The Climate Litigation War

Photo credit: Pablo Porciuncula/AFP/Getty Images

Cities and states are increasingly suing fossil-fuel companies for alleged climate harms.

Some of the claims? That Montana’s failure to require climate assessments led to more CO₂ there, and thus global warming in the state (never mind that global warming is, in fact, global, not a local phenomenon). That fossil-fuel producers are to blame for erosion and flooding in Honolulu. That a roster of some two dozen energy companies and organizations caused not just global warming generally but also the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave. And so on.

One climate litigator predicts that potential liability could run into the trillions of dollars.

“The effect on the American economy would be dire,” Heather Mac Donald writes. “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.”

Read more about the lawsuits.

In a new investigation, Christopher F. Rufo and Susan Crabtree reveal that California Governor Gavin Newsom has granted about $1 billion to nonprofits that have encouraged migrants to flood the country.

These groups are radical. Operating under the guise of “humanitarianism,” they reject the need for borders, want to help “queer and trans immigrants navigate immigration relief and benefits,” view the U.S. as an oppressor, and claim that ICE causes “terror” and advocate for its abolition.

“Who benefits from this system? Certainly, the migrants who entered the United States without documentation and would like to stay,” Rufo and Crabtree write. “But also, and perhaps more importantly, the army of nonprofits, lawyers, activists, and bureaucrats who keep the system running—and keep politicians like Newsom in power.”

Read more.

MCI–Framingham in Massachusetts houses incarcerated women. But the facility currently houses at least 11 trans-identified men.

Some of these men are serial rapists, wife-murderers, and child molesters, and inmates have reported sexual assault and harassment. Female correctional officers, too, have reported sexual assault, yet they’re still required to strip-search these men when they request female staff.

The Justice Department should investigate, Forest Romm and Elspeth Cypher write. “While state officials focus on other priorities—declaring Massachusetts a sanctuary for ‘gender-affirming care,’ funding legal defense programs for illegal immigrants, and defending ‘the trans community’ against the ‘fascist’ Trump administration—women at MCI–Framingham are being subjected to sexual abuse by men who have exploited a loophole opened by reckless progressive reforms.”

Read more about what some of these women have endured.

Mississippi used to be last in the country in fourth-grade reading. Today, the state is scoring above the national average.

The state can credit several policies for this turnaround. First, schools screen students for reading difficulties three times a year, starting when they’re in kindergarten. Every time a child screens below the benchmark, the school sends a letter to the child’s parents outlining a plan. Any student who can’t demonstrate reading proficiency by the end of the third grade is held back. Every school is graded, too, based on student performance. Schools earn points when students perform at or above grade level. Districts that get an F for two consecutive years face state takeover.

New York could learn a thing or two, Jennifer Weber argues. Indeed, she notes, “a state that has spent more per pupil than any other for 19 consecutive years should be able to hold someone accountable for whether its children learn to read.”

Read more.

“This case is truly absurd. If sanity were prevailing, someone at the head of one of these bureaucracies could waive the rules for this man. But I’d rather have bureaucrats err on the side of obsessive rule-following and equal treatment than give them the freedom to make exceptions when they feel like it.