“Big Luther” might be out of office, but he hasn’t finished towering over environmental activists.
The former United States Senator is known for his staunch opposition to job-killing Obama-era regulations and mandates as Alabama’s Attorney General and was a key ally to President Trump in Strange’s brief tenure on Capitol Hill.
Now, back in the private sector, Luther Strange is still advocating for Alabama jobs and President Trump’s agenda.
In an op-ed published this week, Strange applauds a federal judge in New York for rightfully throwing out a climate lawsuit brought by cities against major energy companies. In doing so, U.S. District Court Judge John F. Keenan wrote, “Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.”
This is the second judge in as many months to toss this kind of lawsuit, confirming what conservative leaders in Alabama have been saying for years: courts should follow the law, not make the law.
Strange notes in his column, “Allowing courts to usurp the place of Congress and regulators is a recipe for incoherence. It takes power out of the hands of the people’s representatives. It pushes experts out of the process.”
When Strange served as the state’s 47th attorney general, he stood up to BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and won more than $2 billion in a landmark settlement on behalf of Alabamians.
Today, in a stark contrast, a number of cities including Santa Cruz, Oakland, San Francisco, Boulder and New York are bringing lawsuits against energy companies alleging future harm from the effects of climate change brought on by the products these companies sell.
Sen. Strange points out, “They are seeking awards — often in the hundreds of millions of dollars — for events they outline in detail, but that have not yet happened. And by their own admission, these events may never happen.”
He adds, “But it gets better: some of these California cities have directly contradicted themselves by issuing precise projections about the future costs of climate change in their lawsuit while indicating in their statements to the buyers of their municipal bonds that they know of no climate-related risks. They state in their bond issuance documents that it is impossible to predict whether flooding and other damage will occur, if at all. In many cases, it was the same city officials who made both sworn statements.”
It’s good to see that federal judges are seeing through these frivolous lawsuits. Like Judge William Alsup of California, who said:
Our industrial revolution and the development of our modern world has literally been fueled by oil and coal. Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress, would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded?
Even liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke against environmental policy-making by the judiciary, saying in a 2011 case involving climate change that “the relief you’re seeking seems to me to set up a district judge, who does not have the resources, the expertise, as a kind of ‘super-EPA.’”
However, these lawsuits will keep coming. There is simply too much money to be made by trial lawyers and environmentalists for them to stop. And that is what it is all about.
“Lawsuits will not develop sound public policy, and they will certainly not halt climate change,” Strange concluded.
