Obviously, it’s all about Trump in this astroturfed suit, which, sad to say, I missed earlier in the year

The Youth Activists Suing Trump Are Fighting Climate Change and Authoritarianism

Does the United States Constitution guard against executive abuses of power that deprive children and youth of their fundamental rights to life and liberty?

That was the fundamental question Julia Olson, an attorney and the founder of Our Children’s Trust, posed to Judge Dana Christensen this week during a two-day hearing in a federal courthouse in Missoula, Montana.

The case, Lighthiser v. Trump, began in May when 22 young climate activists, aged 7 to 25, filed a lawsuit in the District of Montana asking the court to declare three Trump administration executive orders unconstitutional and prevent their implementation. The plaintiffs say the orders show the Trump administration’s intention to increase fossil fuel development, block renewable energy, and terminate congressionally mandated climate change science and research—all “under the false claim of an energy emergency, while the true emergency is that our fossil fuel-based energy system is polluting the air, water, lands, and climate on which Plaintiffs’ lives, liberties, and personal security depend.”

In some ways, Lighthiser v. Trump is the logical next step for OCT and the U.S. climate litigation movement, which aims to compel the government to take meaningful action to address the climate crisis—or prohibit it from making the crisis worse—through the judiciary. The lawsuit follows two of OCT’s recent wins, Held v. Montana and Navahine v. Hawaii Department of Transportation, and “further builds American constitutional jurisprudence on fossil fuel activities infringing the fundamental rights of youth,” according to the nonprofit law firm.

Sadly, the government lawyers never asked “have you youts given up your own use of fossil fuels and made your lives carbon neutral?” But, in fact, the Chief Executive does have the authority to put out those EOs, in the same way Biden apparently had authority to go the other way.

In other ways, Lighthiser is unlike anything that has come before. For one, this week’s hearing marked the first time a U.S. federal court heard live testimony in a constitutional climate change case. And, as Mat dos Santos, one of the OCT attorneys representing the plaintiffs, told me, “Lighthiser goes beyond the traditional climate cases that Our Children’s Trust is famous for, because it’s really a case about our democracy and whether this president has the power to act on his own initiative without any regard for how that power was supposed to be divided up amongst the other branches of government.”

Yeah, and it is all about force every American to comply with the insane, doomsday beliefs of the cult, while very few actually practice what they preach. They couldn’t really convince people to act in practice via 35 years of scaremongering. They couldn’t get as much legislation passed as they wanted. So, now they sue. If this makes it to the Supreme Court the cult will lose.

We know which way the Democrats will vote on this: will all the Republicans in Congress vote for it, or, will a few get squishy?

Congresswoman Hageman Introduces Legislation to Protect the American Taxpayer from Climate Change Reparations

Today, Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (WY-AL), alongside Congressman Tom Tiffany (WI-07), introduced legislation protecting the American taxpayer from attempts by international courts to impose climate change reparations on the U.S.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), issued an advisory opinion contending that international climate change treaties are binding on UN member states, and that breaching these agreements is an “international wrongful act.” According to the ICJ, countries that produce or consume fossil fuels could be subject to orders demanding they cease all “climate change” activities and pay full reparations to harmed nations.

Reps. Hageman and Tiffany’s bill would block the use of federal funds to pay a demand for reparations issued by any international bodies or courts for alleged violations of international law.

“The UN’s war on affordable and reliable energy is well known. This is just another effort to push forward with radical policies that have no basis in fact or science. Pursuant to the ICJ theory, every single country in the world would be subject to paying reparations, as every single country consumes fossil fuels. Yet, we know that such an outcome isn’t the UN’s intent. This is just another effort to force America to prop up the economies of failed states and impoverished nations. American citizens are not going to be forced to pay reparations based on vague, speculative claims about so-called climate damage,” said Rep. Hageman. “This bill protects both U.S. sovereignty and Congress’s constitutional authority. It guards against financial risks born of international lawsuits or opinions built on unproven assumptions.”

If other nations want to pay, have at it. It’s very sketchy as to if the US is even subject to the ruling by the ICJ, which is also non binding because it was just an advisory opinion. It makes the lawyers happy, though.

But, what if a Democrat wins in 2028? That wacko could start directing US money to the scam. This law could stop that.

If they were still respectable they would note the effect on the climate from things like land use, urban heat island effect, natural processes, and, oh yeah, the big ball of nuclear fire at the center of the solar system. But, no, they cannot even use the proper term which would be anthropogenic global warming. ‘Climate change’ replaced AGW in order to Blamestorm pretty much everything, including snow and cold weather

Climate change ‘beyond scientific dispute,’ National Academies report says

One of the United States’ most respected scientific bodies rejected claims from Trump administration officials that rising temperatures posed little danger, saying on Wednesday the scientific evidence of climate change was “beyond scientific dispute” and that impacts on the nation are worsening.

The conclusion from the the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine differs starkly from a draft report issued by the Energy Department in July, in which a panel of scientists known for their contrarian views argued that the risks of climate change have been overblown.

The nonprofit National Academies advise the government on scientific issues.

In sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s report, NASEM’s 135-page review of climate science says that our understanding of climate science has only improved since EPA in 2009 formally declared greenhouse gases a threat to human health and welfare.

That includes long-term observations that “confirm unequivocally” that human emissions are warming the planet, that climate change is already harming the health and welfare of U.S. citizens and that the severity of climate change increases “with every ton of greenhouse gases emitted.”

Reads more like blathering from a doomsday cult with skin in the game to keep the money train rolling

“Much of the understanding of climate change that was uncertain or tentative in 2009 is now resolved and new threats have been identified,” the report concluded. “These new threats and the areas of remaining uncertainty are under intensive investigation by the scientific community. The United States faces a future in which climate-induced harm continues to worsen and today’s extremes become tomorrow’s norms.”

I have a recommendation: everyone at the National Academies should immediately give up their own use of fossil fuels and make their lives carbon neutral. No one is allowed to travel to Brazil for COP30. The Academies should forgo all use of fossil fuels, AC, heating, and more at it’s offices, ban meat. And tell everyone who believes this report to do the same.

I can only hope so

It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.

Ten years ago this fall, scientists and diplomats from 195 countries gathered in Le Bourget, just north of Paris, and hammered out a plan to save the world. They called it, blandly, the Paris Agreement, but it was obviously a climate-politics landmark: a nearly universal global pledge to stave off catastrophic temperature rise and secure a more livable future for all. Barack Obama, applauding the agreement as president, declared that Paris represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.” (snip through several paragraphs of yapping about Paris Agreement)

A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29), the president of the host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, praised oil and gas as “gifts from God,” and though the annual conferences since Paris were often high-profile, star-studded affairs, this time there were few world leaders to be found. Joseph R. Biden, then still president, didn’t show. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris or President Xi Jinping of China or President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. Neither did President Emmanuel Macron of France, often seen as the literal face of Western liberalism, or President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, often seen as the face of an emergent movement of solidarity across the poor and middle-income world. In the run-up to the conference, an official U.N. report declared that no climate progress at all had been made over the previous year, and several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms.

This year’s conference, which takes place in Brazil this November, is meant to be more significant: COP30 marks 10 years since Paris, and all 195 parties to the 2015 agreement are supposed to arrive with updated decarbonization plans, called Nationally Determined Contributions, or N.D.C.s. But when one formal deadline passed this past February, only 15 countries — just 8 percent — had completed the assignment. Months later, more plans have trickled in, but arguably only one is actually compatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement, the climate scientist Piers Forster recently calculated, and more than half of them represent backsliding.

Perhaps they are all tired of it? Perhaps the politicians pushing the scam realize that the peasants are tired of it all, and politicians usually do not want to lose their positions, eh?

And neither is it a story particular to America. The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so. In many places — like in South America and in Europe — existing laws have already been weakened or are under pressure from shifting political coalitions now pushing to undermine them.

And therein lies a big problem: more and more citizens are noticing that this has less to do with science and more to do with Government controlling the citizens, all while the people implementing these laws and policies refuse to practice what they preach dictate

Few advocates believed naïvely in the caricatured versions of those propositions, but even so, it was seductive to imagine a kind of flywheel effect unfolding, with faster action enabling still faster action through public enthusiasm for a new and transformative green industrial revolution. At least when it came to politics, the flywheel never got spinning. Globally, concern about warming is still rising, but only slowly — and while large majorities in many countries say they support faster decarbonization, other polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about.

Yeah, Doing Something is popular in theory, but, when it comes time to practice it? Not so much. I also suspect that those in the 1st World are tired of the constant litany of doom and gloom. You can only take so much.

I hope this trend continues.