2021年12月9日 来源：纽约每日新闻
There is an old Albert Einstein saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Welcome to New York City’s never-ending attempt to sue and blame corporations for climate change. With new leadership in Gracie Mansion, it’s time to break this litigation insanity.
Earlier this year, outgoing Mayor de Blasio grabbed headlines when he announced the city was suing energy companies over climate change. This case is the city’s third climate lawsuit in the past 20 years — all based on variations of the fact that energy use emits carbon dioxide.
We all know climate change is a serious problem. It is a byproduct of modern society. Electrification, refrigerating food and cooling and heating homes were some of the greatest human health developments of the last century.
How we achieved those advancements in the first place is not how we are maintain them in the future. The only way to tackle climate change is to innovate new technologies that will allow us to source and use energy sustainably, among many other things.
The mayor’s lawsuits will do nothing to aid this transition or solve climate change. The previous lawsuits failed for good reason. The first was filed in 2004 by then-New York City Mayor Bloomberg. He joined several states in suing the nation’s major electric companies to try to get a court order against their operations.
The Supreme Court in 2011 unanimously rejected this case. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, said judges should not get involved in setting national climate policy. Climate change is an important issue, and Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency are “better equipped to do the job than individual district judges issuing ad hoc, case-by-case” decisions.
The city’s response? File more climate lawsuits — and get others to do the same. In 2012, the architects behind the city’s litigation put out a report saying they still believed “the courts offer the best current hope” for imposing their political agenda, which includes a carbon penalty. At a 2016 meeting in New York City, they said litigation also gives them a platform for creating a “scandal.”
New York then became the center of this litigation campaign. The state filed a lawsuit intended to drive the vilification of energy manufacturers. De Blasio filed the city’s second climate lawsuit, this time targeting energy manufacturers and saying they should have to pay billions of dollars to the city.
At this point a former mayor, Mike Bloomberg also began funding the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law to help drive similar lawsuits around the country. The center is paying salaries of attorneys it is placing in government offices to file these lawsuits — an arrangement that has raised serious ethical problems and been banned in some states.
Most courts are seeing through this ploy. The federal judge hearing the city’s second case said it was clear the city was “trying to dress a wolf up in sheep’s clothing.” He said this case is no different from the city’s previous lawsuit, and the Supreme Court already said it is not the job of courts to set climate policy. Besides, the court continued, “Aren’t the plaintiffs using the product?”
Soon after, a local state judge threw out a climate lawsuit brought by the State of New York, calling the allegations “hyperbolic” and “ill-conceived.”
Earlier this year, when the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the city’s second lawsuit, it accused New York City of “effectively seek[ing] to replace [the] carefully crafted frameworks” of national and international law over climate policy with a “patchwork” of state lawsuits. The federal appellate court also said the lawsuit “ignores economic reality” and risks “upsetting the careful balance that has been struck between the prevention of global warming, a project that necessarily requires national standards and global participation, on the one hand, and energy production, economic growth, foreign policy, and national security, on the other.”
If New York City politicos want to do something meaningful on climate, the next mayor should use the city’s position as the world’s economic engine to drive progress on climate technology.
It should look to lead partnerships with energy manufacturers and other innovators that can accelerate the breakthroughs we need so modern life will not degrade the climate. New York City could then be the center of the next generation of green jobs and climate successes.
Already, this type of collaboration has led the cost of wind and solar farms to fall dramatically while output has soared. Cars, airplanes and factories are more efficient. And communities are not dealing with impacts of climate change on their own.
As Einstein also reportedly said, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” New York City should not squander this important moment by continuing the failed mistakes of the past.