Things aren’t going well at all for the global warming crusaders. Despite hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on green energy over the past decade, the world and America used more fossil fuels than ever before in history last year.
The electric vehicle movement is stalled out, solar and wind power are both still fringe forms of energy, and the green candidates got crushed in recent elections in Europe because voters are sick of the higher prices associated with green policies.
So having struck out with consumers, businesses and at the ballot box, now the greens are moving on to the courts. The climate change industrial complex has now joined forces with trial lawyers to advance their war on fossil fuels.
One of the more absurd lawsuits happened in Hawaii.
There, a group of 13 teenagers — honest, I’m not making this up — sued Hawaii’s government over its use of fossil fuels. Environmental law firms Our Children’s Trust and Earthjustice claim that Hawaii’s natural resources are imperiled by CO2 emissions. Even if that were true, shouldn’t they be suing China?
The settlement will require the state to eliminate fossil fuels from its transportation system by 2045, and also formally recognizes the right to file future lawsuits against other parties.
Gov. Josh Green even stood next to the young plaintiffs as he read a statement claiming, “This settlement informs how we as a state can best move forward to achieve life-sustaining goals.”
There’s so much that’s wrong about this decision. How did a bunch of teenagers possibly have standing to sue? What possible harm have they suffered from fossil fuels?
The irony is that this island paradise in the Pacific — whose primary industry is tourism — is going to collapse without fossil fuels. With no jets and cruise ships allowed, will tourists and business travelers have to arrive by sailboat?
But this new technique of using lawsuits to advance the anti-fossil fuels movement has spread to other states. Last August, a judge ruled that GOP-dominated Montana violated its constitution when it approved fossil fuel projects without taking climate change into account.
After recent flooding in Vermont, green activists sued the state for not abolishing fossil fuels.
Massachusetts is suing Exxon Mobil for adverse weather conditions.
There are now 32 cases filed by state attorneys general, cities, counties and tribal nations against companies including Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell. The lawsuits claim that the industry tried to undermine scientific consensus about the crisis.
Here’s what’s so frightening about these sham lawsuits from trial lawyers who hope to turn oil companies into cash cows similar to the tobacco lawsuits 20 years ago: The end game of lawsuits against states and oil and gas companies for using or producing energy because of alleged damage to the environment could bring about abolition of fossil fuels through the back door of the nation’s courthouses.
But what none of these judges or litigators take into account is the catastrophic economic effects of NOT using fossil fuels. As an example, the Left wants to abolish air conditioning, which requires electricity, which mostly comes from fossil fuels. But air conditioning saves tens of thousands of lives a year. What about the millions of jobs that would be wiped out with no fossil fuels? How many thousands of Americans would die in hospitals, or assisted living centers, or day care centers, or schools if the lights go out with no fossil fuel power plants?
Fossil fuels have saved millions more lives over the last century than they take. They make Americans much richer and safer and happier and healthier and more mobile. Meanwhile, there is no evidence backing up the absurd claim by teenagers that if Hawaii stopped using fossil fuels, the state’s weather conditions would improve.
Will judges take that into consideration when they try to rob Exxon and coal companies of their profits for the sin of making life on earth much better?
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior economic advisor to Donald Trump. His latest book is: “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
I have a degree in Environmental Studies from UCSB, the liberal party school that pretty much founded Earth Day back in the 1970s. I went back to finish college when I was in my late 20s and knew more of what I wanted in life. I powered through my classes surrounded by hundreds of eager, ready to be brain-washed idealists. I know for a fact that I managed to change a few lives while there, by questioning what the professors were spouting off and presenting the “other side.” I was previously a geology major and I read, plenty. Gore was wrong and he’s now a multi-millionaire. What used to be called Global Warming is now called Climate Change..because it isn’t getting warmer. Greenland ice sheets are growing, the ocean isn’t rising. This is now the largest political scam in the history of the world. When the original hockey stick guy left out the entire decade of the colder 1970’s, the scientific community failed to be up in arms. Now, decades later, his incorrect suppositions are treated as fact. The silent majority needs to SPEAK UP! Even the co-founder of Greenpeace isn’t buying it!! WE NEED TO SPEAK UP AND CHANGE the trajectory, hopefully it isn’t too late.
The Elite of the world continue to bring absurd situations to the courts with the main goal of making money at the expense of their respective companies. Eventually, every resource will be controlled by the Elite and One World Order. The rest will suffer the consequences.
There is no such thing as “fossil” fuels. They are made by the earth, constantly, even if the left is too stupid to understand it. There could not have been enough “animals” to make all the OIL we have used since the late 1800’s. God gave us this planet and provided us with oil, among other things. The left wing nuts are mentally ill. They are malignant narcissists because they actually believe they can change the earth. It is all about them. Call them on and they scream bloody murder because you are questioning their very existence. They are mentally ill useless food users.
When God created the earth he put oil, coal and natural gas in it, because he knew we would figure out a way to use it, and it would improve our lives, which it has. Why would God give us these fuels to use, if us using them would destroy the earth, and kill us all?
This is Marxism! Let thousands if not millions die so the elitists can rape the country of resources for themselves! How many of these elitists live in homes without a/c? How many have no heat in winter? Do they cook on wood stoves or is using firewood contributing to climate change? Yeah, rules for you but not for me!
This is so typical of the Left. Knowing they do not have majority popular or voter support (which the Left has not had since the 1960s), they know they can’t win at the ballot box. Without a majority in the federal and state legislatures, they can’t get the laws they want passed and implemented the legal way. So they shop around for corrupt and politically-biased judges to legislate from the bench.
These lawsuits are absurd on their face. Our judicial system is only empowered to determine if a law was broken, if a law is constitutional, if a contract was violated and if there was any damages caused by the violation, to determine a penalty. Our judicial system in NOT empowered to make laws, issue mandates to be followed, and determine which companies should be shut down because some snowflake idiot doesn’t like them. The courts should throw these suits out and require the plaintiffs to pay all costs. .
While the Federal Government is playing lip service to the liberal greenies, their action is the exact opposite. TVA will only allow 10% excess electrical energy from private Sources such as a backyard solar panel array. Unannounced by the White House, 3500 new leases for oil and gas were approved by Biden’s administration. Just in time to lower gas and diesel prices before the election. Don’t expect to see prices for consumer goods such as food to drop. I priced an electric truck which was $35,000 more than a gas truck and the salesmen could not tell me how long the batteries will last nor what a battery would cost to replace it. There were none in stock so there was no price.
I hope all these people will be able to do without the gasoline/oil that is used to make water bottles, plastics, tires, medical equipment, food eaten, and the list goes on and on. Sounds like no one is using their brain anymore to figure things out. Goes to show what is not being taught in our schools, public or private. They need to take their hands and fingers off their phones, listen and learn from their elders who have been around for many years, get a job to support themselves instead of living off somebody else.
It just gets crazier and crazier. Folks, God controls the weather. See Amos 4:7 and Deuteronomy 28:17.
Lately we’ve had two rulings that went against the people in favor of the darkness, so who knows, one of which went against our own First Amendment.
Screw the Green New B.S.!
Judges are(once were) expected to be cool headed, rational, and not the opposite.
Oil and natural gas are strategic commodities. To ban these two most important sources of energy is a crime against humanity and God. Climate change is myth. The earth is at the end of an Ice Age, terminating only about 100,000 years ago. Earth is still warming up. Earth time is measured in epochs or eons, not man-years. Man has been around as an industrialist for only about 260 years. The earth is 4.8 billion years old. It has been to 10 or 12 epochs. Man’s time on earth, where industrialism has made a monumental change away from a nomadic-survivalist life to one of freedom of fear from lots of life threatening problems. This fraction of earth time is so small, that a calculator must illustrate the number in scientific notation: 5.416666666666667e-8.
Advising to a major northeast power plant, I read four studies written by ISO New England, and each study over the years concluded that wind and solar can never replace the grid. Only coal, oil, natural gas, and solar can keep the grid steady and not intermittent. I would add: hydro power. Quebec Hydro generates a sustainable, nearly infinite electric power supply from its dams in Northern Quebec on the south end of Hudson’s Bay. They have offered hydro-generated power to New England for more than 20 years. Simple: just hook into the existing grid. Nope, instead, the climate change maniacs and politicians opt for building wind farms off the south coast of New England and are now trying to bring it to Maine. Billions have been invested on an intermittent power source and in the process, they are destroying sea life. The pile driving of the stands which mount the wind turbines is devastating to the sonar equipped sea mammals. Having been trained as a Navy ASW pilot, I am quite familiar with the properties of sound transmission in sea water. Nothing these companies do can mitigate these sound waves. Listen to their recordings online.
The worst part: a client dealing with the Norwegian partners of a company installing turbines off Martha’s Vineyard announced to him in December that they had taken the Chinese on as partners. He threw them out of his office.
Oil and gas are and will remain strategic commodities. So will nuclear and hydro power. Believing otherwise is condemning the human race to failure.
They are going to have to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that climate change and global is a fact. They’re going to have to lie under oath and perjure themselves. My biggest our judicial system is so corrupt the climate change zealous may very well prevail in spite of any evidence proving they are correct.. they have been beating this dead horse for 50 years. None of their predictions have come true. They’re making a very select few people billions of dollars. It is not science it is a religion
The only error in this article is calling carbon based fuels, “fossil fuels”. This term was coined by Rockefeller to make oil seem rare and non-renewable. Neither is true. Oil is not from fossils and the earth is constantly making more. I very much appreciate the other comments I’ve read.
Who needs Congress? I’m sure the Attorney General will not just make guns “health risks” but fossil fuels as well so we can count on unelected bureaucrats “looking out for us” whether we like it or not and make both as unaffordable as smoking. Thanks Big Government!
Any judge that pushes this agenda at a minimum be disbarred for life and lose any government pension and at a maximum should be executed.
Climate change, many varieties of sexual beings, we live in an upside down world China goes about it’s business and is not worrying about any of that only how to screw us even more and laughing all the way to the bank at our expense We live in the country where a small loaf of bread costs 5 dollars so we can send the “humanitarian” aid to every hell hole on this earth where it ends up on the black market We are being encouraged to not have children because of over population then we turn around and send food to where they are multiplying out of control because we must save children Could this be crazier?
Regarding the “green movement” there is an old saying… “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”
These youngsters don’t seem to know that they are pawns in someone else’s fraudulent venture to further diminish U.S. resources for someone else’s personal gain – NOT OURS. What these kids SHOULD know is that the effectiveness of our power grid is not worth throwing away for the sake of non-viable energy sources that will not help to feed, educate, cure, or defend our nation.
Brainwashed useful-idiot children being exploited by the globolist communist/fascist totalitarian hedonists.
No, we as taxpayers, citizens have the right to decide this ourselves. Like electric, or gas stoves, vehicle and how they run.There is no proof to completely win me over just because someone says it’s so or you don’t have the right to decide.
To the “climate change” alarmists out there: I collectively contrast my pre-liberal-indoctrination schooling, professional engineering career, and life experiences with any assertions made under “settled science”, or by touted “experts”, or through declared “consensus”, or by a dubious “study”, or by a biased “poll”. As a result, I do not believe any declarations of “climate change”, or that mankind’s mere existence is causing “climate peril”. Oh, the horror! Over the past 60 years, I have either heard about (ad nauseam), or experienced, and (miraculously!) survived: Pre-EPA herbicide and pesticide exposure; sunlight, without sunscreen; “The Population Bomb”; acid rain; air and water pollution levels far greater than today (predating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts); exhaust emissions from leaded gasoline and non-biodiesel fuel; exposure to lead-pigmented paint; ozone depletion; sunspot activity; fluctuating ocean and Great Lakes levels; the Scarcity Mindset: “We’re running out of ______” (fill in the blank); numerous El Niño’s and La Nina’s; seasonal (named!) storms, each breathlessly proclaimed by Weather Channel wannabes as more apocalyptic than their predecessors; tornadoes; hurricanes; earthquakes; floods (including those wrought by “bomb cyclones”, “atmospheric rivers”, “zombie storms”, the “Pineapple Express”, and the latest, “derechos”); droughts and “flash droughts”; heat waves (including “global warming”); cold snaps (including “The Little Ice Age”, “global cooling”, and “polar vortexes”); changes in polar and glacial ice levels; species extinctions and amazing rediscoveries (including “the plight of the polar bears”); and the latest, NATURAL gas usage (furnaces, stoves, water heaters, clothes dryers, power plants)! Get the picture? I’m still here, so is “the planet”; and it shall remain, long after we are all dead and forgotten!
Stop trying to saddle us with technology that isn’t ready. To those that want EV cars..knock yourself out..this is America. It will gladly buy a hybrid car useing both gas and battery (if i had to).
The judges realize they use fossil fuels every day. They must make a biased ruling to not hurt themselves.
Why do otherwise intelligent writers continue calling oil and natural gas “fossil fuels?” That myth was debunked years ago! Oil and natural gas are not from dead dinosaurs bones! Get a grip people and quit prolonging this myth! And drill baby drill!
Progressive judges will and practical common sense thinking judges will not.
It would be fascinating to see what the Hawaiian Islands would look like in a decade without fossil fuels! The ‘howlies’ would be gone, the South Pacific Islanders/native Hawaiians would have their culture back, there would be zero cars, construction would halt, there would be zero food and/or markets, there would be zero communication, zero power, zero schools, zero clothing (unless one made it for themselves), zero tourism, etc.
How to go backwards almost 150 years in time!
Hope the Supreme Court stops this ridiculous stuff, but don’t bet on it… We’ll be back to horse and buggies…
I worked as a pipefitter on the Alaska oil pipeline and the USA is cleaner than any other country
If the dummies in this country ban fossil fuels they better get a hold of every foreign country and tell them to do the same they will be laughed at by other countries who will never ban fossil fuels some countries have so much pollution it is probably 10 times more then what we have. What is the problem in this country is those in power want to control what we use.just like banning cars what a joke then call all the others countries and tell them to ban all gas powered cars we all know how far that will go we all share the same earth so it is not just us it is the world.
The biggest health risks to America and the rest of the world is the promotion of the Leftist Agenda!
Everyone that believes the “Global Warming” “Climate Change” GARBAGE is an atheist. If they believed in GOD and his word. Better yet if they read it they would know that GOD will decide when the EARTH will be destroyed, NOT lowly man. We are well on our way through Revelations. I agree whole heartedly with the comment by Leslie.