Trial Lawyers Poised to Sue Society Into Stone Age

Moonbats had hoped Copenhagen would mean economically crippling Western Civilization. Instead, they had to settle for stealing $billions upon $billions from taxpayers on behalf of Third World dictators. But we’re hardly out of the woods when it comes to the profound threat to society posed by environmental extremism. Our rulers are using the EPA to impose rules too extreme even to pass a legislature so hard left that it just seized control of the healthcare industry in the face of 2 to 1 voter opposition. Then there is a certain wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party, the voracious locust swarm made up of trial lawyers:

Across the country, trial lawyers and green pressure groups — if that’s not redundant — are teaming up to sue electric utilities for carbon emissions under “nuisance” laws.

A group of 12 Gulf Coast residents whose homes were damaged by Katrina are suing 33 energy companies for greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contributed to the global warming that allegedly made the hurricane worse.

This is the equivalent of suing the owner of a black cat that walked across your path before you got in an accident. It isn’t just dumb to think local power companies caused Katrina; it’s insane. But the inmates are running the asylum now.

There’s more:

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and seven state AG allies plus New York City are suing American Electric Power and other utilities for a host of supposed eco-maladies. A native village in Alaska is suing Exxon and 23 oil and energy companies for coastal erosion.

What unites these cases is the creativity of their legal chain of causation and their naked attempts at political intimidation. “My hope is that the court case will provide a powerful incentive for polluters to be reasonable and come to the table and seek affordable and reasonable reductions,” Mr. Blumenthal told the trade publication Carbon Control News. “We’re trying to compel measures that will stem global warming regardless of what happens in the legislature.”

Liberals don’t even hide the fact that they are using our infamously irresponsible left-wing courts to circumvent the democratic process and impose their deranged antihuman ideology.

Don’t imagine the judicial branch will pass up this opportunity to expand its already alarming power:

U.S. appeals courts seem more than ready to arrogate to themselves this power. In September, the Second Circuit allowed Mr. Blumenthal’s suit to proceed, while a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court’s dismissal of the Katrina case in October. An en banc hearing is now under consideration.

The beauty of the greedy totalitarian left’s new strategy is that it allows them to sue absolutely anyone they don’t like and/or has money to be looted. According to attorney David Rivkin:

There is no logical reason to draw the line at 30 defendants as opposed to 150, or 500, or even 10,000 defendants. These plaintiffs — and any others alleging injury by climatic phenomena — would have standing to assert a damages claim against virtually every entity and individual on the planet, since each ‘contributes’ to global concentrations of carbon dioxide.

This is why the Supreme Court’s psychotic ruling that the CO2 we exhale is a pollutant signed the death warrant for our economy and our liberty. On top of the massive looting spree by slimy trial lawyers, power-drunk judges will engage in what the WSJ calls “ad hoc command-and-control regulation against any industries that happen to catch the green lobby’s eye.”

In the short term, we will see energy prices follow the same trajectory as the price of cigarettes. In the medium term, the economy will be too gummed up by avaricious lawsuits and whimsical judicial decrees to function at all. Unless we take our country back from liberals soon, there won’t be any long term.

richard-blumenthal.jpg
Blumenthal vows to crush our wealth and freedom.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Share this!

Enjoy reading? Share it with your friends!