RICO Them! Fight Lawfare with Lawfare!

Guest post by Jim Willis of Marcellus Drilling News.

Public Citizen, a tax-exempt non-profit based in Washington, D.C., and founded by Ralph Nader, is about as far left as a group can go. It’s left of Vladimir Putin (and we’re not joking). Earlier this week, Public Citizen issued a “prosecution memo,” which is a 50-page report structured like the memos that prosecutors compile before issuing an indictment.

The memo purports to make the case for charging oil companies with murder over heat-related deaths. It is stark…raving…mad.

We suppose nothing should surprise us anymore when it comes to the radicalized left, but this one does. Once again, as has happened throughout history, leftists seek to jail (or execute) those who disagree with their twisted view of the world. That’s what this is.

"Lawyer" by Wesley Fryer is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Public Citizen issued this press release to announce this latest flummery:

Prosecutors charging major fossil fuel companies for extreme heat deaths could have a strong case, according to a new report published today by Public Citizen and former federal prosecutor Cindy Cho.

The 50-page report—structured like the memos that prosecutors compile before issuing an indictment to assess whether there is a strong enough case to obtain and sustain a prosecution—details admissible evidence, possible charges, and legal issues pertaining to a homicide prosecution of Big Oil firms for their role in causing lethal heat waves, such as the one that blanketed much of the U.S. last week.

The prosecution memo, which was authored by a former prosecutor, a criminal law scholar, and other legal experts, analyzes whether prosecutors in Arizona could pursue reckless manslaughter or second degree murder prosecutions for deaths caused by the July 2023 wave, an extreme weather event that killed 403 residents of Maricopa County and that climate scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” but for human-caused climate change. Its authors stress that their conclusions are “broadly applicable to any prosecutor seeking justice for climate victims” and that similar charges could be pursued in “any jurisdiction that has experienced climate-related deaths.”

The memo provides an overview of the publicly available evidence that (1) Big Oil’s conduct in generating a substantial portion of all global greenhouse gas emissions and deceiving the public about the dangers of those emissions was a cause of deaths from the July 2023 heat wave, and (2) Big Oil engaged in this conduct with the culpable mental state required for a reckless manslaughter or second degree murder offense. The memo also assesses a range of likely defense arguments that the fossil fuel industry might assert in response to a prosecution—including blaming consumers, challenging causation, and asserting necessity—and discusses why none provides a complete defense to the charges.

Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel at Public Citizen and lead author of the memo, said, “As Americans reel from another lethal heat wave, it’s important to remember that these climate disasters didn’t come out of nowhere. They were knowingly caused by fossil fuel companies that chose to inflict this suffering to maintain their profits, while regular people, like the victims of the July 2023 heat wave, and of so many other climate disasters, pay the price. These victims deserve justice no less than the victims of street-level homicides. And this memo shows that prosecutors have a path to secure that justice, if they choose to pursue it.”

One of the memo’s co-authors, Professor Cindy Cho, served for over a decade as federal prosecutor, first as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and then as Chief of the Criminal Division for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana, where she prosecuted a wide range of cases—including public corruption, sexual exploitation of minors, white-collar crime, illegal opioid distribution, cyber crime, and criminal cases arising from the siege of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—and won multiple awards for her work, including a DEA Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force National Award for Innovative Investigation Efforts for the prosecution of a dark web drug trafficking organization; a Food and Drug Administration Special Achievement Award for the prosecution of a drug manufacturing CEO; and an Inspector General’s Award for Excellence for the prosecution of a fraudulent nursing home executive.

Describing her work on the memo, Professor Cho said, “When someone causes suffering by breaking the law, good prosecutors know it is their duty to bring appropriate charges. Some of the very best public servants I’ve had the privilege to work with are prosecutors who embrace really tough cases because they can also be the most righteous cases. Although civil remedies are of course vital, sometimes only our criminal laws can measure up to the harm someone has inflicted. If human-generated climate change is killing people, and the organizations that generated it knew the risks, then it stands to reason that criminal charges may be exactly what society expects.”

Climate activist and author Bill McKibben said, “What’s happened to the climate is a crime: after fair warning from scientists about what would happen, Big Oil went right ahead pouring carbon into the atmosphere, and now there’s a huge pile of dead bodies (and a larger one of dead dreams). The only question left is whether our legal system will recognize these crimes—and this report shows there’s a good chance the answer could be yes.”

Leftist “reporters” just about soiled themselves, they were so excited. Here’s an example from the leftwing rag Salon, running under the headline “Climate crimes: Advocates urge murder prosecution charges against Big Oil for heat wave deaths”:

Last summer, an unhoused man attempting to jump over a school fence to reach shade broke both his legs and died. In another case, a 73-year-old man fell while hanging his laundry and his body was found covered in burns and with a core temperature of 107 degrees. A woman also died in her $1 million Scottsdale home when the AC malfunctioned while a 33-year-old man collapsed and died while on a Saturday hike.

These are a few of the 403 people who died from a brutal heat wave that hit Maricopa County in July 2023, a summer marked by record-breaking temperatures that exceeded 110º F for 31 days straight.

According to climate experts, these surging heat waves are far from natural — climate change from burning fossil fuels is driving our planet into hotter and hotter extreme weather. And given that fossil fuel companies bear the brunt of this crisis, some advocacy groups want to see Big Oil companies like Chevron and Shell criminally prosecuted.

On Wednesday, the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen released a model prosecution memo laying out a case to hold major fossil fuel companies criminally accountable for climate-related harms, including deaths from climate disasters. A network of former prosecutors, criminal law professors, and other legal advocates developed the memo together, and it was co-authored, among others, by former Justice Department prosecutor Cindy Cho. The memo places the blame on nine Big Oil companies: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, BHP, Peabody and the American Petroleum Institute. (Salon reached out to all of them for comment and has not heard back at the time of this publication.)

“What struck me was the scope,” co-author Aaron Regunberg told Salon. A former Rhode Island assemblyman and currently the senior policy counsel at Public Citizen, Rugenberg described climate change as “a massive public safety threat” and pointed out that “not everyone is going to make it when the heat breaks, and dozens of communities have already recorded deaths this summer from extreme heat. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands more are going to lose their lives before the summer ends?”

The memo makes the case that a person or institution is guilty of reckless manslaughter if it is proved beyond a reasonable doubt that they caused a victim’s death through reckless conduct. Second degree murder, on the other hand, is defined as “recklessly causing the death of another person by creating a ‘grave risk of death’ under circumstances ‘manifesting extreme indifference to human life.'” To prove the latter, the state needs to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant(s) caused the deaths of the victim(s) through reckless conduct which created a grave risk and demonstrated extreme indifference to human life.

Public Citizen argues that a strong case exists for both of these charges when it comes to the 403 people who died from the Maricopa County heat wave last year. Many desert cities could one day become too hot for people to live, even with plenty of air conditioning.

“Following the July 2023 heat wave, an extreme event attribution study determined that the occurrence of such heat in the American Southwest would have been ‘virtually impossible’ but for human-caused climate change, with lead author Mariam Zachariah, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London, saying, ‘Had there been no climate change, such an event would almost never have occurred,'” writes the report.

“These climate disasters are the specific result of decisions and actions that were made by particular actors,” Regunberg said. “Massive oil and gas companies, as we detail and report, are responsible for generating a big portion of all the greenhouse gas emissions that have caused the plan to heat up and are deceiving the public about the dangers of those emissions in ways that lead to even more heating and warming. I think the inclination that these heat deaths might be more than just tragedies, but actually crimes, was strongly reinforced through this research process.”

The Public Citizen memo is only a sample document; on its own, it carries no legal weight. However, Regunberg and his associates believe that it will spark a much-needed conversation about how to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.

But there are a few cases that have been taken to court with varying results. A 2023 report by the U.N. Environment Programme and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law found that the total of climate cases has more than doubled over the past five years and such litigation is expected to keep growing. More recently, a group of 13 young people sued Hawai’i’s Department of Transportation for failing to protect the environment. Last week, the case was settled, forcing the state to decarbonize its transportation network, among other stipulations. Hawai’i’s governor Josh Green released a statement acknowledging “the constitutional rights of Hawai?i’s youth to a life-sustaining climate.”

“Certainly our hope is that this kind of work is leading to real conversations,” Regunberg said. When asked what ordinary people can do to help their cause and hold Big Oil accountable, Regunberg said “if you’re someone who is in a community that has experienced a climate disaster, or are a victim of a climate disaster yourself, we think it’s important for folks to be sharing those stories with their local prosecutor in the same way they might for any other street level offense.”

Ultimately Public Citizen’s goal with the sample memo is to emphasize that — while their particular document focuses on Maricopa County — everyone has a case against the fossil fuel companies.

“Though this memo focuses in on this specific scenario, its analysis we think applies similarly to basically any jurisdiction that has experienced climate heat deaths,” Regunberg said.”We hope that this can be something of a memo for any public officials who want to investigate how they might seek justice for climate victims.”

Our caution to the left is to beware. The same standard you are applying to others will be applied to you.

Editor’s Note: Let me add a caution as well. It is this; if the industry doesn't wake up out of its slumber, stop playing “me too” on climate, and sue the bastards, these prosecutions will happen. Public Citizen was created for the purpose of rain-making for trial lawyers. That remains its primary objective, although its funders have ulterior motives that also include climate grifting and power-seeking. They are working together as part of the biggest racketeering scheme ever and the only way to beat them is to RICO them. Fight lawfare with lawfare and do it now!

#PublicCitizen #ClimateMurder #ClimateHomicide #Lawyers #Rainmakers #RICO

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