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.