Photo by SULEIMAN MBATIAH/AFP via Getty Images
If judgments against Big Oil are allowed to stand, they will set precedents for wider assaults on private enterprise and the rule of law.
While the Trump administration has ended for now the federal regulatory war on traditional energy, a litigation war has quietly gathered force. Cities and states are suing American fossil fuel companies for the alleged climate harms those jurisdictions claim to suffer.
The first multibillion-dollar judgment against the industry could unleash a cascade of similar rulings. Leading climate litigator Benjamin Franta estimates that the potential liability runs into the trillions of dollars.
The effect on the American economy would be dire. But equally catastrophic, from a philosophical standpoint, would be the damage to rationality itself. The causal claims behind the climate-change lawsuits insult reason, repudiating the hard-won gains of the Western empirical tradition.
The plaintiffs in the more than three dozen climate suits filed in the United States read like an honor roll of progressive localities: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Maine, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, among others. Their targets include some of the great industrial concerns of the modern age — ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Daily Wire
___________________
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.