Climate Change Deniers "Educating" Judges

 

In the coming months and years, if you wonder why more judges are questioning climate science and siding with the fossil fuel industry, ProPublica has a likely reason: 

"For many months, conservative lawmakers and political operatives have been targeting the scientists and lawyers behind the Climate Judiciary Project, a program meant to educate the courts about climate science, alleging that their effort constitutes a conspiracy to influence federal judges and persuade them to rule against the oil industry.

Now, just as congressional investigators are escalating a formal inquiry into the project, a separate program closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and free-market conservatives is hosting a symposium for 150 judges in Nashville, Tennessee. The program, run by the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, also aims to educate judges, but in a way that prioritizes American business interests and questions climate science. 

The dueling efforts come as a number of significant lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages are making their way through the courts and as oil-industry-aligned attacks on climate policies, and the legal arguments supporting them, have been sharply increasing."  (our emphasis)

So what this right-wing program is peddling are the same canards that the fossil fuel industry has spread for five decades, despite overwhelming climate data and research that points to a warming of the climate, perhaps now irreversible.  The fact that the program is run by the "Antonin Scalia School of Law", named after the late, far-right Justice, is a sure sign that the judges are going to get pseudoscience from the fossil fuel industry, rather than facts from an independent, science-based group (say the National Academy of Sciences).  In any event, we're certain that the judges attending are sympathetic to the industry and are looking for "alternative facts" from them to use in environmental cases.