Lobbying Force Behind Climate Litigation, Punitive Taxes Wondering About Exposure
Following up on New York’s $75 billion “Climate Superfund” tax on energy companies purportedly for causing climate change, sharply covered by the Wall Street Journal editorial board and noted by GAO here, we now know a few more things.
First, the Rockefeller Family Fund certainly seems to have been behind New York’s new cash grab, which followed Vermont in adopting this next stab at using climate to obtain a “sustainable funding stream.”
Second, the group is worried there might be consequences for it and its surrogates for what they are doing.
It is now level ground that the Rockefeller Family Fund was behind the New York AG’s Martin Act investigation of ExxonMobil and, e.g., the Minnesota AG’s ‘climate’ lawsuit against numerous energy companies.
Subsequently, with the litigation campaign having failed to date to force companies to sue for peace (as records also showis the objective), in hopes of gaining some level of release from this vexatious multi-jurisdictional assault, state-level FOIA requests suggested RFF involvement in imposing “Climate Superfund” taxes, too. This is supported by other public domain material. (Hey, who’s that in the top right corner?)
In 2024, the California Office of the Attorney General released to Government Accountability & Oversight a memowritten by (and, notably, as) University of Michigan Assistant Professor of Law Rachel Rothschild.
As you can see, California’s AG received the memo from the Center for Biological Diversity, which is also one of the groups fronting the climate litigation campaign.
How CBD received what was purportedly a privileged attorney-client memo produced for RFF remains an open question.
GAO then sought relevant records from, among other public institutions, the UMich Regents. Michigan categorically denied each request claiming that any correspondence that existed was personal, not work-related.
This was despite that Prof. Rothschild authored the memo expressly citing her position as a UMich Law Prof, testified before state legislatures as a UMich Law Prof, the school conducted and posted an interview bragging about this is aspect of her work, etc. This is not an unknown routine by public-university academics, who suddenly determine all non-teaching work is private after the tenure reviews are completed and public records requests come in.
The prof and the school claim that this is all part of what is in fact pro bono work by Professor Rothschild for the Rockefeller Family Fund (see Rothschild affidavit).
In doing so, however, they raise more questions about who the client is than even it purports to answer. Or who the lawyers are. And where the privilege lies and, if it existed, why it wasn’t waived.
Here we go again with the whole university-letterhead-and-faculty-canoodling-with-RFF thing.
CLW also notices something else in the school’s disclosures. It is a handwritten note from the school’s FOIA officer re a conversation w Rothschild about the FOIA requests (per UMich, the redaction is the Prof.’s cell number).
This states that Prof. Rothschild corresponded with RFF about her work developing climate superfund legislation, beginning prior to her July 2022 appointment to the UMich faculty and continuing through the period covered by the FOIA requests at issue here, January 1, 2023 through July 31, 2023. But note also the revelation that this advice about “trying to pass legislation” covered the example cited of “potential legal challenges that businesses could bring against the groups (legal risks, etc)”.
The answer to the question of why would RFF worry about “the groups’” legal exposure from lawmakers targeting “the groups’” political opponents suggests quite a lot about what is actually going on in the policy/lawmaking (and, we know, law enforcement) world.
However, CLW notes that the school has declined to produce any documentation supporting the claim that this work was performed not as or pertaining to her position a faculty member (as the Law School previously bragged was the case) but as part of an off-hours attorney-client relationship; it also has evaded GAO’s request for annual review/performance evaluation/tenure-track-type records which surely would inform a conclusion about the claim that this advocacy is really not part of her position, all other public representations notwithstanding.
The campaign “the groups” are running is a very, very nasty piece of work. There is more than a little confession underlying this handwritten note. In a just world, the groups would have reason to be concerned.
At the bare minimum, the public deserves to know the role of their own institutions in this coordinated campaign.