeats summary judgment and requires a trial.
In other words, the legal system is broken, because the failed “gatekeeper” function of judges for scientifically idiotic theories can’t be corrected until on appeal (and even not then if it’s in the 9th Circuit), and this will be years later.
Come up with a theory, find the right judge, and voila, our legal system is broken.