States and localities have filed waves of lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry to make energy companies pay for damages that communities face from climate change. Threatened with potentially huge financial penalties, industry and its supporters recently turned to the Supreme Court for help — without success. Now, Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, has launched a new line of attack that could help industry by focusing on the money that’s allegedly behind the climate cases.
At a June hearing on Capitol Hill, Cruz accused China of funding the lawsuits in order to cripple U.S. oil and gas producers and to strengthen Beijing’s position in global energy markets. If the community court cases succeed, Cruz said U.S. energy production would fall and prices would rise. “And the biggest winner in all of this: China, who’s paying the bills,” he said.
However, Cruz’s office has not offered evidence that China or a China-linked nonprofit that Cruz identified by name has funded climate lawsuits in the United States. A spokesperson for Cruz, Macarena Martinez, provided NPR with a response from ChatGPT that reads, in part: “What’s not publicly demonstrated (so far) is a direct, documented grant-to-lawsuit pipeline.”
Cruz’s unsubstantiated claim is part of a yearslong effort by the fossil-fuel industry and its allies to fight lawsuits that state and local governments have filed against oil and gas companies, according to environmental advocates and Democratic lawmakers. The litigation alleges that corporations misled the public for decades about the dangers of burning fossil fuels, the primary cause of climate change. The lawsuits seek money to help communities cope with the risks and harms from global warming, including more extreme storms, floods and heat waves.
For years, Republican lawmakers have probed the funding sources for America’s environmental movement. That scrutiny has focused more recently on climate litigation as cases proliferated around the country. This summer, a group of Republican state attorneys general called for a federal law to protect energy companies from “activist-funded climate lawsuits.”
Ryan Meyers, general counsel for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for the oil and gas industry, said in a statement to NPR that the climate lawsuits are “baseless” and a “coordinated campaign” against energy companies. “Climate policy belongs in Congress,” Meyers said, “not a patchwork of courtrooms.”
The American Petroleum Institute would not comment on the record about Cruz’s allegation that China is funding the lawsuits.
John Chung-En Liu, an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University who has studied Chinese climate propaganda on social media, says framing U.S….
Read More: Ted Cruz claims without evidence that China is funding U.S. climate
