Who is Alexandra Klass?
President Biden has quietly brought in at least the second member of the “climate” litigation industry into his administration in senior legal positions. Both are academics found to have been using their position at a public university to assist the climate lawsuits.
This time it’s a University of Minnesota Law School professor who, in apparent violation of University rules, placed a legal memorandum on Law School stationery as the scholarship of her and several students urging a climate lawsuit by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, despite that it was in fact ghost co-written over the course of months by “lawyers advising the Rockefeller family fund” in New York.
Ellison did file that suit recommended by the new Biden official, then-Minnesota Law Professor Alexandra Klass. However, emails show his Office waited until billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg hired and provided him with two attorneys to handle the case. Emails also show this new Biden attorney was aware of this arrangement and sequence.
Despite that history, Professor Klass was just last week installed, without an announcement by the administration (and without Senate examination or confirmation), as the federal Department of Energy’s Deputy General Counsel for Litigation, Regulation, and Enforcement.
Klass provides yet further evidence that administration claims that it is doing everything it can to bring down the price of gas is simply unsustainable.
Klass’s fellow activist, UCLA Law School’s Ann Carlson, was Biden’s pick to serve as Chief Counsel in the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration to impose aggressive “climate standards for cars and trucks”. Carlson did not serve as a recruiting ‘cutout’ for plaintiffs to our knowledge, like Klass, but she did show up with the tort team and Rockefeller operatives in at least one jurisdiction before they filed suit and also served as a recruiter for the Rockefellers’ climate litigation operation. She also was a member of the plaintiffs’ legal team, and also a reliable media go-to on the climate suits, as well as all things “climate”.
Rob Schilling, Executive Director of Energy Policy Advocates, which obtained the emails detailing Klass’s role in these machinations, said “These personnel choices affirm the administration’s unceasing campaign to fulfill Biden’s campaign pledge to kill our domestic energy industry.”
The details of, and links to emails and draft memos behind the story behind Klass’s successful intervention to persuade Ellison to file suit against U.S. fossil fuel companies for supposedly wreaking climate havoc on Minnesota is laid out in a 2021 paper here.