A joint staff report from the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee published in October exposed, in part, activists’ effort to train judges in plaintiff-favorable climate liability research via the Environmental Law Institute.
Now, the activists and donors have their eye on another institution that can be used to launder plaintiff-friendly research through seemingly respectable channels: the National Academy of Sciences.
NAS has set up a new committee to assess climate attribution science, which seeks to attribute extreme weather impacts to climate change, and in some instances, draw a causal line from specific companies’ historical emissions to localized weather events.
The committee is in part funded by the Bezos Earth Foundation and by a wealthy board member of Climate Central. But billionaire funding is just the start of activist influence. It is comprised of over a dozen researchers, most of whom hail from academic institutions – except one member from the Rockefeller-funded Union of Concerned Scientists.
UCS Develops Science to Support Litigation, Informs NAS Committee
UCS is not shy about its goals for building out attribution science. Delta Merner, a lead scientist at UCS who sits on the NAS committee, previously admitted that company-specific attribution “has a role to play in litigation.” This is an understatement – this kind of attribution science was developed by UCS and climate activist Richard Heede specifically to support plaintiffs in climate lawsuits at the direction of Sher Edling, the leading climate plaintiffs’ law firm.
Faced with the flaws and gaps in attribution science – of which there are many – UCS’s latest report lists attribution science as the number one priority amongst other areas of “litigation-ready research.” The report does not paint a rosy picture of the state of attribution science as applied to climate lawsuits, admitting that “quantifying harm remains challenging.”
Now, UCS has a new donor-funded platform under the National Academy of Sciences which it may use to give the uncertain body of science a more authoritative brand, and consequently, a greater impact in climate lawsuits.
Bezos, Climate Central Corner the Market on Attribution Science
American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Roger Pielke Jr. was quick to identify the activist forces behind the new NAS committee. As Pielke Jr. pointed out, the committee is not Climate Central or Bezos Earth Fund’s first foray into donor-funded attribution science.
Pielke Jr. writes that Climate Central previously “led the creation of and housed another advocacy group called World Weather Attribution (WWA)” in order to develop event attribution to specifically support climate lawsuits and drive sensational media coverage. WWA data has since been cited in Multnomah County’s experimental climate lawsuit, which makes the spurious claim that energy companies should be held liable for the effects of a 2021 regional heat wave.
WWA is now funded by none other than the Bezos Earth Fund, which is simultaneously funding a Yale University program to develop communications tactics to share news of extreme weather events in an “emotional, human, and individual” manner, rather than “abstract scientific descriptions.”
While Bezos and his partners at Climate Central are paying for both the extreme weather attribution studies and PR tactics to sensationalize the research, these same funders will now help steer the National Academy of Sciences’ own assessment of extreme weather attribution.
NAS Committee’s Ties to Sher Edling
At the committee’s first meeting in November, none other than Michael Burger – Executive Director of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Of Counsel at Sher Edling – gave a presentation to the committee.
Roger Pielke Jr. observed that Burger’s side gig working the leading climate plaintiffs’ firm was left off his bio on the Committee meeting agenda, presenting a clear conflict of interest for the Committee as they supposedly develop an impartial view of attribution science:
“I cannot emphasize how unusual it is to have a litigator briefing a NAS committee on how their work can help support his firm’s work. Absolutely bonkers.” (Emphasis added)
In a response to a question during the committee meeting regarding how attribution science studies could be designed better to “inform litigation,” Burger carefully toed the line, responding:
“The answer I give to this line of question is that the science drives the litigation more than the litigation driving the science. The science needs to keep evolving and that’s what’s going to inform the litigation.”
But Burger’s claim is at odds with others made by his colleagues at Sher Edling. In 2017, name partner Vic Sher gave a presentation where he described working with activist Richard Heede to build out attribution science to support his case:
“So how do we link emissions to specific corporate emitters? Obviously if you can’t tell who’s doing it, you have a problem. Well here we’ve been working primarily with an expert named Rick Heede who is with an outfit called the Climate Accountability Project in Colorado. […]
“Now when Rick and I started talking, his original article went back to, uh, I think 1850, and maybe it was 1874, and I asked him how many companies that are either US companies or do sufficient business in the United States that we can sue them here, would it take to get to 25% of all of the global emissions, globally (did I mention that?) in the world between 1965 and 2015. We were having this conversation in 2016. And Rick identified 28 such companies that are by themselves, using his methodology, responsible for 25 percent of global CO2 and methane emissions – 1965 to 2015.”
Despite Burger’s comments, it’s clear that the attorneys and their funders are in the drivers’ seat, not “the science.”
NAS Committee Stands Ready to Support Climate Plaintiffs
The fact is, there is hardly widespread consensus regarding the rigor of extreme weather attribution science, company-specific attribution science, or either flavor’s applicability in the courtroom or in policymaking.
Earlier this year, the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus published a lengthy, four-part critique of attribution science in the New Atlantis Magazine. Nordhaus wrote:
“These estimates have been widely misunderstood as quantifying how much more likely climate change made it for the heat wave to occur at all. But that is not what the method actually estimates. Rather, it quantifies changes in the likelihood of the heat wave reaching the precise level of extremity that occurred.”
Speaking specifically to Multnomah County’s use of attribution science in its climate lawsuit, Ryan Maue, former Chief Scientist at NOAA, wrote:
“The claims are fantastical […] The heat dome would most certainly have occurred regardless of climate change and would have been an unprecedented or record event anyway.”
It’s yet to be seen whether the NAS committee takes into account perspectives that don’t align with those of its funders.
Bottom Line: The National Academy of Sciences’ new committee on extreme weather attribution is funded by billionaire donors and staffed with activists seeking to take down the oil and gas industry. Rather than exploring the ample critiques of extreme weather attribution science, the committee looks poised to do climate plaintiffs’ bidding.
