Trump is Right to Take On the Climate Litigation Complex

A new report from the National Academy of Sciences purports to support 'extreme weather' litigation

There is a particular kind of institutional decay that announces itself not through incompetence but through overreach — the moment a body built to advise quietly converts itself into an advocacy outfit. That moment arrived in plain view last week when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a 253-page report claiming that scientists can now attribute individual heatwaves and rainstorms to man-made emissions “with a high degree of confidence”, and wildfires, droughts and cyclones with “moderate confidence”. Two days later President Trump did something no prior occupant of the White House had quite dared to do: he called the report what it is on Truth Social: “Fraudulent, biased and misleading,” ordering federal suspension and debarment officials to review the Academies’ conduct and taxpayers’ exposure to what he termed “Climate Fraud”.

The howls of outrage were immediate and predictable. But strip away the theatre of a Presidential Truth Social post — capital letters, “Radical Left Dumocrats”, the invented spelling — and what remains is a serious institutional question that deserved to be asked years ago: has the National Academy of Sciences become an advocacy organisation wearing the borrowed authority of ‘consensus science’?

From weights and measures to trial-lawyer auxiliary

Congress chartered the National Academies in 1863 for a modest and useful purpose: advising the government on technical matters such as the calibration of currency and the protection of ship hulls from corrosion. It is worth dwelling on how far the institution has travelled from that brief. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board observed in its own broadside against the report, published the same weekend under the pointed headline ‘A Climate Coup at the National Academies of Science’, the new document explicitly frames itself as “relevant to policy and legal decisions pertaining to climate change and liability for losses sustained as a result of extreme weather and climate events”. That is not the language of scientific advice. It is the language of a legal brief.

The report goes further, noting that its methodology could help state and local governments demonstrate the “concrete injury” needed to establish standing in lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, and that it might “inform” measures such as Vermont’s climate superfund law — which empowers state officials to calculate the “financial impact” of greenhouse gas emissions and then demand payment from energy companies to cover it. As the Journal‘s editors put it with admirable bluntness, “the point is to put a scientific gloss on a coercive exercise of government power”. The scientific gloss provides a legal strategy, built to order, for a litigation campaign that has been running for the better part of a decade against the companies that keep the lights on.