The American Energy Institute (AEI) has released a new report detailing how the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) at the Environmental Law Institute is “influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”
The Climate Judiciary Project’s stated goal is to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation.” According to its website, CJP has provided this information to more than 2,000 state and federal judges since its establishment in 2018.
AEI notes CJP is also involved in more than two dozen lawsuits suing energy providers over damages from climate change. These lawsuits, AEI charges, “enlist far left jurisdictions to pursue damages in tort that will destroy energy providers or fundamentally change their business practices and product offerings. If the plaintiffs prevail, they will conscript industry into foisting electric appliances, garish lightbulbs, and other progressive amenities into every home. Having passed the Green New Deal in Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act, the far left is trying to further implement it by lawsuit.” Under its cloak of impartiality, CJP is “a partner in this anti-democratic social engineering.”
According to AEI, CJP’s raison d’être is “to preview the climate change-plaintiffs arguments to judges and provide them with a roadmap to ruling in their favor,” doing so at 44 different events since 2018. These events normally take place where they have pending climate litigation.
Further, AEI states CJP is bankrolled by the same left-wing activists groups who provide funding to a Collective Action Fund at the Tides Foundation, which also donates to Sher Edling, LLP a San Francisco-based law firm. Sher Edling also happens to be involved with the Arabella Advisors far left-wing dark-money network, which received $2.5 million in grants through Arabella’s New Venture Fund in 2022, and $8 million from dark money groups overall. Sher Edling is council to plaintiffs in two dozen climate cases brought forward in California, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.
“Despite the obvious conflict created by these dual-funding streams,” the AEI report says, “CJP does not disclose on its website or its materials that it is funded by entities who are also financially backing climate litigation. Given CJP’s billing as a trustworthy entity, it should be transparent about the sources of its funding with the public and the judges they target.”
CJP also notes it has partnered with 21 contributing experts, “among them faculty of leading universities, government and private research institutions, and members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,” that AEI charges are “actively engaged” in climate change cases.
“Activist academics prepared 13 judicial education curriculums appearing on CJP’s website,” AEI notes. “The topics range from an introduction to climate science to controversial, pro-plaintiff ‘source attribution’ studies, an emerging field whose accuracy is vigorously contested by the energy provider defendants. Many of the academic experts who shaped or presented these materials are involved in climate litigation, making them inappropriate sources for judges. Their activities range from amicus filings backing climate plaintiffs to plaintiff-advisory roles. One figure…has played an essential role in securing funding for climate litigation, and worked for a law firm litigating over 20 climate cases.”
These educational curricula used by CJP “endorse plaintiff-aligned positions as facts even though they are currently subject to dispute.” One example AEI highlights is a study used in three of CJP’s curriculum modules that was paid for by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is also currently monetarily supporting climate change lawsuits.
In an effort to curb CJP’s activities, the AEI report suggests interested parties should call attention to the “ethics crisis” CJP has created and encourage state elected officials from barring CJP and the Environmental Law Institute from law schools and other state facilities, as well as contact their federal congressman and implore them to stop any further collaboration between CJP and the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), the education and research agency of the federal courts chaired by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts because “this partnership indicated CJP has privileged access to federal judges and bears the imprimatur of the FJC, prestige it does not deserve in light of its obvious conflicts.”
Nothing in this Research & Commentary is intended to influence the passage of legislation, and it does not necessarily represent the views of The Heartland Institute. For further information on this subject, visit Environment & Climate News, The Heartland Institute’s website, and PolicyBot, Heartland’s free online research database.
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Tim Benson joined The Heartland Institute in September 2015 as a policy analyst in the Government Relations Department.
