What do judicial ethics codes have to do with climate deception?
It all comes down to simple math.
Every year, the Supreme Court receives many thousands of cert petitions.
To grant a writ of certiorari,
four of the nine justices must agree to take one of these cases.
Given that lower threshold,
any time a justice recuses themselves based on conflicts of interest
it reduces the likelihood that a case will be heard.
In this case, multiple justices have conflicts of interest that should take them out of the running to consider these suits
—if such principles matter to the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.
One of these conflicted justices is Amy Coney Barrett.
Barrett’s father,
Michael Coney, worked for nearly three decades as one of Shell’s top attorneys,
during which time he was also a
“major participant” in the American Petroleum Institute.
Coney was at Shell in 1988,
when the company issued a “confidential” report
projecting that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause
“fast and dramatic” increases in global temperatures that
“could have major social, economic, and political consequences.”
He was at Shell a year later,
when the company produced another “confidential group planning” document predicting that,
if fossil fuels were not phased out,
climate change would cause
“more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges”
that would create so much chaos that
“civilization could prove a fragile thing.”
He was still there as Shell began redesigning its own infrastructure to prepare for that
“violent weather”
the company knew was coming.
And Coney remained at Shell over the following decade,
while the company played a lead role in Big Oil’s fraudulent campaign to lock us into those nightmare climate scenarios it predicted.
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