House GOP: Climate lawyers could be improperly influencing judges

By John O’Brien | Legal Newsline
The Center Square

WASHINGTON – The U.S. House Judiciary Committee is asking for answers from one of the lawyers pushing climate-change cases against Big Oil, wondering how he had access to materials an activist group gives judges as part of a training program.

That program is possibly intended to sway courts to rule in favor of the dozens of climate cases filed by state and local government officials who have teamed with private lawyers hoping for a jackpot. The committee this month sent four letters seeking more information, including one to lawyer Roger Worthington.

Worthington was previously admonished by an Oregon judge for introducing as evidence studies that he may have financed. It was called a “gobsmacking failure” to reveal potentially biased evidence in Multnomah County’s case against Chevron and others.

Now there are questions about how Worthington had a document prepared by the Environmental Law Institute and its Climate Judiciary Project titled “Drawing the Causal Chain: The Detection and Attribution of Climate Change.”

It was released by CJP in June 2023 as a training tool for judges. But the firm Worthington and Caron posted a pre-publication version of the document on its website two months earlier, and the Judiciary Committee wants to know how by the end of January.

“In addition to pre-dating the publication date of the document, the document hosted on your firm’s website includes what appears to be peer-reviewed comments, indicating the pre-publication nature of the document,” says a letter from the committee, signed by Republicans Jim Jordan, the Judiciary chairman, and Darrell Issa of California.

“Worthington & Caron having pre-publication access to judicial training modules raises significant concerns regarding potential improper ex parte contact with judges as well as calling into question the veracity of representations that ELI has made to the Committee about CJP’s contact and engagement with parties in litigation.”

ELI’s judicial-training strategy has been called into question by 23 state attorneys general who have asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to cancel grants to the group. ELI’s CJP has hosted more than 50 events and trained more than 2,000 judges on its own version of climate science, the AGs said last year.

ELI received about 13% of its revenue from EPA grants in 2023 and 8.4% in 2024. The series of letters from the committee expresses a concern that CJP is improperly attempting to influence federal judges.

State court judges are the ones handling the climate cases, and defendants have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to end them once and for all. They want their appeal of a Colorado Supreme Court decision that allowed Boulder’s case to move forward to be heard.

Boulder’s once-attorney, David Bookbinder of the Environmental Integrity Project, has also received a letter from the Judiciary Committee that asks if he had early access to CJP training materials.

CJP’s program complicated a climate case in Hawaii, where Justice Mark Recktenwald disclosed he spoke at a CJP conference. Hawaii’s supreme court, like Colorado’s, denied the oil companies’ motion to dismiss the case.

The lawsuits allege state-law claims that essentially say the oil industry tricked consumers into using more fossil fuels than they would have by downplaying the risks of climate change.

State and federal judges in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York, California, Maryland, New Jersey and Puerto Rico have thrown out climate cases seeking money from oil companies to pay for the effects of global warming, seeing them as an improper attempt to regulate emissions. That is the job of regulators and not judges, they say.

Bucks County, Pa., judge Stephen Corr noted that the county’s complaint used the word “emissions” more than 100 times, while “deceptive” and “deception” were used only 39 times combined. He threw out the case as an attempt to regulate the international emissions market masked in consumer protection.

Judge Videtta Brown, in Baltimore’s case, said the litigation goes beyond the limits of Maryland law, or whatever states other cases are filed in.

“This Court holds that the U.S. Constitution’s federal structure does not allow the application of state court claims like those presented in the instant cases,” Judge Steven Platt wrote in tossing Annapolis’ case.

“The States such as Plaintiffs here… can participate in the efforts to limit emissions collaboratively, but not in the form of litigation… If states and municipalities [or] even private parties are dissatisfied with the federal rulemaking or the outcome of cases, they may seek federal court review.”