Under the guise of judicial “education,” the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), a group founded by the left-wing Environmental Law Institute, has been quietly working to steer the courts toward the climate lobby’s agenda, arming judges with alarmist narratives that now fuel a wave of lawsuits intended to financially cripple the energy industry. Climate Litigation Watch has reported over the past several years on how “the plaintiffs’ climate tort movement” briefed federal judges from the perspective of plaintiffs and drew speakers “exclusively from the world of plaintiffs’ witnesses or historic amicus brief filers in support of the climate litigation complex.”
And while the CJP’s defenders reflexively point to the energy representatives that sit on ELI’s board as exonerating proof of its claimed neutrality, the program’s actions behind-the-scenes speak louder than the window dressing on its letterhead.
Enabled by its partnership with the Federal Judicial Center and state judicial authorities, the CJP’s climate propaganda has reached over 2,000 federal and state judges. Mark Recktenweld, chief justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court, presented at a course in collaboration with the CJP just months before issuing his court’s decision in favor of Honolulu–the plaintiff–in its notorious lawsuit seeking to manipulate energy policy for the entire nation.
Last year, Senator Ted Cruz blasted what was happening at the hands of “climate activists, who by all appearances are facilitating plaintiffs’ suits through ex parte communications with judges.” One of the most vocal members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and chairman of the subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights, Cruz held a hearing in June focusing on “China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance.” Cruz highlighted the “three-pronged assault” against American energy by foreign funding, mass litigation, and judicial capture. Climate lawfare groups that seek to “cripple the fossil fuel industry through legal attrition” are bankrolled by dark money groups like the New Venture Fund and the Tides Foundation and by the Chinese Communist Party. Energy Foundation China, an organization tied to the party and led by a former senior official in the Chinese government, funds environmental groups to push litigation and policies aimed at weakening energy production in the United States while advancing China’s interests. “Communist China emits more carbon than the United States and Europe combined,” Cruz explained, but of course, “this is not about climate. It is about global energy dominance and control.” The CJP’s propaganda is funded by “the same dark money donors who bankroll the lawsuits themselves.”
Cruz did not mince words in calling out the Left’s judicial capture scheme: “This is not how a constitutional republic functions. Courts are not supposed to be laboratories for political activism, and judges are not supposed to be trained by the plaintiffs’ bar that is receiving their funding from the Chinese Communist Party. What we are witnessing is judicial capture, driven by ideology, powered by money, and tolerated by far too many.” Fox News reported on a number of revealing communications in its investigation of the cozy relationship between judges and climate activists. Among them was a climate presentation video shared with a CJP-launched listserv by Travis Laster, the vice chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, in a message that included the disclaimer: “Because the link is of a judicial event that is otherwise not public, please do not forward or use without checking with me. I suspect that goes without saying, but the powers that be will be happier that I said it.” It begs the question: Who are “the powers that be”?
So where is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to sound the alarm on this judicial capture scheme? He claims to care about that, and he is, after all, the ranking member on the subcommittee that Cruz chairs. Recall that Whitehouse is the Senate’s premier conspiracy theorist. His work extended from issuing his paranoid “Captured Courts” report during the first Trump administration to using his position in the majority two years ago to push reckless legislation that would have opened the floodgates of scurrilous ethics complaints in an effort to subtract justices in a variation on court packing. As The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “under the left’s ethics standard, every judge who attends a Climate Judiciary Project event should have to step aside from climate-related cases. Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and his Senate sidecar Dick Durbin are trying to use ethics as a political weapon against conservative Justices, but watch out: It’s a double-edged sword.” Of course, for these and so many other Democrats, the objective was never truly about ethics. It was and is instead about power. They are fine with judicial capture as long as it is in the service of their side. So don’t expect them to protest when a group like CJP tries to tip the scales of justice in favor of desired leftist outcomes.