“@USChamber is putting lives and livelihoods at risk by continuing to block action on the climate crisis. They need to decide who they really fight for: ‘American businesses large and small,’ or fossil fuel special interests with deep pockets.”
Litigation
The Chamber organized and led the effort to defeat the landmark Clean Power Plan of the Obama administration.
The U.S. Chamber Litigation Center is extremely active and has been involved in over 2300 lawsuits in the last twelve years, either as plaintiff or amicus curiae.
The Chamber defended BP from the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. It blocked the EPA’s Clean Power Plan in 2016. The Chamber uses its large legal resources to put the interests of fossil fuel companies ahead of citizens and the environment.
2019-2020
The Chamber is gearing up to defend the Trump Administration’s replacement of the Clean Power Plan, the Affordable Clean Energy plan, in court.
ACE has substantially lower GHG emissions reductions than the Clean Power Plan, putting the US’s emissions on a track consistent with 4°C+ warming by 2100 warming globally.
2019
The Chamber filed two briefs to protect Shell Oil and Suncor Energy from litigation by local governments in Colorado and Rhode Island who were suing to hold the companies liable for climate change.
The briefs were filed in two Federal Appeals Courts to reverse the remand orders and to have the cases taken out from the District courts.
2019
2017
The Chamber filed a brief in a case against 18 states and 2 cities, who were protecting an EPA rule requiring new coal-fired power stations capture a percentage of their emissions with carbon capture.
This helped secure the building of a new generation of coal-fired power plants.
2017
In 2017, the Bureau of Land Management repealed a rule that required hydraulic fracturing operations on Federal and Indian lands to follow certain standards, including methane leaks, and waste water disposal.
We can thank the Chamber for helping to sue to make that happen!
2016
The Chamber filed a brief against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, arguing that it “unlawfully attempts to radically transform the electric sector and usurp states’ traditional authority over the electric grid.”
The Chamber won: the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the Clean Power Plan.
2016
As soon as President Obama announced that he would limit offshore gas & oil drilling in Alaska, the Chamber threatened to sue the administration.
The Chamber followed up by asking President Trump to undo the regulation. It worked.
2015
The Chamber filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s new Ozone Standard.
“The EPA set an unattainable mandate with this new ozone standard that will slow economic growth opportunities,” said William Kovacs, senior vice president, Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The new standard was based on thousands of new studies that had been published since the last review in 2008. It limited ground-level ozone to 70 parts per billion. Ozone causes harm to the respiratory system, and aggravates asthma and other lung diseases. Higher levels of ozone disproportionately affects children, older adults, and outdoor workers.
2014
In 2014, the Chamber began to convene groups of fossil fuel industry lobbyists, lawyers, and political strategists to devise strategies to oppose future regulatory actions that might limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The litigation began that year.
Two years, later the Chamber boasted about its leadership role in killing the Clean Power Plan in this op-ed.
In 2011, the US Chamber helped sue to make a special exception to expedite oil & gas exploration in Polar bear habitats.
2011
The Chamber filed a brief urging the US court of Appeals to reject a challenge to the federal offshore permitting process that would have halted offshore oil and natural gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico.
Less than a year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
2011
The Chamber filed to sue the EPA to overturn its finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare.
2010
The Chamber sued the EPA for trying to regulate car emissions.
2010
The Chamber tried to set up the “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century,” to discredit climate science so as to put off science-based climate legislation.
The Chamber filed to sue the EPA for saying that climate change is caused by humans. They used absurd, pseudo-scientific language. From their report: “Climate Change reconsidered”:
“It is arbitrary for EPA to rely on 21 years of twentieth-century warming as near-conclusive proof of human warming but then claim that the preceding 31 years of cooling and the following 13 years of no warming prove nothing”
“Over the last 65 years, temperatures have mostly been steady or declining, while CO2 levels have steadily increased”
“empirical data from independently derived temperature records show the pattern demanded by this theory [global warming] and predicted by models does not exist”
There is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that climate change is human-made.