Climate litigation is having a difficult month.
As plaintiffs suing energy companies for global warming gear up for their upcoming Supreme Court hearing, the plans to extract billions under local tort laws suffered significant setbacks in recent weeks.
Last week, the modeling scenarios used to predict the most dire consequences from global warming were deemed “implausible” by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which climate activists typically cite as the key source for global warming projections.
And on May 12, the government of New Zealand outlawed climate lawsuits in that country, echoing energy companies’ defense that regulating global greenhouse gas emissions belonged under the purview of national regulators and lawmakers rather than local courts.
“Even in a place that is far to the left of the United States on most policy issues, they can see the common sense that you don’t want your government policy and your national economy regulated by lawsuits,” O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told the Daily Signal.
Calling the lawsuits “a backdoor way to set policy through the courts instead of through elected lawmakers,” Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, said that the “legal and evidentiary landscape has shifted substantially” against climate litigators.
