The Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is relying on “activist academics” to craft materials that can influence judges in a slew of climate change cases.
According to National Review, many of these individuals are not credentialed climate scientists.
An internal CJP email exchange obtained by National Review sheds light on how such ghostwriters transform the work of established climate scientists into partisan “educational” material designed to push judges to adopt the organization’s views on climate change.
In the exchange, Paul Hanle — the founder of the Climate Judiciary Project — connects a freelance writer named Steve Olson with Inez Fung, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Berkeley, to ghostwrite Fung’s “What is Causing Climate Change” chapter in the CJP curriculum.
Hanle describes Olson’s “approach to writing for senior scientists,” which includes providing the scientist with a draft of the CJP curriculum chapter, based on the scientist’s other writings and an interview with Olson. After Olson completes the draft, the scientist can edit, and the module is peer-reviewed.
While ghostwriting in general is not inherently wrong, CJP is not forthcoming about Olson’s role in contributing to the chapter. On the CJP website, the chapter is attributed only to Fung. The chapter makes no mention of Olson, who is a “popular science” author and consultant. Olson’s body of work shows a clear bias toward climate alarmism.
In 2016, Olson published a piece in USA Today titled “Will history condemn climate deniers?” In this piece, he says “If any issue is as morally fraught today as slavery and colonialism were in the 19th century, it is climate change.”
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CJP bills its curriculum as “evidence-based judicial education about climate science and how it arises in the law” and insists that “it does not advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case.”
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If adopted by judges, this way of thinking could have significant implications for the future of the American energy industry. Fossil fuel companies are now facing a wave of public-nuisance lawsuits, which seek to hold specific companies liable for climate change writ large, unbound by any geographic constraints. Even if the suits are ultimately unsuccessful, climate activists can impose significant costs on these companies through drawn-out, expensive litigation.
Read the full story in National Review.
