OPINION:
The Supreme Court may soon decide whether far-left cities or states can circumvent legislative processes and instead use our courts to impose radical environmental agendas.
Having failed to garner enough political support to minimize or eliminate carbon-based fuels, nearly three dozen progressive jurisdictions have resorted to having friendly state judges circumvent the Constitution on national issues. They want no debate, no public referendums, no legislative process — just one like-minded judge penalizing energy companies for “causing climate change.”
There is nothing ethical or legal about this crony forum-shopping and backroom dealing, and the plaintiffs know it. That’s why, when the Supreme Court recently suggested it may hear these cases, leftists panicked, insisting that state judges litigate the matter.
Progressives know their laughable political ploy will tumble if the Supreme Court reviews the cases. That would be bad for them but good for our system of checks and balances, for common sense and especially for reliable, affordable energy, jobs, health care and modern living standards.
Climate activists blame fossil fuels for heat waves, cold spells, hurricanes, wildfires (including those caused by arsonists, electric companies and forest mismanagement), floods, droughts and abusive husbands. Vice President Kamala Harris even blamed human-caused climate change for the millions of immigrants who have crossed our borders illegally since 2021.
As a former Sierra Club activist, I once believed such claims. I eventually realized, however, that the environmental movement often intentionally uses junk science to advance increasingly extreme agendas, especially campaigns to eliminate fossil fuels.
More than 80% of our energy still comes from oil, natural gas and coal. Wind and solar energy are notoriously unreliable, require expensive backup power and need a dozen times as much in raw materials per unit of electricity than natural gas generators. They cannot provide petrochemical products, including clothing, cosmetics, fertilizer, paint, plastics, pharmaceuticals and wind turbine blades.
“Renewable” energy is not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. Manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles and grid backup involves mining for numerous metals and minerals in energy-intensive and environmentally damaging processes that cause habitat destruction, pollution and increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Much of that mining occurs in countries with corrupt governments and desperately poor families such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar, where child and slave labor are the rule, not the exception. Ships haul the materials to China, the world’s largest polluter, which monopolizes the global battery production market and uses coal and more slave labor and pollution-intensive processes to produce materials and parts for these green energy products.
The EVs then get marketed as zero-emission vehicles because there is no exhaust and most people don’t know this or realize the electricity to charge their batteries comes mostly from coal- or gas-fired power plants.
Wind turbines also depend on oil, gas and coal for the metals and minerals in their towers and generators, fiberglass-and-resin blades and concrete-and-rebar bases. Solar panels, sprawling many square miles of former cropland and wildlife habitat, have the same impacts.
Most components of damaged and worn-out batteries, solar panels and wind turbines cannot be recycled and get dumped in landfills. Many contain hazardous materials that can leach into soils, waterways and groundwater.
Sea-based wind turbines harm or kill wildlife, including endangered whales; land-based turbines kill millions of birds.
Pleadings and briefs in lawsuits brought in carefully chosen liberal state courts can ignore facts like these, often preventing judges and juries from considering them.
They can target a few American oil companies for alleged climate cataclysms while ignoring other oil and coal companies worldwide, as well as China, India and other countries that emit the vast majority of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
These lawsuits essentially and preposterously assert that products sold by these few oil companies are causing unprecedented climate changes. This deliberately ignores multiple ice ages, the Medieval Warm Period (950-1300), the Little Ice Age (1303-1850) and other warm, cold, wet and dry intervals that lasted tens, hundreds or even thousands or millions of years.
Scientists still debate what combinations of powerful natural forces caused these climate changes. And yet lawyers representing the cities and states essentially and absurdly claim fossil-fuel emissions have somehow replaced those natural forces.
Recent Supreme Court decisions reveal why leftists are alarmed about its possible intervention in their scheme. West Virginia v. EPA held that in the absence of clear legislative authority, government agencies cannot unilaterally issue regulations that have “major” economic or political significance.
Loper Bright Enterprises Inc. v. Raimondo ended the 40-year Chevron deference era, ruling that silent or ambiguous statutory texts do not give administrative agencies unfettered power to interpret laws in ways that give them increasing control over people’s lives and livelihoods.
Liberal state court rulings in these climate cases would certainly have monumental consequences, for the oil companies and for our environment, economy and lives, in arenas where Congress has never given any state or federal agency — or court — any such authority.
The Supreme Court should intervene here to ensure that these complex scientific, economic and political issues are fully studied, debated, vetted and voted on — not relegated to biased courtrooms.
• Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
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