CLW is not alone in noticing an awful lot of familiar verbiage popping up in climate lawsuits filed in different jurisdictions with different laws, different plaintiffs, and even different lawyers.
There was the amusing episode in which artifact language from Minnesota’s June 24, 2020 turned up in the District of Columbia’s lawsuit filed the next day, even though DC AG Karl Racine denied he even knew about his colleagues’ suit.
Different clients if the same allegations—but, of course, clumsily repeating allegations made in the Minnesota complaint in the DC complaint about a party not named as a defendant by DC. But at least the same outside law firm did this, if to claim a purely local offense.
Then Russell Cook spotted more than a little resemblance between a couple of tribal lawsuits recently filed.
This brings to mind this similar if less extensive find of Mr. Cook’s. Which also was like this one. Which, turns out, is among about 50 pages of the the Multnomah County (OR) complaint using the same words, displaying the same images, and invoking arguments and citations in the same order as the Puerto Rico suit. And they don’t even have the same lawyers! Leading Cook to describe the latter as “a seemingly plagiarized copy of Puerto Rico v Exxon as I detailed in my dissection of Multnomah.”
What is one to think of such a preponderance of cookie-cutter language between purely local state law cases that have nothing to do with federal issues or local issues in other states, we swear, your honors?
Put aside how some lawyers might rake in tens of millions of dollars taken from purported damages suffered by taxpayers, grounded in that. Energy Policy Advocates has detailed in amicus briefs the extensive evidence that this is a centrally coordinated campaign of vexatious multi-jurisdiction litigation. But it is quite the own-goal when even disparate lawyers use the same language to file complaints that the defendants make a pretty good case are all part of the same and belong in federal court. Which may be something to point out next time someone removes one of these to federal court?
CLW closes on a related point: Although the law firms filing lawsuits making the same claim may be diversifying, the evidence that they do all have the same, shall we say, advisors has recently grown…
So lawyer from State A and lawyer from State B lift the same argument from some shared file of good arguments. So what?
If you have a lawyer draw up your will, you can bet that he pulls up a form and with little or no modification plugs your name into it and you pay a bunch of money for the service. That’s how the world works.
I’ll wait while someone tells my why I’m naive and ignorant.
Looking back, the friends that made the most money in computers did it with lawyers and copyrights.
I think you miss the point, and invoke a false analogy. What the author is saying is that there must be a third party back of the two AGs in the two different states. This is another way of saying that there is coordination among disparate jurisdictions, and that this coordination is opaque, separately funded, private, and undisclosed. It is, in still other words, a conspiracy and likely subject to RICO prosecution, except that Soros’s henchmen don’t prosecute crimes.
Commenter Steve Case only chose to glance at this situation at the most superficial level. The IPCC / Al Gore / Naomi Oreskes mob are counting on the public doing that.
Meanwhile, I’m indebted to WUWT reproducing the Climate Litigation Watch blog post here which significantly mentions what I began seeing starting in 2017 at my GelbspanFiles blog. It was understandable that the main law firm handling now 17 of what I term “boilerplate copy” lawsuit filings would use a common template when taking their traveling circus act to different states. No harm, no foul there, apart from the firm making false accusations combined with huge errors concerning their beloved ‘industry documents.’ But when other unrelated law firms start using the identical accusation text against skeptic climate scientists — accusations that are false and are based on literally worthless ‘leaked industry documents’ — that’s when we all should smell a rat. Most egregious of all, as I detailed in my dissection of Multnomah v Exxon, was the apparent outright plagiarism from the Puerto Rico case of an inexcusable reading of a particular name in an old Greenpeace degraded photocopy. You do not make that kind of clumsy error in lawsuits having massive national implications, and you absolutely do not repeat errors within accusations offering such documents as proof of skeptic climate scientists being on the payroll of Big Coal & Oil. The credibility of prosecutors depends on their cases being bulletproof. What the careless blunder likely means is that the accusation template was fed to Puerto Rico and they didn’t undertake due diligence to be sure it had merit. The question now is, who is it promulgating those false accusations? I explored that in my Part 2 dissection of Puerto Rico.
They do this because they have nothing. They have already told us what they wanted us to hear.They are so lazy they haven’t even continued to find a proof to back up what they say. We are supposed to believe them because they think so much of themselves. I don’t buy it and many many more are having doubts. That is a good thing, they have nothing.
What they have is a propaganda machine and money.
Counter sue for harassment
Could it be a conspiracy?
Repeating from my comment further above, I explored that in my Part 2 dissection of Puerto Rico v Exxon. Think of the name “Naomi,” and skip to the end of my blog post to see who she describes as “my good friend and colleague,” and then ponder why that “friend” would find it necessary to physically accompany the lead lawyer for Puerto Rico to that island a few years before the lawsuit was filed.
Once there were the ambulance chasers…
Now they just make stuff up
It’s like trying to successfully use a slingshot against an Abrams tank. If it doesn’t work from the front, move to a different position or angle, and see if it works then …
Alternatively, 300 slingshots might clog up the wheels.
The fourth dimension of climate fraud, first academia, then the media, followed by government and, of course the scavengers of the legal profession, the priesthood of the secular state. No stone can be left unturned if beneath it is the possibility of financial reward through the court system. As a public employee one must wonder what the ultimate reward for Minnesota Attorney General Ellison might be for his action. Perhaps a position with whatever law firm his state has engaged to assist in the pursuit of this harassment. If it has potential others will try it as well, although the lack of originality in the details is very curious.
The spread of corruption. Lack of originality is an artefact of someone else feeding these cases down to compliant AG’s and NGO’s who are eager to show they’re part of ‘the cause.’
Climate Lawsuit Format:
Yep. Whatever happens, the lawyers get paid. I can’t imagine that many of the lawyers involved will be acting pro bono or even no-win-no-fee; you’d have thought that if they really thought they were acting to save the planet they might do so…
Of course the common verbiage is not accidental. This lawfare can be traced back to a meeting held in La Jolla, CA in June of 2012; called the Workshop On Climate Accountability Public Opinion, And Legal Strategies.
These examples raise the question of what remedies the justice system provides for when individuals or groups abuse the justice system with meritless litigation in order to achieve ends that are not supported by the constitution, laws or regulations. They work through acts of intimidation, deliberate legal abuse and vexatious impairment of commerce. These attacks are not what the justice system was designed for. I can’t say I know anything about what those remedies might be.
Compare what is happening in other countries as well – in those countries where the litigation isn’t happening, look at what systems they’ve got to stop this sort of thing from happening. In the USA there are very few penalties for bringing vexatious litigation – perhaps there should be more.