The Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), a little noticed environmental group, holds seminars and other educational programs for judges across the nation that, according to the group’s website, provide “reliable, up-to-date information" about climate change litigation.
Scott Walter, President of conservative Washington D.C.-based watchdog group Capital Research Center (CRC), said the project is really about influencing judges to rule against the fossil fuel industry at a time when tort cases against traditional energy are increasing.
“The Climate Judiciary Project hopes to indoctrinate judges in the gospel of environmentalism, which explains why it’s the creation of a handful of politically powerful billionaires who share the same last name, Foundation. As in Hewlett, Pew, and the like,” Walter said in an email to Legal Newsline.
According to CRC’s Influencer Watch site, CJP collaborates with national judicial education institutions in an effort to increase federal, state, and local judges’ familiarity with “left-of-center interpretations of climate science methods, concepts, and regulations.”
CJP is a child of the left-wing Environmental Law Institute, an environmental legal advocacy organization established in 1969.
CRC reports that as of May 2023, more than 1,000 judges have participated in the group’s programming, which includes 13 curriculum modules and 21 contributors.
The group links climate change to fossil fuel production and use.
"The only factor that can clearly explain the rising temperatures of the two centuries is the increasing level of atmospheric greenhouse gases, modulated by land cover change and increases in atmospheric aerosols (pollutants) from human activities," one of CJP modules states.
Suing energy companies is a lucrative and growing business.
The total number of climate change court cases has more than doubled since 2017 and is growing worldwide, according to a recent report by the UN Environment Programme.
Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow specializing in energy and the environment with the American Enterprise Institute, told Legal Newsline in an email that he “heard of this effort to indoctrinate judges in the last week or so. Purely a propaganda exercise, as best as I can tell.”
“Also, their ‘experts’ seem for the most part to be lawyers, with a couple of people with arguable science credentials," he said.
Zycher said the proper forum for debate over climate policy is Congress, not the courts.
“Climate policy pursued through litigation fundamentally is anti-democratic, substituting the preferences of judges for the actions of elected officials accountable to the citizenry,” he wrote in a 2021 commentary published in The Hill. “More broadly, litigation aimed at specific industries is a direct threat to the central purpose of the U.S. Constitution, to wit, the protection of specific groups against discrimination driven by the whims, passions and distorted accusations of other interest groups and transitory political coalitions.”
Zycher added that “apart from the ideological opposition to fossil fuels, climate litigation is a money chase aimed at deep pockets, thus hiding the enormous costs of increasingly expensive energy to be inflicted upon large numbers of consumers, workers and investors.”
Just this past Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to legal action brought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison targeting companies in the oil production industry. The Supreme Court decision means that the lawsuit remains on the state level. Energy companies prefer to argue these cases in federal courts.