Climate shakedown: How rogue lawyers built a backdoor tax on your energy

There is a quiet, coordinated campaign underway to reshape American energy policy. It is being waged not by voters or their elected representatives, but by a small network of activist lawyers, blue-state officials, and anonymous donors. They have figured out that what they cannot win at the ballot box, they might extract from a courtroom. And it is costing you already.The vehicle is climate litigation. Across the country, about 40 nearly identical lawsuits have been filed by states, counties, and cities demanding that oil and gas companies pay billions of dollars for their alleged role in climate change.Eleven states, the District of Columbia, and dozens of local governments have signed on. And behind a striking number of them is the same California firm. Sher Edling is filing copy-and-paste complaints on a contingency-fee basis, meaning the lawyers get paid only if the money flows, and then take a healthy cut. Who bankrolls this? Congressional investigators have documented millions in “dark money” that Sher Edling reportedly received — roughly $3 million routed through the Collective Action Fund and the New Venture Fund. They are pass-through vehicles that are not required to disclose their donors.Activists, funders, and government prosecutors have even convened off the record to coordinate strategy. This is not grassroots justice. It is a professionally financed campaign to make national policy through friendly local courts, one jurisdiction at a time, accountable to no electorate.The word lawfare means using litigation as a weapon to achieve a political end that could not survive an honest, open debate. And the genius of it, from the activists’ point of view, is that the public pays either way.Producing and selling gasoline, diesel, and natural gas is entirely legal; it is what keeps the United States moving, warm, and lit. But every dollar a producer is forced to surrender, and every dollar spent defending against these suits, gets folded into the price the rest of us pay at the pump and on our utility bills. It is a tax on energy that no legislature enacted and no voter approved, collected through the back door of a courthouse.The good news is that the tide may be turning. The Supreme Court agreed this year to hear the Boulder, Colorado, case, which squarely tests whether a single county’s courtroom can set energy policy for the entire country.States are no longer waiting. This spring alone, Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Iowa passed laws barring these speculative climate-damage claims from their courts. Oklahoma’s is fittingly titled the Energy Security and Independence Act.In Congress, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) of Wyoming has introduced the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act, which would end retroactive climate-liability suits and reaffirm that emissions policy belongs to accountable federal lawmakers, not roving trial lawyers. These are policies made in daylight by people whom voters can hire and fire.But here is the part the litigation industry would rather you not dwell on, even on its own terms: this crusade is pointless.Suppose every one of these lawsuits succeeded and U.S. energy grew more expensive. What would it accomplish for the global climate? Almost nothing.China now emits more greenhouse gases than all developed nations on Earth combined, and emissions from India and the rest of the developing world keep climbing. The U.S. could hobble its own producers, raise its own families’ bills, and weaken its own energy independence, and the global emissions curve would barely flicker because the growth is happening on other continents.The real cost of climate lawfare could be billions paid by all of us. It does not cool the planet. It makes American energy scarcer and pricier; it enriches a handful of lawyers and the shadowy funds behind them, and it transfers power from voters to litigators and judges.KAGAN’S CLIMATE CONFLICT IS OBVIOUS — RECUSAL SHOULDN’T BE OPTIONALWorse, it does all this at the exact moment we should be pursuing energy dominance. By outproducing our rivals, keeping costs low for working families, and refusing to hand an adversary such as China a strategic advantage, we volunteered to give it away. Through no choice of ours.The public deserves energy that is affordable, abundant, and reliable, and they deserve to decide their energy future at the ballot box, not through a lawsuit. The courts were never meant to be a policy-laundering service for interests that lost the argument everywhere else. It is time to say so and to shut the racket down.Frank Lasee is a policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that champions free markets, property rights, and innovation as the keys to protecting both people and the environment.