The Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute offers a primer on environmental litigation as the latest entry in its “Trial Lawyers, Inc.” series. The brief details the green lobby’s success in turning federal courts into miniature EPAs. One particularly quixotic member of that lobby is Connecticut’s attorney general and senatorial aspirant Richard Blumenthal:
In Connecticut v. American Electric Power . . . political operatives are seeking to get courts to regulate companies directly by forcing them ‘to cap and then reduce their carbon dioxide emissions,’ which, the suit alleges, are ‘contributing to global warming.’ The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals . . . allowed this lawsuit . . . to proceed. Leading the charge in this litigation is Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who unabashedly exclaimed, ‘Our legal fight is against power companies that emit a huge share of our nation’s CO2 contamination, but it will set a precedent for all who threaten our planet.’
Set a precedent? It sure will:
Connecticut’s biggest private employer is determined to move more of its operations outside its home state and other ‘high-cost’ locations, a top executive said today at a conference in New York.
‘Anyplace outside of Connecticut is low-cost,’ United Technologies Corp.’s chief financial officer, Gregory Hayes, told Wall Street analysts — paraphrasing previous remarks by another UTC executive, Jeff Pino, the president of Sikorsky Aircraft.
Really, I would welcome AGW advocates trying to "prove" the CO2 claim in court. All the advocates would be subject to discovery and the game would be in the final death stage.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe comment above about having to "prove" the claim that CO2 contributes to global warming sounds a lot like what the tobacco companies did back in the 60s and 70s, when they challenged litigants to "prove" that there was a connection between smoking and lung cancer. It was tough to do and it took time, but no one's carrying water for that kind of defense any longer. Point is, there comes a time when credible observers can look at a pattern in the evidence and draw solid conclusions about the outcome. All great leaps in science have been based on that process. So goes the case with CO2 and global warming.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Point is, there comes a time when credible observers can look at a pattern in the evidence and draw solid conclusions about the outcome. All great leaps in science have been based on that process. So goes the case with CO2 and global warming."
Sorry, but you are assuming as FACT something that has not been offered as evidence. Since climategate, it's been obvious that the many of the "solid conclusions" were false or falsified. The larger point is, it's the responsibility of legislatures, not courts, to act on scientific knowledge. As for the tobacco cases, those courts accepted the "second-hand smoke, even in small amounts, causes cancer" canard, entirely made up by UN bureaucrats. Sorry, but relying on naked hearsay (in the legal sense) is not the way courts should function.
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