The U.S. Supreme Court very recently granted certiorari in Suncor Energy v. Boulder on the question of whether federal law preempts Boulder’s state-law tort claims for alleged injuries from purported interstate/international greenhouse gas emissions. Before the court hears the case, however, let’s examine the outsize yet mostly unknown influence fomenting this litigation that the Environmental Law Institute, Climate Judiciary Project, and other similar organizations have upon both the Federal Judicial Center and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Imagine that the National Rifle Association, “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization,” wrote a chapter on Second Amendment rights in the FJC’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which is supposed to be an objective, neutral reference for judges. Anti-Second Amendment and pro-gun control groups would freak out because the NRA has an obvious agenda: it advocates, files lawsuits, lobbies for legislation, and is proudly pro-Second Amendment.
That’s why it was important that 27 state attorneys general, led by West Virginia’s JB McCuskey (R), as well as the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, led by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Darrell Issa (R-CA), alerted the FJC to serious bias problems in a reference manual’s “climate science” chapter because it created an appearance of impropriety, subverted prior Supreme Court precedent, and potentially compromised judicial integrity.
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Congress created the FJC in 1967 as the research, education, and training arm of the federal judiciary. The FJC informs and/or trains thousands of federal, state, and municipal judges. It is supposed to be neutral, objective, and non-partisan. Thus, it and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine never should have published the reference manual’s tendentious chapter on “climate science” because biased parties wrote it and it strongly favored “climate change” plaintiffs.
On Feb. 6, 2026, Judge Robin Rosenberg, the FJC’s director, informed McCuskey that the FJC “omitted the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition.” Rosenberg and the FJC board apparently agreed that the chapter was sufficiently biased as to require its removal.
The controversy continues, however, because the pro-plaintiff “climate science” chapter remains in the version found on the National Academies’ website. Basic common sense necessitates that, because the FJC deleted the chapter, the National Academies, which is also supposed to be objective, neutral, and non-partisan, must also delete it. Furthermore, the FJC and the National Academies must make sure that any future copies of the reference manual’s paperback edition do not include the deleted chapter.
Thus, on Feb. 19, 2026, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R) and 21 state attorney general co-signatories wrote to the National Academies, which Congress created in 1863, querying whether it will delete the offending chapter. Knudsen stated that “when biased theories are presented to judges as fact and neutral reference tools, it compromises judicial impartiality and can tip the scale on pending litigation,” and that, because the federal government provides more than $200 million of the National Academies’s budget, “Taxpayer money should not be used for political causes, particularly by an entity that Congress created to provide independent and objective scientific reports.”
The chapter states that “the effects of climate change will become increasingly severe and pervasive as GHGs [greenhouse gas emissions] continue to accumulate in the atmosphere,” but that is a frequently contested allegation, not a fact. It also says that global warming and sea level projections (i.e., estimates) “are not intended to convey the world as it will be but rather the world as it could be,” thus seeking to eliminate the requirement for actual evidence to prove “climate change” causation and damages.
The chapter’s authors, Jessica Wentz of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, and Radley Horton of Columbia University’s Climate School, are completely biased in favor of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in purported damages against fossil fuel corporations. Their chapter’s substantive basis is “climate event attribution,” which is the plaintiffs’ legal theory in climate litigation.
Wentz’s CJP bio states that one of her specialties is to “inform legal obligations on the part of both government and corporate actors to … compensate for climate damages.” She began her legal career at Earthjustice, formerly known as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. She has consulted or participated in dozens of “climate change” litigations and served as a plaintiffs’ witness in Juliana/Earth Guardians v. U.S., where the ultra-liberal 9th Circuit dismissed the case.
Michael Burger, the Sabin Center’s executive director, is of counsel at Sher Edling, the main plaintiffs’ law firm bringing mass-tort climate suits. He advised Wentz and Horton on the biased chapter, which did not disclose his affiliations or case involvements. Burger’s bio states that he sues companies “for the climate change related damage they knowingly caused.” Like Wentz, he began his legal career at Earthjustice and litigated, consulted on, or participated in dozens of “climate change” cases.
As Knudsen noted, Wentz has argued that “the world needs to phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible in order to avert potentially catastrophic levels of global warming and climate change.” Horton has argued that “it’s absolutely critical that there be a global effort to do everything we can to dramatically draw down emissions.” If the reference manual had to have a “climate change” chapter at all, it was inappropriate to have them be the authors and Burger advise them. They bewail research “funded by fossil fuel interests or other industry actors,” but hypocritically appreciate billionaires and other dark-money sources funding pro-climate change/anti-fossil fuel litigation.
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Even worse, the chapter serves as a biased, interested, ex parte advocate with direct access to judges but no cross-examination or other challenge. The chapter, therefore, improperly subverts the Supreme Court’s 1993 precedent in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, which created a systematic framework for judges to assess the reliability and relevance of expert witness testimony and exclude pseudoscientific or unreliable expert testimony.
In light of the Supreme Court’s post-Daubert cases of General Electric Co. v. Joiner (1997) and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999), Rosenberg was right to strike the chapter, as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine also must.
John Shu is a legal scholar and commentator who served in the White House under Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.