Lawsuits Over Who Is To Blame For Global Warming

Here come the lawsuits over who to blame for global warming and climate change. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Peter

from: http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA550CaliforniaGlobalWarming_90107.html


# 550

January 2007
Science Puts the Chill to California's Global Warming Hot Air
by Bonner Cohen, Ph.D.

Determined to put the kibosh to those responsible for the scourge of global warming, California's ever-vigilant Attorney General Bill Lockyer has sued six U.S. and Japanese automakers, including GM, Ford and Toyota, for "damages" related to greenhouse-gas emissions.
Claiming that emissions from vehicles manufactured by these companies are harming Californians' health, damaging the environment, and costing the Golden State millions of dollars to curb their effects, Lockyer says his federal lawsuit is "part of a strategy to address global warming."
"The goal of this one," Lockyer declared September 20, 2006, "is to hold these automobile manufacturers accountable for the monies taxpayers are spending to address these harms."1
Actually, it's Mr. Lockyer who should be held accountable for the taxpayers' funds he's squandering on a frivolous lawsuit. But there's more. Not to be outdone, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature mandating a reduction in the state's greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. "We simply must do everything we can to slow down global warming before it's too late," the "governator" declared.2
Lockyer's lawsuit and Schwarzenegger & Co.'s initiative are both predicated on the assumption that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), are contributing significantly to a dangerous warming of the planet. As it turns out, this widespread view, enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol and repeated ceaselessly by the media, is being challenged by that pesky nemesis of political fashion known as science.
Exhaustive research of climatological data going back millions of years carried out by Lee Gerhard, senior scientist with the Kansas Geological Society, reveals an entirely different picture of the forces driving the myriad changes through which the earth's climate has passed. Gerhard dismisses the notion that human emissions of carbon dioxide are a significant driver of climate and refutes the idea that climate change rates and today's slight global warming are unprecedented. "They are not," he flatly states. Instead, Gerhard makes two key points:
* Climate naturally changes constantly, from warmer to cooler and from cooler to warmer, and at many levels of intensity over time at many scales.
* Variation in solar activity closely correlates with global temperature variations, suggesting that the amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the earth is a primary climate driver at the time scale of decades to millennia.3
"Overall," Gerhard says, "the earth's climate has been cooling for 60 million years, but that is only an average -- temperature goes up and down constantly."4 Addressing a September 20 Capitol Hill briefing sponsored by the Center for Science and Public Policy, Gerhard, in a power point presentation, showed the highly variable nature of the earth's climate over the past 16,000 years and, in more detail, during the last 2,000 years. "Depending on the period in earth's history that is chosen," he said, "the climate will either be warming or cooling. Choosing whether earth is warming or cooling is simply a matter of picking end points."5
Gerhard, whose research took place under the auspices of the Kansas Geological Survey and was not funded by industry, points out that the geological record shows that rises in greenhouse gases do not precede rises in temperature. Indeed, CO2 levels actually rose prior to the advent of the Little Ice Age (circa 1400).6 Moreover, CO2, the greenhouse gas most prominently cited as contributing to global warming, represents only about 1/4 of 1 percent of the total greenhouse gas effect, "hardly a device to drive the massive energy system of earth's climate," he says.7
Gerhard's conclusions are supported by findings released Sept. 29 by CO2 researechers Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso. "[E]arth's mean near-surface air temperature is nowhere near the peak level of what it was a million or so years ago," they write. "Neither is it as high as it was during the mid-Holocene [circe 5,000 years ago], which was itself much cooler than all four of the interglacials that preceded it. In fact, it's not even as warm now as it was a mere 900 years ago, when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was fully 100 ppm (parts per million) less than it is today..."8 (emphasis in the original) "Climate is always changing," notes Philip Slott, professor of biogeography at the University of London. "Climate is governed by millions of factors, from the lightest waft of a monarch butterfly's wing, through erupting volcanoes, shifting land surfaces, ocean currents, ocean salinity and atmospheric gases, to shifts in the geometry of the earth, solar cycles, meteors, and meteorites." "The idea of global warming," he continues, "is dangerous precisely because it gives the false impression that we might be able to halt climate change by fiddling with just one or two of the millions of factors involved.9
In Gerhard's view, today's climate debate has been dominated by those embracing the notion of "anthroprocentrism," a mindset that identifies human beings as the source of all things "bad."10 But the earth's climate, and the larger geophysical forces of which it is a part, is a complex, still poorly understood mechanism that does not lend itself to simple explanations. The more we learn, the more we know what we don't know. In the same vein, grandstanding politicians in California and elsewhere, eager to be seen doing the "right" thing, can do much harm if they don't know what they don't know.
# # #Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. is senior fellow at The National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Comments may be sent to bcohen@nationalcenter.org.

Footnotes:
1. "Automakers Sued Over Vehicle Emissions," Washington Times (Associated Press) 21. Sept. 2006: C9.2. "Global Warming Initiative Signed," Washington Times (Associated Press) 28 Sept. 2006: B1; Jeffrey Ball and Jim Carlton, "California Pact Would Place Caps on Emissions," Wall Street Journal 31 Aug. 2006: A1.3. Lee Gerhard, "Introduction to Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change," http://www.ff.org/centers/csspp/gerhardnotes.pdf.4. "Introduction to Geological Perspectives"5. "Introduction to Geological Perspectives"6. http://www.ff.org/centers/cspp/gerhardppt.ppt.7. "Introduction to Geological Perspectives"8. Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso, "How Warm Is the Earth Nowadays?," http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N39/EDITB.jsp. 9. Quoted in Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave: Environmentalism and its Consequences (Washington, D.C. Capital Research Center 2006), page 47. 10. "Introduction to Geophysical Perspectives"

The Cost Of Controlling Global Warming? You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

If you want to feel a real chill, read the following article and consider hundreds and hundreds of lawyers around the country filing lawsuits against companies that emit carbon dioxide, (which of course we all know causes global warming). Then of course these polluting companies will need lawyers to defend themselves. All of this is going to cost a lot of money. Guess who is ultimately going to pay?

Then of course there will be the buying and selling of "carbon credits". Anyone emitting the pollutant carbon dioxide will have to pay for that "right". They estimate this market could be as much as $100 BILLION per year!!! There will be buyers and sellers, and the inevitable "middle man", or broker. And you think your electric bill is high now? Just wait.

Guess what all of that leads to? A cleaner environment you say? More stable and predictable weather maybe? Don't hold your breath. It all leads to higher costs to the consumer, not just for the energy you use, but everything you eat, wear, or use to provide shelter. The economic forecast looks grim. Blame it all on carbon dioxide and global warming.
Peter


from: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-greenlawyers_25bus.ART.State.Edition2.4358ea8.html

Don't like the heat? Try suing
Lawyers anticipate a rising sea of work tied to climate change
12:00 AM CDT on Monday, June 25, 2007
By ERIC TORBENSON / The Dallas Morning News etorbenson@dallasnews.com

Think this global-warming controversy will blow over soon? The lawyers don't.
Top Dallas firm Thompson & Knight started a dedicated climate-change practice June 4 with 26 lawyers. Today, Dallas' Vinson & Elkins will unveil its 41-lawyer group, headed by a former senior counsel for the World Bank.

The law firms – and a dozen others nationwide – are getting ready for a predicted explosion of climate-related work tied to government regulation, lawsuits against energy companies and new markets that will trade the rights to emit carbon.

"We're not here to act as climatologists," said Thompson & Knight's climate chief, Scott Deatherage, though he has a degree in marine biology and knows plenty of the science behind global warming. "We're here to steer our clients through what is likely to be new regulation, and that's going to have risks and opportunities."

One potential opportunity is the $30 billion global market for rights to put carbon into the air; if the U.S. comes on board, the market could grow by $100 billion, and the credits are likely to become investments that draw Wall Street attention.
Vinson & Elkins' Christopher Carr, who helped the World Bank oversee its carbon finance unit, predicts a nationwide "cap" on carbon emissions in just a few years.

"It's not a question of if; it's when, and most importantly, how it will be set up," Mr. Carr said.
By their geography, the Dallas firms have a number of energy companies as clients. But they also expect to represent plaintiffs who've been harmed by global warming and pollution.

Potential suit in Canada
Steve Susman of Susman Godfrey in Houston has been a pioneer in such litigation. He led the charge this year to force TXU Energy into building fewer coal-fired plants in Texas than it had planned.
Now he's among several lawyers talking with a group of Inuits in northern Canada who have seen an entire island sink under rising seas from global warming. The tribe is weighing its options, including suing carbon-emitting corporations such as power companies for heating the planet, he said.

"Melting glaciers isn't going to get that much going, but wait until the first big ski area closes because it has no snow," said Mr. Susman, who teaches a climate-change litigation course at the University of Houston Law School. "Or wait until portions of lower Manhattan and San Francisco are under water."

Some lawyers are trying to tie the damage from Hurricane Katrina to global warming – and the energy companies who may have contributed to that warming.
Mr. Susman predicts large insurance companies, which have paid out billions of dollars in claims in the past two decades because of powerful hurricanes, eventually will become plaintiffs in broad greenhouse-effect litigation against energy companies.

It might seem difficult to convince judges and juries that losses from intense storms or rising sea levels came from carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. Even if American power plants caused the warming, what of China and India and other industrial countries' roles in the process?

But lawyers are testing those waters.
"You're going to see some really serious exposure on the part of companies that are emitting CO{-2}," Mr. Susman predicted. "I can't say for sure it's going to be as big as the tobacco settlements, but then again it may even be bigger. We're not going to know until the regulatory environment becomes clearer."

Ahead of the game
Attorneys such as Mr. Carr and Mr. Deatherage see big changes coming from Washington, and many of their Texas-based energy clients want to be ahead of the game when rules are made.
"I think we'll have a climate-change statute post-2008," Mr. Deatherage said. Energy companies are jockeying now to make sure investments in clean-air technologies qualify for tax or carbon credits down the road.

Public-nuisance laws that are being cited in suits related to environmental hazards such as lead paint could come into play with global warming and energy companies.
Whether states and municipalities can really extract potential damages for the "nuisance" of global warming isn't clear. California has sued automakers over global warming; the automakers, in turn, have sued the state over clean-air rules.

The Bush administration's recognition of climate change along with overall Democratic momentum in Congress has pushed both energy-related companies and their law firms into action.
The regulatory side, not the litigation side, is where the bulk of the legal work will come from, said Mr. Carr, who hopes to bring his experience with carbon-credit trading to bear with Vinson & Elkins' numerous energy clients.
"While there may be some litigation in the shorter term, the transactional area is going to be a significant source of long-term legal work," he said. "To me, it's personally important that we get the business legislation right."

Public opinion
Others also downplay the idea of big money from climate-change lawsuits. Going after Big Tobacco had plenty of public support, but going after Big Energy could be a different story.
"While it made a nice little story to gang up on tobacco companies who are killing us with a poison product, it won't be so fun to gang up on energy companies when they're in fact keeping the lights on and getting you to work on time," said Darren McKinney of the American Tort Reform Association in Washington, D.C., which works to reduce frivolous lawsuits. "We're not going to get public support for litigation that drives energy costs through the roof."

But as they succeeded in extracting concessions from tobacco companies, Mr. Susman predicts lawyers will be effective players – more so than, say, diplomats – in helping solve the problem of global warming.
And, he said, the law firms girding today for the coming environmental war are making a good business decision, Mr. Susman said.
"I think these guys are smart, because there's going to be a lot of litigation in this area and they want to get ahead of it," he said.