Mitigation of climate change advanced another step on July 19 with the second setback in less than a month to legal abuse of complex controversy.
Dist. Judge John F. Keenan, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, dismissed New York City’s attempt to hold five major oil companies liable for alleged damage from global warming.
The earlier legal victory for climate-change mitigation occurred on June 25 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, where state and city governments wanted oil and gas production by the same companies declared a lavishly liable public nuisance. Dist. Judge William Alsup granted the companies’ motion to dismiss (OGJ Online, June 29, 2018, subscription required).
Both lawsuits defied logic, smacked of political opportunism, and embodied the extremism that regularly discredits climate advocacy.
The earlier decision acknowledged the inability of a single district court to solve a large and complex problem and emphasized the unfairness of punishing suppliers of something everyone wants.
Keenan expanded both arguments.
“As an initial matter,” he wrote, “it is not clear that defendants’ fossil-fuel production and the emissions created therefrom have been an ‘unlawful invasion’ in New York City, as the city benefits from and participates in the use of fossil fuels as a source of power and has done so for many decades.”
And pressing the climate-change agenda in court raises balance-of-power questions.
“Climate change is a fact of life, as is not contested by defendants,” Keenan wrote. “But the serious problems caused thereby are not for the judiciary to ameliorate. Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.”
Promoters of extreme climate mitigation resort to constitutionally adventurous litigation because they can’t win popular support for their change-everything-now demands.
On the day Keenan issued his opinion, the House passed, 220-180 with 2 abstentions, a nonbinding resolution calling carbon taxation, a supposed global-warming remedy, “not in the best interest of the United States.”
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted July 20, 2018; author’s email: [email protected])
