If It’s Not Open Warfare, It’s Collusive Lawfare

[rangerrebew]

If It’s Not Open Warfare, It’s Collusive Lawfare
14 hours ago Guest Blogger 
Environmentalist lawsuits reach new heights of absurdity and threats to American energy 

Paul Driessen

The Biden Administration continues waging war on fossil fuels, aided by environmentalists, politicians, and corporations chasing subsidies, competitive advantages, power and profits. They want to “fundamentally transform” America’s energy and economic systems, prevent “climate cataclysms,” and ensure “environmental justice” for some (by inflicting injustices on others).

Their weapons include withdrawing huge areas from economic activities; banning leasing, drilling and pipelines; and imposing regulatory standards so costly or technologically impossible that coal-fired power plants, internal-combustion vehicles, and gas stoves, furnaces and water heaters must be abandoned.

This open warfare is augmented and amplified by more clandestine “lawfare.”

Environmentalists have long employed lawsuits to impose by court decree what they cannot achieve via ballot boxes or legislation. The litigation often redefines sloppily or deliberately vague statutory language, to impose more onerous standards that can block or bankrupt oil, gas and mining projects – and then ignored for land- and resource-intensive wind and solar projects.

An especially pernicious strategy is “sue-and-settle” lawsuits, wherein environmentalists collude with friendly federal agencies to create a “disagreement” over a policy or regulation, and sue in friendly courts. The parties then agree to a settlement that’s been negotiated behind closed doors, leaving the public and impacted third parties with no opportunity to address the case’s legal or evidentiary merits.

 https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/09/if-its-not-open-warfare-its-collusive-lawfare/

[Elderberry]

The Environmental Disaster of “Green” Energy

Powerline 6/10/2023

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/the-environmental-disaster-of-green-energy.php

Paul Driessen has an excellent piece at Watts Up With That? He discusses the pernicious “sue and settle” practice that left-wing activists and government agencies are pursuing, and argues for venuing climate-related litigation in the federal courts.

But I want to focus on his comments on the environmental evils of “green” technologies:

    The litigants and courts will also encounter the bitter reality that the “fundamental transformation” they so earnestly seek means covering the planet with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines … and the quarries and mines to build them. America already lacks sufficient EV charging stations and step-up and step-down transformers for new homes and a functional grid. Millions more will be needed in short order to reach Net Zero – which means thousands of new mines, quarries, processing plants and factories.

    Toyota Motor Corp. calculates that “more than 300 new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035.” That’s essentially just for new EVs, and getting them approved and developed would likely take decades. A US energy transformation – to say nothing of a global transformation – would require thousands of mines, and thousands of processing facilities.

    The process of converting cobalt, lithium, aluminum, iron, rare earths, manganese, nickel and other ores into high-end metals is fossil-fuel-intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting and dirty. “Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest,” the Wall Street Journal notes. “Refining it … involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of.” Using little children to mine cobalt and processing rare earth elements involve legendary ecological and human rights abuses.

More at link.