This Wednesday, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability will hold a hearing to shine a light on the lack of oversight and ethics rules that allow billionaires to push political agendas through the civil justice system with little to no transparency.

For a case study of how shadowy nonprofits and foreign billionaires influence litigation, and policy, the Oversight committee should look no further than the climate litigation campaign.

For years, Energy In Depth has uncovered how the Rockefeller network, Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, American billionaire Michael Bloomberg, British billionaire Chris Hohn, and L.A. real estate executive Dan Emmett, collectively poured millions into the law firms, academics, and ENGOs executing the nationally-coordinated climate litigation campaign since its origin in 2017.

With this hearing, the committee has an opportunity to begin shining a light on the funders behind the lawsuits, exposing their hypocrisy and revealing their true motives: to shut down and eliminate American energy. Importantly, the Committee can get answers on behalf of Americans who bear the brunt of this legal activism in the form of higher energy prices.

Here are key questions the committee can raise to expose this cynical ploy to increase energy costs for everyday Americans:

1. How much have Leonardo DiCaprio and other wealthy donors given to the climate litigation campaign through dark money pass-throughs?

Last year, bombshell reporting from Fox News revealed that plaintiffs’ law firm Sher Edling has received millions of dollars in grants to finance the climate lawsuits for which it serves as outside counsel for states and municipalities suing energy companies. At least a portion of the funds originated with Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio and were funneled through the “Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience and Adaptation” – a fiscal sponsorship of the Resources Legacy Fund (RLF) and later the Arabella Advisors-backed New Venture Fund (NVF).

Via the Collective Action Fund, RLF and NVF pool and distribute earmarked funds from a number of foundations, including the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, JPB Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

That brings us to the next question:

2. How do for-profit law firms use charitable dollars to fund lawsuits against American energy companies? Should donors be able to take huge tax write-offs if their money funds private attorneys?

Through these dark money vehicles, wealthy donors can take major tax write-offs for donating funds to a nonprofit, which then regrants the funds to Sher Edling – a for profit law firm that uses grant funding to sue energy companies on behalf of states and municipal governments.

Legal experts have raised ethics concerns about Sher Edling’s use of third-party funds. Michael Krauss, a law professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, pointed out how taxpayers are underwriting lawsuits that ironically raise the price of energy:

“If legislation through litigation is bad, what to make of legislation through litigation subsidized by taxpayers through charitable donations?”

3. Were public sector clients aware of Sher Edling’s third-party funding scheme at the time that they agreed to potentially pay the firm tens of millions of dollars in contingency damages from prospective damages?

In exchange for representing plaintiffs for free, Sher Edling has signed contingency fee contracts with state and municipal governments that would award the firm a large percentage of any damages awarded – up to tens of millions of dollars – if the case is successful.

While disclosure of third-party litigation funding sources isn’t consistently required across the country, some states – including Minnesota and New Jersey, whose lawsuits are represented by Sher Edling – have laws in place that require outside attorneys to receive “informed consent” from their clients before accepting compensation from another party. Did Sher Edling disclose its external funding to the state and local governments it represents?

Contingency fee agreements are often set up and priced to manage risk, but Sher Edling doesn’t take on  much risk if it has a steady stream of external funding from the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and other wealthy funders. Would the plaintiffs have signed away such a large percentage of eventual damages if Sher Edling had disclosed its billionaire donor funding upfront?

4. Should private entities be paying the legal bills of governments to sue other private entities?

Sher Edling isn’t the only private law firm receiving Rockefeller money to sue American energy companies. In 2020, the city of Hoboken, N.J. filed a climate lawsuit and retained the law firm Emery, Celli, Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP. It was later revealed that the city’s legal costs would be covered by the environmental nonprofit Institute on Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), even while the private attorneys are in line for a major pay-out under their contingency agreement with the city if Hoboken’s suit is successful.

IGSD, the activist group underwriting Hoboken’s lawsuit, is yet another organization that receives funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund, according to the New York Post:

“The D.C.-based Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund – one of the climate change litigation’s biggest backers.”

IGSD and its donors have a clear agenda. In 2017, with help from a $1 million grant from the Rockefellers, the organization launched the Center for Climate Integrity, whose services at the time included “legal analysis, climate science expertise, and communications and community engagement.” Now an independent entity, CCI is the primary plaintiffs’ recruiting operation promoting climate lawsuits around the country.

5. Is it ethical for privately-paid attorneys to work in taxpayer-funded positions with the explicit goal of suing the funders’ political opponents?

Billionaire donors don’t just pay for the outside counsel – they pay for the government attorneys working on climate lawsuits, too, as Fox News reported in 2020:

“A program funded by 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is paying the salaries of lawyers who are farmed out to liberal state attorney general offices to pursue climate-based litigation — a compact critics say amounts to Bloomberg buying state law enforcement employees to advance his preferred political agenda.”

Bloomberg-funded Special Assistant Attorney Generals (SAAGs) have been placed in at least eighteen offices of attorneys general across the country and where the SAAGs are placed, climate lawsuits tend to follow. In Minnesota, Attorney General Keith Ellison even gave a shout-out to the two SAAGs placed in his office when he launched the state’s climate lawsuit in June 2020, praising the Bloomberg-funded attorneys for their “excellent, excellent work” on the case.

The Bloomberg SAAGs have been the subject of intense scrutiny from media and elected officials. Curtis Hill, the former Attorney General of Indiana, told the Daily Caller that “the arrangement through which a private organization or individual can promote an overtly political agenda” raises “obvious” legal and ethical concerns – so much so that in 2019, the Virginia state legislature passed an amendment that prohibits employees of the state attorney general’s office from receiving outside compensation.

6. Should taxpayer-funded government bodies like states and cities, which often are plaintiffs in these lawsuits, be engaged with for-profit investors?

It’s not just dark money and politically-driven billionaires funding climate lawsuits – in June, the Financial Times reported that climate litigation is capturing the interest of investor-backed “professional litigation funders” around the world:

“But the growing interest in cases seeking compensation for climate and environmental damage, and the new focus of market regulators on corporate greenwashing, is turning legal fights into a business opportunity. Professional litigation funders, backed by investors ranging from pension funds to family offices, want to make money from climate-related claims.” (emphasis added)

Professional litigation funders use investors’ money to finance large-scale civil lawsuits in exchange for a share of any eventual damages, essentially betting on the success of the suit. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, which advocates for safeguards and disclosure around third-party litigation financing (TPLF), has pointed out the risks associated with speculative litigation financing:

“Since TPLF lets plaintiffs off the hook for legal costs, there is little risk for them to advance non-meritorious claims. … TPLF allows funders to exercise undue control or influence over the litigation.”

Congress should examine how to safeguard the legal system to prevent lawsuits from enriching speculative investors while raising energy costs for hardworking Americans, as the Rockefeller-funded outside attorney for the Colorado case admitted:

“Whether that’s cutting back on the harmful activities, and/or to raise the price of the products that are causing those harmful effects so that if they are continuing to sell fossil fuels, that the cost of the harms of those fossil fuels would ultimately get priced into them.”

Bottom Line: The House Oversight Committee has an opportunity to begin to shine a light on the shady network of activists, attorneys, wealthy donors, and speculative investors who prop up the climate litigation campaign, often in favor their own bottom line, while consumers and taxpayers are left footing the bill and bearing the brunt of the misguided war on American energy.