Trolling for Anti-Environmental Plaintiffs

A reader sent me a an email from the Coalition of Energy Users trying to find plaintiffs for a challenge to AB 32 implementation.   CEU claims to be a grassroots group that does not have a deep-pocket funding source, and that may be true.  On the other hand, its interests are so precisely aligned with the oil and coal industries that it’s hard not to wonder a bit. (For example, they want to abolish the California air board entirely, and they are vehemently opposed to a severance tax for gas and oil, even though such taxes are common among almost all gas and oil-producing states including Texas and Louisiana.) The group is affiliated with the Tea Party and was founded by someone at the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, who also worked on Prop. 23, an effort to block climate change action through the initiative process. As you may recall, that effort was largely funded by sources like the Koch brothers.  If the Kochs aren’t funding CEU, they really ought to be.

Here’s an excerpt from the email to potential plaintiffs:

Warren and Pam Duffy’s southern California chapter of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACTSoCal) has found a legal team who seeks injured parties as potential Plaintiffs in an Anti Cap and Trade-AB32/CARB lawsuits.

CFACT will set up teleconference interviews with the attorneys to determine qualifying criteria.

The email also calls Mary Nichols (the head of CARB)  the “most dangerous woman in America,” a title that used to belong to Hillary Clinton and then to Elizabeth Warren.

CFACT is a local affiliate of a D.C. anti-environmental group that promotes climate denial.   It’s one of those places that loved Richard Muller until his results came out the “wrong” way; now he “has proven nothing more than a media shill and has quite simply brought shame to science.”)  Not too surprisingly CFACT apparently gets funding from oil and auto companies.  It would be interesting to know who is paying the legal team that CFACTSoCal “found.”

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