The U.S. Department of Justice continues to push back against the nationally coordinated climate litigation campaign, announcing a lawsuit against Minnesota over its 2020 climate lawsuit against major energy companies. The DOJ complaint alleges Attorney General Keith Ellison’s case is an unconstitutional attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions – claims preempted by federal law, an argument courts across the country have repeatedly upheld in dismissing similar cases.
The complaint also raises concerns about how these types of cases threaten American energy security and national interests. As Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward explained after the filing:
“Minnesota’s attempt to impose a national regulation on global greenhouse gas emissions not only is preempted by federal law, but also undermines affordable and reliable American energy, weakening the national and economic security of the United States.”
The DOJ’s action is part of a broader federal effort to defend the constitutional limits on state climate lawsuits.
Last April, President Trump signed an executive order targeting multiple attempts to impose climate liability on domestic energy producers. The following month, the DOJ sued Michigan and Hawaii to block their climate litigation, and against Vermont and New York over their climate superfund bills – each grounded in the same core argument: that states cannot use their courts to regulate emissions that cross state and national borders.
The DOJ’s complaint against Minnesota also arrives as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to review Boulder’s climate lawsuit in its upcoming term – a decision likely to have significant ramifications for the broader climate lawfare campaign, including in Minnesota. The DOJ previously filed an amicus brief urging the Court to take up Boulder’s case, underscoring the constitutional stakes the federal government sees in these suits.
Minnesota’s case has been stalled in court for years, with the Minnesota Supreme Court denying the companies’ motion to dismiss last month – making the DOJ’s intervention both timely and significant.
Activists Interests Running Rampant Through Minnesota
The DOJ’s lawsuit brings renewed scrutiny to a case that has faced serious questions since the day it was filed – starting with how it came to be filed.
After the lawsuit was publicly announced, the Executive Director of Minnesota-based activist group Fresh Energy, Michael Noble, revealed during a webinar exactly how the case originated:
“[The Center for Climate Integrity] brought this concept to Fresh Energy in the fall of 2018, and Fresh Energy helped put this idea in front of Attorney General Keith Ellison shortly after he was sworn in.”
Open records from 2018 and 2019 revealed that University of Minnesota law professor Alexandra Klass drafted and signed a memo titled “Potential Lawsuit against Fossil Fuel Companies for Minnesota Climate Change Damages” which was shared with Ellison to lay the groundwork for the case. Fresh Energy funded the work and organized a strategy meeting that brought together Klass, the Rockefeller Family Fund, and the Center for Climate Integrity.
The picture that emerges is clear: a national activist organization conceived the lawsuit, a local group lobbied the incoming AG to file it, and outside money funded the groundwork — all before any independent legal assessment of Minnesota’s actual claims.
Legal and Ethical Questions from the Get-Go
The outside influence didn’t stop at the filing.
To litigate the case, Ellison hired Sher Edling, the San Francisco-based plaintiffs’ law firm and key player in the climate lawfare space. A congressional investigation found that the firm has received nearly $14 million in dark money funding since 2017, routed through outside nonprofits and traceable to sources including the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — the same network that helped design the litigation in the first place.
The firm’s financial arrangement with Minnesota raises further questions. Sher Edling stands to collect a contingency fee of 16.67% of the first $150 million recovered – a potential $25 million payday – plus 7.5% of anything above that threshold. That means the firm bankrolling the climate lawfare campaign nationally stands to profit directly from Minnesota’s lawsuit, regardless of what it costs state taxpayers to pursue it.
The outside influence extends inside Ellison’s office as well. Two Special Assistant Attorneys General (SAAGs) – not Minnesota state government employees – were brought in to assist with the drafting of the complaint. When announcing the case, Ellison personally thanked the two SAAGs for their “excellent” work in putting the case together.
Their salaries are paid for by the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU Law School, an organization partially funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In Minnesota, the legislature has previously attempted to pass legislation barring privately paid outside lawyers from working in the state attorney general’s office.
Bottom Line: The DOJ’s lawsuit against Minnesota puts a national spotlight on a case that was never as straightforward as Ellison presented it. The same legal argument – that states cannot use their courts to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions – has already prevailed in multiple jurisdictions and is now headed to the Supreme Court. The activist blueprint behind the lawsuit, the dark money funding its outside counsel, and the Bloomberg-paid lawyers who helped draft it all point to the same conclusion: this was never simply Minnesota’s case to begin with.
