Senate Hearing Highlights Alleged CCP Links in Funding Climate-Related Lawsuits
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Congress must streamline federal environmental regulations and preempt state laws, or the nation’s energy producers will continue to be handicapped by climate-related litigation often sponsored by foreign financiers, including—some alleged in a recent Senate hearing—by the Chinese Communist Party.
Acknowledging he’s a “strong opponent” of preemption—when a higher level of government precludes, or “preempts,” actions by those below—Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said the matrix of federal, state, and local environmental legislation adopted since the 1970s is ripe for litigative exploitation.
“Congress should preempt state laws, and courts should read between the lines of congressional statutes to find preemption,” Kobach said during a June 25 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights Subcommittee.
A driving Trump administration theme is trimming federal laws to make compliance less costly, time-consuming, and confusing. Whittling back the realm of statutory superfluity in often-redundant federal, state, and local regulations related to the environment and energy production is among its primary aims.
Kobach called on senators to go beyond deregulation “so that we have a uniform national policy.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said there’s urgency in doing so because entities associated with China are allegedly taking advantage of the nation’s courts to subsidize “the left’s lawfare against American energy dominance.”
“We’re witnessing a systematic campaign against American energy, a coordinated assault by the radical left backed and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, to seize control of our courts, to weaponize litigation against U.S. energy producers, all to undermine American energy dominance,” he said.
Cruz outlined a “three-pronged assault” spearheaded by “dark money entities tied to the Chinese Communist Party” that pay “activist lawyers to flood our courts with lawsuits” and influence campaigns.
Even more insidious, he said, is the Union of Concerned Scientists’ seminars for judges that have “quietly captured and brainwashed the judiciary itself” in “closed-door trainings that indoctrinate judges to adopt the ideological goals of the ‘climate lawfare machine.’”
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Cruz cited a June report by State Armor, a think tank that helps states thwart “global security threats,” alleging a link between San Francisco-based nonprofit Energy Foundation China and “a slew of activist groups who work to phase out fossil fuels throughout the U.S.”
The State Armor report stated that Energy Foundation China has “funneled upwards of $12 million to U.S.-based climate advocacy groups since 2020,” Cruz said. “This is not remotely a grassroots nonprofit. It is a foreign policy weapon disguised as philanthropy run by Chinese Communist Party operatives.”
There’s fire with that smoke, Capital Research Center President Scott Walter agreed, noting, “It’s no accident … that China has deep ties to the environmentalist movement” across the globe, citing suspicions that Energy Foundation China, through New York-based Chinese-American Planning Council, assisted in influencing New York’s 2023 adoption of its Climate Change Superfund Act.
“The Chinese Communist Party has every incentive to support climate activism in America,” he said. “The Energy Foundation China scheme is not subtle. It’s headed by a former influential Chinese government official, and sends money to activists groups” and “activists in universities like Berkeley, UCLA, and Harvard.”
But, Walter added, “foreign nationals in China aren’t the only ones who attack our energy independence. Billionaires around the world add to the threat.”
Billionaires
Washington-based Capital Research Center was founded in 1984 to “examine how ... nonprofits spend money and get involved in politics and advocacy,” according to its website.Walter said Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest finances Intergenerational Environment Justice Fund, British hedge-fund billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn donates millions to the Center for Climate Integrity, and “then there’s the biggest foreign billionaire working to manipulate America’s politics, Hansjörg Wyss.”
The Swiss founder of medical-device manufacturer Synthes has “poured over $650 million into the American left,” he said.
“Home-grown billionaires” financing climate lawsuits include Hewlett, Rockefeller, Ford, and MacArthur donors that ”provide climate lawfare groups a half-billion dollars a year,” and Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s former Republican mayor and Democratic presidential candidate, Walter said.
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Actionable Remedies
Debate often spiraled into well-trod ideological trenches that only tangentially addressed the root issue: Too many laws engender too many lawsuits.
According to Columbia University Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change, climate-related litigation has tripled worldwide since 2017, with legal challenges to alleged violations of environmental laws also mushrooming in the United States.
Under its U.S. Climate Change Litigation database, the center on June 25 listed 1,341 pending federal statutory claims related to environmental laws, including 203 under the Clean Air Act, 252 under the Endangered Species Act, and 436 under the National Environmental Protection Act. Kobach was the only participant to offer actionable suggestions to remedy this.
Kansas attorney general since 2023, following two terms as secretary of state, Kobach gained national prominence for authoring one of the nation’s strictest voter identification laws in 2014.
As a veteran of “multiple environmental cases in this broad category of litigation,” Kobach focused on “what’s new in environmental litigation.”
Trends crowding court dockets include laws adopted by states, even by counties and cities, seeking to dictate policy beyond their jurisdictions, he said.
“In other words, the law doesn’t just regulate the state, it attempts to regulate the whole country,” Kobach said, citing California’s 2023 “advanced clean fleet regulation.”
That regulation mandates a transition to zero-emission trucks by 2035 for medium-duty vehicles, by 2042 for all other vehicles, he said.
“This regulation masquerades as an in-state rule but, really, it’s a nationwide rule because of California’s scope,” Kobach said. “Because so many ports are in California, trucks have to go through and if they go through California for one bit of one day, they’re subject to the regulations.”
In addition, he said, there are “lawsuits brought by cities and counties all over the country,” such as a case against ExxonMobil in Kansas where Ford County is “attempting to represent not just Ford County, not just Kansas counties, but all counties in America.”
These spur expensive legal engagements that plaintiffs don’t expect to win, but taxpayers must still pay for, Kobach said.
“We will continue these fights in court as state attorneys general, but we do need some help from Congress, and I think these are modest requests for legislation,” he said.
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