CLW readers may have noticed the media cycle has subtly begun for next week’s House Oversight Committee climate change show-trial, as energy crises unfold worldwide and President Biden prepares to take 13 Cabinet members and no grants of legislative authority from Congress supporting his “climate” agenda to the annual “Conference of the Parties” in Glasgow (where, like President Obama before him, he will claim that while legislative authority would be nice, in its absence he will do what he wants anyway — not, in fact, how these things are supposed to work).
Also like President Obama in his Year 1, it appears to be a near certainty that on the Friday before the COP kicks off, October 29, the Biden EPA will let slip its principal excuse for jamming its climate scheme on the economy despite elected representatives repeatedly rejecting it — it will replace the Trump EPA’s ozone NAAQS, in a sue-and-settle move in State of New York v. EPA. The Wall Street Journal editorial page explains the move here.
With that backdrop, see the opening trial brief and declarations of Lindzen, Happer, Horner and Walter which were filed on Friday in open records litigation in Los Angeles (full administrative record here). The subject of the records at issue is the role of academia (specifically, plaintiffs’ tort bar consultants among UCLA Law faculty) in the climate litigation industry, and what they boast of to at least one major donor behind these efforts. You may recall one such email by UCLA Law faculty describing the AGs, activists, “prospective funders” and faculty gathering at the “secret meeting at Harvard” was “about going after climate denialism—along with a bunch of state and local prosecutors nationwide”.
As context to the Regents’ behavior in this matter, the trial brief and declarations detail the climate industry’s Enron origins, and the role of academics supporting the plaintiffs’ effort (also noted is the spate of briefings of federal judges by the plaintiffs’ side, initiated after Judge Alsup dismissed litigation against oil companies in the Northern District of California, which briefings also trace back to UCLA faculty).