The rightwing campaign to control how US judges view the climate crisis

As cities and states sue big oil for billions in damages over allegations that it covered up the dangers of its products, rightwing organizations are attempting to discredit the wave of litigation. They claim the lawyers behind it are teaming up with an environmentally focused legal education non-profit to bias federal judges against oil companies.

But it is actually fossil fuel-backed organizations that are attempting to sway the judiciary in their favor, one of those law firms is countering. Evidence of this includes judicial seminars hosted by one such group featuring pro-industry speakers such as the current energy secretary, Chris Wright, in his former occupation as a fracking executive.

The stakes of this rightwing influence campaign could not be higher, said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity. “The goal is to create an atmosphere around climate litigation that makes the issue seem politicized, or like something that judges should rule on cautiously,” he said. “If judges are led to believe that the cases are somehow too political, or that climate science is sketchy … they’re less likely to rule against defendants in climate lawsuits.”

For three years, Republican lawmakers have gone after the Washington DC-based non-profit Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and its Climate Judiciary Project, which holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. The project aims to provide “evidence-based judicial education about climate science and how it arises in the law”, according to ELI’s website.

But the Republican-led House judiciary committee claims that ELI has conducted “improper attempts … to influence federal judges”. The House judiciary chair, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and House judiciary subcommittee on courts chair, Darrell Issa of California, requested documents and information regarding the allegations in August, and formally launched an investigation into the group this year.

Among the groups being investigated for alleged links to ELI is Sher Edling, a law firm that has filed more than two dozen climate deception lawsuits on behalf of states and municipalities against major fossil fuel companies. In a letter to the committee late last month which was provided to the Guardian, William Pittard, an attorney representing the firm, said: “There is nothing extraordinary, and certainly nothing nefarious, about Sher Edling’s touchpoints with ELI, which are minimal.”

In fact, Pittard wrote in the missive, which was first covered by E&E News, Sher Edling’s connection to ELI “pales in relation” to its links with companies targeted by climate accountability litigation. The organization has taken funding from BP, Chevron, and Koch Industries – all defendants in the lawsuits. Its board has also included a BP executive and a Shell executive, and currently includes a lawyer who represents BP in three climate accountability cases and a legal officer who used to work for Shell affiliates.

Sher Edling is not the only law firm targeted by the inquiry into ELI. Last month, the committee subpoenaed the attorney representing Multnomah county in its 2023 case against major oil companies.

Fossil fuel-tied groups have gone after ELI to distract from their own attempts to influence the judges who may preside over climate lawsuits, Pittard wrote. Among those endeavors: seminars hosted by the Law and Economics Center (LEC)’s Judicial Education Project, housed within George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law.

The LEC has long come under fire for its expense-paid judicial seminars, attended by federal judges, and for accepting significant funding from fossil fuel firms, including ones targeted by climate accountability litigation.

Chris Wright appearances

In his previous role as the head of a fracking company, Wright spoke three times before private audiences of judges at events hosted by the LEC, Pittard notes in his letter.

The current energy department head spoke at one of the program’s seminars in June of 2024, Pittard noted, citing a publicly available agenda. Three months earlier, Liberty Energy, the onshore oilfield services which Wright founded and led, sued the Securities and Exchange Commission over a Biden-era rule requiring companies to report climate-related risks.

Wright also appeared before judges at the program twice in June 2021, another agenda shows. In a November 2024 blog post, David Henderson, a fellow presenter at the same program and a rightwing economist, reflects on what Wright discussed.

“I learned a lot from his talk: his knowledge of oil and gas, obviously, but also two other things – his basis for skepticism about how bad global warming will be and his willingness to go public when doing so wasn’t obviously popular,” Henderson wrote.

Liberty Energy is listed as a member of the American Energy Institute, a rightwing, pro-fossil fuel thinktank which has attacked ELI for “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science”. In 2024, the Guardian found that the organization has ties to Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightwing takeover of the US judiciary who helped handpick Donald Trump’s supreme court nominees.

It is not clear which judges were present for Wright’s presentations. In a statement to EE News, a LEC spokesperson said that though the program’s judicial seminars are closed to the public for “judicial security reasons”, the judges who attend programs are listed in its annual report. But the report appears to list everyone who registered for LEC programming, not attendees at specific seminars.

Others with financial interest in the fossil fuel industry have spoken at recent LEC seminars, Pittard says in his letter. Just weeks ago, one of the program’s symposiums featured Phil Goldberg, who is special counsel to an initiative of a trade group that opposes climate accountability lawsuits and whose board includes top brass from five defendants in climate accountability litigation. He is also a managing partner of the law firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, which represents Murphy Oil in one such suit, Pittard noted.

The LEC, Department of Energy and Wright did not respond to requests for comment.

Fossil fuel funded judicial education

Leo in 2016 reportedly brokered a $20m anonymous gift to rename the law school which houses the LEC after the late rightwing supreme court justice, Antonin Scalia. The LEC itself is also funded by oil companies, including ExxonMobil – a defendant in several city and state lawsuits against big oil – and the Charles Koch Foundation, an affiliate of a defendant in one such lawsuit. As ProPublica recently reported, the center told the Charles Koch Foundation it gives judges a “healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of lawsuits they are hearing”.

“No surprise: Fossil fuel prefers that judges rely on industry-funded ‘education’ seminars teaching a false version of climate science,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator who raised the alarm about the center in a letter to the judicial conference late last month.

Records reviewed by the Guardian show the center also sought support in 2023 from the the charitable foundation of hedge fund billionaire, Paul Singer, including for its Judicial Education Project. Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, holds a large stake in Suncor Energy, acquired Citgo in November 2025, and has a stake of over 5% in BP; all three companies are defendants in climate accountability litigation.

“We greatly appreciate your support for our important and timely work,” says a letter from the center, indicating that the foundation had previously backed the project.

In March, Donald Kochan, who runs the LEC’s Judicial Education Project, wrote in the Washington Examiner that ELI is “secretly training judges on ways to evade the strictures of the law in global-warming cases under the guise of ‘education’.” But the group’s judicial education programming merely exists to ensure that judges have a basic understanding of climate issues so they can litigate them fairly, said Davies.

“To have a non-scientist fossil fuel boss like Chris Wright coming in and pretending to teach them about climate science? That’s not the same thing,” he said.