A pair of US Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from a legal firm with ties to the Biden administration over a series of ‘nuisance’ law suits against major oil companies funded with money from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers..On Monday morning Senate Commerce Committee member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) penned a letter to San Francisco-based Sher Edling demanding information related to the firm’s barrage of lawsuits targeting energy companies. .And specifically, the role the acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Ann Carlson, played in these lawsuits while serving as a professor at UCLA Law School..“Over the past five years, your law firm, Sher Edling LLP, has launched a barrage of lawsuits aimed at bankrupting oil and gas companies. While people may use their resources to bring whatever cases they want — even those that may be so frivolous as to be sanctionable — it appears that left-wing funds are footing the bill for Sher Edling’s climate crusade. Radical activists are backing these lawsuits, too,” they wrote..“Ms. Carlson’s prior work for your firm raises concerns about her current efforts to extralegally create new climate policy through vehicle fuel economy standards. As the Republican leaders of the Senate and House committees with oversight over energy policy and NHTSA, we seek information concerning the third-party donations funding your firm’s climate cases as well as Ms. Carlson’s role in those lawsuits.”.The letter notes Sher Edling has established a niche for itself in the so-called 'climate cases' field and has filed more than twenty such cases on behalf of Democrat-controlled states, counties and cities since 2017. .Overall, Sher Edling has filed lawsuits on behalf of the States of Delaware, Minnesota, Rhode Island and New Jersey, and the cities of Washington, DC, New York City, Baltimore, Honolulu and San Francisco, in addition to several other cities and counties nationwide. .The lawsuits allege fossil fuel companies have waged campaigns of deception about the science of climate change for decades and are thus liable for damages from major weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes..In a pattern likely to be replicated in Canada, the firm shopped these lawsuits to jurisdictions around the US to provide legal services at no cost unless it obtained a “settlement against the industry.” So far, however, none have settled..“It appears that Sher Edling is not really working on these lawsuits on a contingency basis, but rather the lawsuits are being funded, tax-free, by wealthy liberals via dark money pass-through funds.”.On its website, Sher Edling says it “represents cities, counties, and states in lawsuits to hold fossil fuel industry defendants accountable for their decades-long campaigns of deception about the science of climate change and the role their products play in causing it, as well as their failure to take steps to avoid the harm they knew would arise from the use of their products or even to warn anyone about it.”.Further, Cruz and Comer alleged Carlson provided professional services to the law firm for years before she was appointed to the NHSTA while promoting policies designed to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. .They also accuse her of coordinating funding from wealthy Democrat supporters — including DiCaprio — and providing ‘pro-bono’ consulting services to states such as Hawaii to launch the suits..Her appointment to the NHTSA was initially withdrawn by US President Biden in May, who then appointed her to the same position in an ‘acting’ capacity to avoid a Senate confirmation hearing..“Moreover, it appears that Ms. Carlson has moved from attacking traditional energy through litigation to attacking it through regulation: on July 28, 2023, NHTSA proposed stringent fuel economy standards that, as even NHTSA admits, will make purchasing cars less affordable in the name of reducing “the impacts and risks associated with climate change,” they wrote.
