Alana Goodman writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one of piece of the climate alarmists’ operation.
A dark money group of left-wing environmental activists has been quietly “training” judges overseeing climate-related lawsuits, hosting them at multi-day, all-expenses-paid seminars in locales like Napa Valley and Palm Beach. Judges who attend these luxury retreats—where they are subject to indoctrination—are not required to report them in ethics disclosures.
At the “Judicial Leaders in Climate Science” seminars, representatives of the activist group, the Climate Judiciary Project, present to the judges contested claims on climate and other environmental issues as settled, scientific fact. Judges who attend the seminars are also expected to make a year-long commitment to participate in CJP events, take online classes, and, perhaps most importantly, help identify and recruit other judges who have influence over environmental law. The secretive program is designed to function like a judicial Tupperware party, with an ever widening circle of judges recruited to normalize controversial and often unsubstantiated climate theories.
A trove of previously unseen documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, including dozens of internal emails, provides a new window into the otherwise opaque operations of the CJP, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Environmental Law Institute, which claims to be “nonpartisan” but has deep ties to the climate movement’s far left.
While neither the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) nor the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) are required to disclose their donors, the IRS filings of other nonprofit organizations show they include left-wing charities like the Picower Foundation—recently renamed the Freedom Together Foundation—which has recently focused on “democracy, gender, and racial justice.” The late Jeffry Picower, whose massive fortune now funds the Freedom Together Foundation, was the single largest beneficiary of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
While judicial ethics rules in the state and federal judiciaries typically require judges to disclose their attendance at privately funded seminars—and when they receive free travel and lodging—seminars hosted by the CJP like “Judicial Leaders in Climate Science” are not subject to those rules because the organization has managed to partner with “educational groups” like the Federal Judicial Center. …
