Frivolous lawsuits by environmentalists

[curiousgeorge]

Nothing really new here, but interesting nonetheless. The logic of this is absurd, since the end point of their argument would be that "man-made global warming" is by definition "man-made", and therefore everyone on the planet is guilty of being a public nuisance.

Environmentalists, unable to squeeze "cap and trade" rules through the U.S. Senate, have a new strategy for combating what they believe is man-made global warming:

They're going to sue.

They're revving up their briefs and getting ready to shop for judges who will be sympathetic to their novel claim that the companies they believe contribute to global warming are a "public nuisance."

The environmentalists allege that individual companies are responsible for climate change because they have emitted greenhouse gases during the course of their operations. Those gases, they say, have "harmed" them by fostering Hurricane Katrina, eroding the shorelines of America's coasts and causing global warming.

www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/29/global-warming-advocates-threaten-blizzard-lawsuits/

[Pooh]

Solution?

"The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.'
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, part II, act IV, scene ii, lines 83–84. thingy (short for Richard) the butcher is speaking.
Just kidding, of course. We have to selective. ;D

Disbarment another solution? Rare, maybe not. Sue the eco-lawyers for
Barratry (bar·ra·try)
1. The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones.
2. An unlawful breach of duty on the part of a ship's master or crew resulting in injury to the ship's owner.
3. Sale or purchase of positions in church or state.
www.thefreedictionary.com/barratry

[kiwistonewall]

The Early North American colonies dispensed with lawyers. Why, oh why did they ever let them in.

law.jrank.org/pages/11880/Colonial-Period-legal-process.html

!!

[poitsplace]

This could REALLY backfire for the environmentalists. Courts don't work under the precautionary principle. I can't go sue someone because they don't have an automated deicer for their sidewalks...because someone MIGHT slip and fall in the future. A legal victory against the AGW hypothesis would likely just add fuel to the anti-agw fire.

[Pooh]

Mar 30, 2010 8:01:10 GMT poitsplace said:

... Courts don't work under the precautionary principle.

If clever eco-fascist lawyers invoke it, call Obama's regulatory czar as a hostile witness for the defense:
Sunstein, Cass R. “Throwing precaution to the wind: Why the 'safe' choice can be dangerous.” boston.com - The Boston Globe, July 13, 2008. www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/13/throwing_precaution_to_the_wind.

Re AGW: "The nations of the world should take precautions, certainly. But they should not adopt the precautionary principle."

[socold]

it's probably just PR BS like that john coleman and 30,000 scientists are going to sue al gore thingy and we are going to sue michael mann, etc etc

[stranger]

Starting a round of lawsuits could easily be expensive. While the eco-freaks have no basis for a lawsuit, the rest of us do. Starting with the financial damages caused by higher energy costs mandated by the eco-freaks own actions. Then of course, there are the justifiable claims of the survivors of people who have frozen to death because they could not afford to heat their homes. And so on.

Stranger

[curiousgeorge]

Mar 30, 2010 21:48:02 GMT socold said:

it's probably just PR BS like that john coleman and 30,000 scientists are going to sue al gore thingy and we are going to sue michael mann, etc etc

Perhaps you should do a little research before you blow it off as PR BS. The following is from one of the firms associated with this ( www.gardere.com/ ), or you could no doubt find the case in the public records of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. This was as of Mar 1, 2010.

The legal atmosphere surrounding such cases is still uncertain, however this and other cases show that courts and defendants are not going to just roll over for environmentalist demands. This means that environmentalists will have to "prove" their claims, not just scream and shout. This is where the validity, reliability and predictive power of models, and the historical data used to substantiate environmentalists claims will be seriously and thoroughly examined and questioned. In other words, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

www.gardere.com/showPub.asp?id=1116

Climate Change Litigation Hits a Roadblock in Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals

HOUSTON - In a significant turn of events, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit last Friday granted a rehearing en banc in Comer v. Murphy Oil, et al, one of three climate change public nuisance cases pending in the federal appellate courts. The entire Fifth Circuit Court ordered reconsideration of an earlier decision by a three judge panel that reversed the dismissal of Comer, a major climate change lawsuit. The court's written order was posted this afternoon.

The class-action suit claimed that plaintiffs were injured when energy and oil and gas companies created a public nuisance by intensifying Hurricane Katrina with their greenhouse gas emissions. Other defendants, including insurance companies, were also named in the suit, which included thousands of claimants who sustained losses and injuries during the 2005 storm.

The trial court originally dismissed the case because the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue particular defendants for the effects of global warming, and because no judgment rendered in the case could determine whether any particular defendant's emissions caused any particular plaintiff's alleged injuries. The trial court also dismissed the claims because the controversy presented a political question involving international issues that were entrusted to Congress and the president, not to the courts.

The original three-judge panel reversed the dismissal following a recent Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision, which held that climate change cases were "ordinary tort cases" despite the international and planetary dimensions. In another ruling, the panel found that plaintiffs need not show that the defendant's pollutants caused the harm, and for purposes of standing it is sufficient to show only that they discharged a pollutant that can contribute to the kinds of injuries being alleged.

A motion to rehear the Second Circuit decision is also pending, but has not yet been decided. A federal court in San Francisco dismissed another climate change nuisance suit last year, and the appeal of that action is pending in the Ninth Circuit.

Texas climate change lawyer Richard O. Faulk, who chairs the Litigation Department and Environmental Practice of Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP, says that the Fifth Circuit's decision to allow the court's complete complement of judges to reconsider the case is a "significant blow to the progress of climate change and public nuisance litigation."

Although Mr. Faulk acknowledges that the case's "ultimate resolution cannot be predicted with certainty," he stressed that "the original panel's original decision now has no value. Clearly, a significant number of the court's judges believe the case deserves a closer look, and plaintiffs' counsel cannot be comforted by that development. Indeed, since no judge on the original panel dissented from the decision, the decision to reconsider suggests that the rest of the court may be seriously interested in changing the result."

Mr. Faulk, who attended and reported on the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and who has argued before the en banc Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, believes that the Fifth Circuit's ruling is consistent with growing climate change skepticism. "In the wake of "climategate" and the debacle of the Copenhagen conference, the Fifth Circuit's decision is yet another example of how climate change issues are receiving greater scrutiny. Time will tell whether this is just a minor speed bump or a major security barrier, but the momentum of skepticism is clearly increasing."

Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP, an AmLaw 200 firm founded in 1909 and one of the Southwest's largest full-service law firms, has offices in Austin, Dallas, Houston and Mexico City. Gardere provides legal services to private and public companies and individuals in areas of government affairs, energy, litigation, corporate, tax, environmental, labor and employment, intellectual property and financial services.

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