JAMES DICKEY AND IVAN LONDON: Minnesota Is Hijacking National Energy Policy

The Trump administration is suing Michigan and Hawaii over their stated plans to sue energy companies for alleged climate change harms. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison should watch out because he’s probably next.

Minnesota’s lawsuit against energy producers is a naked attempt to reshape national energy policy that will have global repercussions for costs. In other words, bad decisions by Minnesota courts will skyrocket prices for consumers everywhere, which is explicitly against the Trump administration’s energy policies.

Ellison’s lawsuit claims that energy production that results in burning gasoline and natural gas has caused global climate change. Yet Ellison’s beef with the companies isn’t about harm from climate change but what energy producers supposedly have said or not said to the public about the energy they produce for our nation. He also faults these companies for having funded research by organizations that disagreed with the State’s view of the climate science. (RELATED: ‘War On Coal Is Finally Over’: Energy Experts Say Trump Admin’s Deregulation Agenda Could Fuel Coal’s Revival)

It’s part of a larger coordinated effort to use litigation to lay the groundwork for an economy-wide green energy transition and to secure additional income for state budgets. Democratic prosecutors in nine states, more than a dozen cities and counties, and Washington, D.C. have brought similar cases using the same playbook to try to keep the deliberations in state courts. In Puerto Rico, “similar” turned out to be identical, as Judge Aida Delgado-Colon discovered when large blocks of text in a complaint filed on behalf of San Juan matched word-for-word a different lawsuit by 16 Puerto Rican municipalities the year before.

Climate activists found Ellison a willing partner for persecuting energy companies when they sold him on the idea of getting millions of dollars a year for Minnesota by securing a settlement like the tobacco master settlement agreement but with energy companies as the target.

Attorney General Ellison has admitted that Minnesota’s special assistant attorneys general were paid for by the New York University School of Law’s climate-alarmist group, the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. The purpose of that funding is to advance “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions,” said then-executive director David J. Hayes. If this troubles you, you’re on to something: just imagine the reaction if an immigration-hawk group paid staffers’ salaries at the Minnesota attorney general’s office to coordinate deportations with ICE.

Minnesota’s demand in the lawsuit is mind-boggling: a gag order on energy producers’ speech, a forced “public education campaign” about supposed climate change myths, and an order for the energy companies “to disgorge all profits” because of their speech. The last bit is the kicker: Minnesota’s case is really just a virtue-signaling cash grab dressed in legalese.

If the case continues, Minnesotans will reap the whirlwind sown by their attorney general in the form of unreliable sources of energy, a crippled economy and astronomically high prices for travel and home-heating. Every state in the union would reel from this economic disaster’s ripple effect, which is why 19 states asked the Supreme Court this year to halt these lawsuits by Minnesota and four other states.

Minnesota should not try to set the entire country’s climate policy. Only Congress—where Minnesota and other states have elected representatives representing their interests—can do that. Minnesota’s appellate courts should end this charade—though they have so far balked.

Lawsuits like this one have already been rejected by courts in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey and partially dismissed in Delaware. For the sake of every American, Minnesota judges must follow suit and let federal courts litigate the issues that affect the entire nation. If they don’t, they should expect the Trump administration to come knocking.

James V. F. Dickey is managing attorney for the Upper Midwest Law Center and Ivan London is a senior attorney at the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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