The Washington Free Beacon reports:
“The Department of Justice quietly weighed in on litigation pending before the Supreme Court this week, siding with liberal cities and states that are seeking to force the nation’s largest oil companies to pay billions of dollars in damages for global warming.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed briefs this week in two related cases: one brought by Honolulu officials in 2020 and another filed by Alabama and 18 other GOP-led states that are asking the court to block litigation against oil companies in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
In the Honolulu case, the solicitor general urged the Supreme Court to reject the fossil fuel defendants’ request for the court to “review and clarify” whether state law is able to impose the costs of global climate change “on a subset of the world’s energy producers.” And in the Alabama case, Prelogar wrote that the Supreme Court should allow Democratic states to pursue their individual lawsuits against the various companies.
The briefs are just the latest instance of the Biden-Harris administration aligning itself with climate activists’ punitive approach towards oil and gas companies.”
This is a step short of what CLW cited as a likely scenario of the Biden-Harris administration siccing Attorney General and DoJ on energy companies that failed to bend a knee to the administration’s enviro-industrial complex allies—given the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020 had promised to do just that.
This move is readily reversible by the incoming administration as, if SCOTUS grants certiorari, Trump’s Solicitor General will file another brief, one which presumably does not throw in with the campaign of vexatious multi-front litigation.