Aaron Regunberg , The National Review; The Supreme Court’s Ethics Code Is a Joke. Big Oil Knows That.
"I don’t have access to Big Oil’s internal emails about this. But they sure look wildly desperate to dodge the growing array of lawsuits over the damage caused by their decades-long scheme to deceive the public about climate change. Oil companies are doing whatever they possibly can to keep the plaintiffs in these suits (cities, counties, states, and Native American tribes) from having their day in court—and as some of the most powerful corporations in the world, there’s a lot they can do. They’re pushing Congress to pass a blanket waiver of liability for climate-related damages. They’ve deputized the Trump administration to threaten states that are bringing suits. And they have tried—again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again—to get the Supreme Court to step in and dismiss the cases against them, based on an often contradictory set of legal theories claiming that the state laws they’re being sued under are preempted—i.e., nullified by federal law.
Big Oil has tried five times since 2021 to get the Supreme Court to step in and dismiss these lower court cases, and so far the court has rejected them all. But now the industry is trying once again, petitioning the justices to take up a case filed by the City and County of Boulder against ExxonMobil and Suncor. Last spring, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that, after seven long years of delay tactics by the industry, this case could finally advance to discovery and trial...
What do judicial ethics codes have to do with climate deception? It all comes down to simple math. Every year, the Supreme Court receives many thousands of cert petitions. To grant a writ of certiorari, four of the nine justices must agree to take one of these cases. Given that lower threshold, any time a justice recuses themselves based on conflicts of interest it reduces the likelihood that a case will be heard. In this case, multiple justices have conflicts of interest that should take them out of the running to consider these suits—if such principles matter to the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.
One of these conflicted justices is Amy Coney Barrett...
Another justice, Samuel Alito, has a more traditional conflict of interest: He owns thousands of dollars of stock in the oil giants ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. Unlike Barrett, Alito has recused himself from considering most, though not all, of the fossil fuel industry’s previous climate deception cert petitions...
We are, after all, living in an age of elite impunity. More and more Americans are asking whether the wealthy and powerful can do whatever they want—even participate in underage sex trafficking—and get away with it. That’s the same question at the center of these climate deception cases: Can Big Oil knowingly destroy the livability of our one and only planet, yet face zero consequences for exposing untold numbers to financial ruin, death, and the chaos of increasingly likely civilizational collapse?...
Big Oil wants us to succumb to nihilism when it comes to climate change. Disappoint them: Don’t give in."
