Things are just not going well for the leftwing activist groups, billionaire-funded NGOs and trial lawyer firms who have recruited a growing number of state and local government entities to sue U.S. oil and gas companies involving specious claims for damages caused by climate change. In recent months, the lawfare campaign, coordinated mainly from the offices of one San Francisco-based firm, has suffered a series of adverse judicial decisions in what appears to be a rising consensus in the nation’s courts.
Just two weeks after suffering a major setback in a decision involving Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the pushers and funders of this lawfare campaign were tossed out in a case targeting ExxonMobil, Chevron and additional defendants in New Jersey. There, Superior Court Judge Douglas H. Hurd dismissed the Garden State’s lawsuit with prejudice based on the same federal primacy arguments which prevailed in recent decisions in New York City and Baltimore, as well as in the Anne Arundel case.
In seeking damages, New Jersey adopted similar tactics adopted in the other cases that make up this lawfare campaign, claiming they’ve been harmed by “climate change” impacts allegedly caused by the emissions by oil companies, but attempting to couch the damages as violations of state laws unrelated to air pollution. But Hurd was having none of it.
“Despite the artful pleading by the Plaintiffs in this case,” the judge says in his decision, “this court finds that Plaintiffs’ complaint, even under the most indulgent reading, is entirely about addressing the injuries of global climate change and seeking damages for such alleged injuries.”
The problem for the states, cities and counties who have signed up for this lawfare campaign in the hopes of grabbing some big bucks from Big Oil is that their arguments inevitably amount to a local effort to de facto regulate air quality, an area of regulation in which the federal government has always asserted its primacy. There’s a very good reason for this: If every city, county and state in America were allowed to regulate air quality, the economy would soon grind to a halt as it becomes impossible to do business in this country.
Like the judges in the other cases decided thus far, Hurd conceded to that reality in dismissing the New Jersey case, saying, “As Defendants state in their moving brief, ‘the federal system does not permit a State to apply its laws to claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by interstate or worldwide emissions,’” adding, “In conclusion, only federal law can govern Plaintiffs’ interstate and international emissions claims because ‘the basic scheme of the Constitution so demands.’”
The decision in the New Jersey case no doubt comes as a real disappointment for the billionaire-funded foundations and NGOs who spent years pushing for the state attorney general’s office to bring a case. In 2023, Energy Policy Advocates obtained emails detailing tactics employed by the Rockefeller-funded Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) to convince various cities and counties in the state to sign onto the lawfare campaign.
Those emails revealed close coordination between CCI and New Jersey officials, even to the extent of CCI funding an “Accountability University” to educate lawfare participants about the best tactics and talking points to deploy in their big money grab efforts.
CCI even offered to “ghost write” opinion pieces for public officials and “serve as an extra set of hands,” adding, “…there are absolutely no legal obligations. Since we are a 501 c3, there is no pledge or legal sign on’ required. Rather, we view ourselves as an extra set of hands to help public officials…”
So, what’s the point of all this, you might ask? Well, the point is that when you see one of these lawsuits brought by a city, county or state government, just know that none of this is happening organically. Also know that this big money grab costs these companies millions to defend themselves, and we all end up paying for it at the gas pump and in our home utility bills. Maybe it’s time we all demand these billionaires and trial lawyers find more productive ways to spend their time and money.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
President Trump’s historic victory in the November election gave him a clear mandate from the American people. And so far, he hasn’t wasted any time getting to work. In his first month back in office, Trump signed 45 Executive Orders (EO) in an effort to put America first and undo much of the damage created by the Biden administration. And that’s especially true with his executive actions to unleash American energy.
Ending the Net Zero Climate Cult Fantasy
For four years under President Biden, the American people were forced to endure an administration that was hellbent on pursuing a net zero agenda. Across the country, they pushed these radical and costly climate action plans to fundamentally transform and restrict the energy options available to consumers. Along with this came calls from the Left to ban gas stoves, gas cars, gas-powered lawn equipment, and hundreds of other draconian ideas to limit the freedom of the American people.
If the high cost of these plans wasn’t enough, they have also proven to be unreliable. States and countries that have committed to energy sources like solar and wind as part of this net zero fantasy have experienced rolling blackouts, continually demand that their customers use less, and eventually have to make haste to open reliable sources of generation they had closed down. Isn’t that right, California?
But Trump’s Executive Order 14154 unleashes fossil fuel production and use in America while unwinding much of the damage caused by the Biden administration…
Exactly a century ago this year, the Supreme Court, in its decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, recognized the right of parents to direct the education of their children, writing that “[t]he fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children . . . The child is not the mere creature of the state.” Today, just as they did a century ago, parents rely on the courts to serve as a backstop against abusive government policy.
Sadly, some courts in America are shutting the door of justice in the face of parents seeking to vindicate their rights and the rights of their children. In a case out of Wisconsin called Parents Protecting Our Children v. Eau Claire Area School District in the Seventh Circuit, the federal court of appeals with jurisdiction over cases arising in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, parents challenged the school district’s policy directing school officials to hide a child’s “social gender transition” from their parents. As the school told its employees, “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities.That knowledge must be earned.”
Incredibly, the Seventh Circuit found that the parents’ harm in that case was merely speculative. Apparently, since plaintiffs must show harm to have standing to sue, parents must wait until they find out that their son’s school has been helping him dress as a girl and use the girls’ restroom for six months before they can challenge the policy.
The Supreme Court chose not to review the Seventh Circuit’s decision in that case. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a short dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, explaining that the parents’ harm is not speculative and that “some federal courts are succumbing to the temptation to use the doctrine of Article III standing as a way of avoiding some particularly contentious constitutional questions.”
Nor is this an isolated incident of judges dodging the controversy of gender ideology. The Fourth Circuit, the appeals court with jurisdiction over Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, came to the same conclusion in John and Jane Parents 1 v. Montgomery County Board of Education. A district court in Ohio did the same in Doe v. Pine-Richland School District.
Parents’ fundamental rights to direct the upbringing of their children, and the right of children to be free from ideological indoctrination by school officials, depends on courts that are willing to protect those rights. That is why Advancing American Freedom is filing an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to take up Blake Warner’s challenge to an Eleventh Circuit rule which effectively requires parents to hire a lawyer before they can represent their children’s interests in court. Specifically, while people can bring their own claims in court without a lawyer, and parents can sue on behalf of their children, the Eleventh and some other courts have found that parents cannot sue on behalf of their children without hiring a lawyer. While Mr. Warner’s claim is not related to gender ideology, his challenge to this rule is essential because his success would ensure that parents who are unable to afford an attorney can still seek judicial protection for the rights of their children.
On Jan. 29, President Trump issued an executive order that, among other things, ordered the removal of federal funding from schools that engage in “social transitions of a minor student” and directed the attorney general to work with state and local officials “to enforce the law and file appropriate actions” against school officials who “facilitate the social transition of a minor student.” Trump’s order is important but know that gender ideologues will undoubtedly stage massive resistance. Parents must remain vigilant, and courts must begin to take their claims seriously. The Supreme Court should entrench parents’ rights by taking Mr. Warner’s case and striking down the counsel mandate.
Donald Trump’s renewed pledge to “Make America Great Again” requires nothing less than reigniting economic growth and prosperity. Wealth creation is essential. Yet as Congress prepares to extend and expand upon Trump’s landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, he can take matters into his own hands by issuing an executive order to index capital gains for inflation.
Taxing inflationary “phantom” capital gains is an unfair and ill-advised policy that punishes risk and success.
Consider this: You invest $1,000, and after four years of Joe Biden in the White House, you sell that investment for $1,100. But since inflation raged during Biden’s tenure, the $1,100 you receive will be worth less in real terms than the $1,000 you invested. And yet, under current law, you will pay a tax on your $100 capital “gain.”
Talk about perverse!
“As has been well documented,” writes Alan Auerbach, University of California economist, “realized capital gains may be subject to tax rates that easily exceed 100% of real gains in the presence of inflation.”
But it’s the law. And not only would eliminating it be the fair thing to do for investors, it would ignite a surge of American prosperity.
Eight years ago, the late Treasury economist Gary Robbins estimated that indexing capital gains for inflation would, by 2025, create an additional 400,000 jobs, grow the U.S. capital stock by $1.1 trillion and boost GDP by roughly $500 billion. Because capital gains were never indexed, average household income today is $3,600 lower than it could have been otherwise.
However, it’s never too late to start doing the right thing.
Congress has repeatedly toyed with indexing capital gains. In fact, indexing capital gains used to be a bipartisan issue. In the early 1990s, congressional Democrats touted indexing as an effective way to boost economic growth and benefit workers.
“If we really want to increase growth,” said a youthful Chuck Schumer, the then-future Senate minority leader, “there are proposals that we can do. I would be for indexing all capital gains, savings and borrowings.”
Having mastered the ways of the D.C. swamp, Schumer now opposes indexing capital gains. Listen to Congressman Schumer, not Senator Swamp.
Indeed, as Trump emphasized in 2019, “Indexing is something that a lot of people have liked for a long time. It’s something that would be very easy to do. It’s something that I am certainly thinking about.”
Looking forward, the Congressional Budget Office estimated last month that federal capital gains tax receipts will total $2.8 trillion over the decade ahead. If only one-fourth of those tax receipts—a conservative estimate—are due to taxing phantom gains, American taxpayers will pay $700 billion in taxes on income that doesn’t exist.
Opponents of capital gains indexation say the subsequent revenue loss would be too great. But inasmuch as inflationary gains should not have been taxed in the first place, a revenue loss is a good thing. It represents the correction of a tax injustice.
The second-order effects that Robbins documents should remove any reservations based on revenue loss. Without the federal tax on inflationary gains, asset prices will adjust until they reach a new, higher equilibrium. Investors will see their portfolios appreciate bigly.
It’s a safe bet that millions of American investors and pensioners would choose a Dow Jones average of 50,000 with indexation over a Dow Jones average of 44,500 without indexation.
As taxpayers realize real capital gains, the federal government will collect billions of dollars in new tax revenue. Federal tax revenue may ultimately be higher with indexation, not lower.
There is the question of whether Trump has the legal authority to issue an executive order instructing the Treasury secretary to issue new regulations indexing the capital gains cost basis for inflation. It comes down to whether the governing Internal Revenue Code section covering the definition of the word “cost” is sufficiently ambiguous to allow regulatory reinterpretation. Congress never specifically mandated that “cost” was to be determined in nominal terms, nor did it prohibit the use of real valuation.
According to a watershed 2012 paper by Charles Cooper and Vincent Colatriano in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, “jurisprudential developments over the last two decades have confirmed . . . that Treasury has regulatory authority to index capital gains for inflation.” With that justification, Trump has little reason to hold back.
James Carter is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a principal with Navigators Global. He previously headed President Donald Trump’s tax team during the 2016-17 transition and served as a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for then-President George W. Bush.
During his campaign and since taking office, President Donald Trump often repeated his desire to bring back the same “drill, baby, drill” oil and gas agenda that characterized his first term in office.
But that term began 8 long years ago and much has changed in the domestic oil business since then. Current market realities are likely to mitigate the industry’s response to Trump’s easing of the Biden administration’s efforts to restrict its activities.
Trump’s second term begins as the upstream segment of the industry has enjoyed three years of strong profitability and overall production growth by employing a strategy of capital discipline, technology deployment and the capture of economies of scale in the nation’s big shale play areas. Companies like, say, ExxonMobil and Oxy and their peers are unlikely to respond to the easing of government regulations by discarding these strategies that have brought such financial success in favor of moving into a new drilling boom.
This bias in favor of maintenance of the status quo is especially likely given that the big shale plays in the Permian Basin, Eagle Ford Shale, Bakken Shale, Haynesville and the Marcellus/Utica region have all advanced into the long-term development phases of the natural life cycle typical of every oil and gas resource play over the past 175 years. Absent the discovery of major new shale or other types of oil-or-natural gas-bearing formations, a new drilling boom seems quite unlikely under any circumstances.
One market factor that could result in a somewhat higher active rig count would be a sudden rise in crude oil prices, if it appears likely to last for a long period of time. Companies like Exxon, Chevron, Oxy and Diamondback Energy certainly have the capability to quickly activate a significant number of additional rigs to take advantage of long-term higher prices.
But crude prices are set on a global market, and that market has appeared over-supplied in recent months with little reason to believe the supply/demand equation will change significantly in the near future. Indeed, the OPEC+ cartel has been forced to postpone planned production increases several times over the past 12 months as an over-supplied market has caused prices to hover well below the group’s target price.
But it is wrong to think the domestic oil industry will not respond in any way to Trump’s efforts to remove Biden’s artificial roadblocks to energy progress. Trump’s efforts to speed up permitting for energy projects of all kinds are likely to result in a significant build-out of much-needed new natural gas pipeline capacity, natural gas power generation plants and new LNG export terminals and supporting infrastructure.
Instead of another four years of “drill, baby, drill,” the Trump efforts to speed energy development seem certain to result in four years of a “build, baby, build” boom.
Indeed, the industry is already responding in a big way in the LNG export sector of the business. During Trump’s first week in office, LNG exporter Venture Global launched what is the largest energy IPO by value in U.S. history, going public with a total market cap of $65 billion.
With five separate export projects currently in various stages of development, all in South Louisiana, Venture Global plans to become a major player in one of America’s major growth industries in the coming years. Trump’s Day 1 reversal of Biden’s senseless permitting pause on LNG infrastructure is likely to kick off a number of additional LNG projects by other operators.
The Trump effect took hold even before he took office when the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation entered into an exclusive agreement in early January with developer Glenfarne to advance the $44 billion Alaska LNG project. The aim is to start to deliver gas in 2031, with LNG exports following shortly thereafter.
America’s oil and gas industry has demonstrated it can consistently grow overall production to new records even with a falling rig count in recent years. Now it must grow its related infrastructure to account for the rising production.
That’s why Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra is likely to transform into “build, baby, build” in the months and years to come.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Another election has come and gone, and once again Arizona showed the nation that it doesn’t know how to count votes. Like a bad movie we are forced to watch every two years, rampant delays in processing early ballots left voters waiting over a week to find out who won key races in the state.
Virtually everyone around the country watching our slow-motion election train wreck, from major media outlets to national pundits, agreed that fixing Arizona’s tabulation process is long overdue.
Everyone, that is, except Governor Katie Hobbs and her partisan Democrat allies in the legislature.
This shouldn’t be a total shock to those who have followed previous attempts to reform our election system. Over the last couple of years, Democrats have opposed popular election reforms like requiring basic proof of citizenship to vote, all while millions were pouring in illegally through the southern border. They argued against commonsense voter ID laws, claiming our elections are safe and secure without them (and California democrats even banned voter ID outright).
And now, after Arizona was again one of the last states to finish ballot processing, the Democrats remain opposed to ensuring we have election night results…
