Climate

Inside Climate  News - In a setback to the Trump administration’s extraordinary legal campaign against state climate action, a federal judge threw out the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to prevent the state of Hawaii from suing oil companies for damages.

Trump administration lawyers had claimed that Hawaii, by trying to sue fossil fuel companies, was standing in the way of the national effort to secure reliable sources of domestic energy. 

But Judge Helen Gillmor of the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii on Wednesday ruled that such a contention was too speculative to be the basis of a lawsuit. 

“The United States’ alleged injury depends on multiple layers of unpredictable future events,” Gillmor wrote, noting the Trump administration filed the case without even seeing Hawaii’s lawsuit (the state filed it the following day). The nature of the lawsuit, whether Hawaii would win, what the fossil fuel industry would do in reaction and how that reaction would affect the United States all were unknown, the judge said.