Democratic Maryland governor Wes Moore announced late last year he would commission a climate “study” aimed at assessing “the undue burden Marylanders are paying for extreme weather events” so that fossil fuel companies can be coerced into paying some sort of climate reparations. Moore didn’t mention it, but the left-wing, climate-obsessed Rockefeller Family Fund chipped in $30,000 for the study, raising questions about the study’s impartiality, the Free Beacon‘s Thomas Catenacci reports. We aren’t holding our breath for the results.
The RFF—established in 1967 by the liberal great-grandchildren of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller—says oil companies (the source of their generational wealth) “advance a business model that accelerates the climate crisis” and that the Maryland study is intended to make those companies pay up. The RFF said in a December press release that the study would “lay the groundwork for a Maryland climate superfund bill, which would require fossil fuel companies to pay for a portion of the state’s climate adaptation costs identified through the study”—which is a weird thing to say before the study is actually conducted and the findings presumably unknown—but did not disclose its role in funding the research.
Blue states like New York and Vermont have already passed “climate superfund” laws, which stipulate that oil companies helped cause extreme weather events like floods and wildfires and have to pay damages to compensate for them. Both states are facing lawsuits from the Trump administration arguing that the laws illegally usurp federal emissions regulations.
The move comes as the RFF—which sits on more than $200 million in total assets, according to its latest tax filing—also supports lawsuits seeking to compel oil companies to pay damages by holding them responsible for climate change. “Such suits have largely been unsuccessful, including in Maryland, where the state’s Supreme Court recently dismissed three lawsuits from Democratic-led jurisdictions that accused the likes of BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron of causing costly weather events,” Catenacci writes. “The RFF-backed study, then, could be the first step toward securing payouts from oil companies through the legislative process rather than the judicial one.”
Hellbound and Down 