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| Wed, 13th Jan 2021 13:41:00 |
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Amy Coney Barrett Should Recuse Herself from Big Oil’s Supreme Court Case |
January 19th, the day before Joe Biden’s Inauguration, is one of those moments when past, present, and future will collide, this time in the halls of the Supreme Court. The Justices will hear a case (BP P.L.C. v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore), and the most interesting question is: How many Justices will there be? Because, as new research makes clear, Amy Coney Barrett, the junior member of that august bench, should recuse herself.
The case before the Supreme Court hinges on a narrow procedural question, but the underlying lawsuit is one of almost two dozen brought by cities and states that want the oil companies to compensate them for the damages—the rising seas and the gathering winds—caused by the fossil-fuel industry’s products. They contend, and the record leaves little doubt, that the industry knew for decades that it was triggering dangerous climate change. These were the biggest lies that companies have ever told: if Philip Morris killed us one smoker at a time, BP and ExxonMobil and the rest are taking out the entire planet, as the new record that the world set for billion-dollar “natural” disasters in 2020 makes clear. That list of duplicitous companies includes Shell, which is where Barrett comes in: her father, Michael, was an attorney for Shell for almost three decades. During her Senate-confirmation hearings, Barrett provided a recusal list that she’d used during her years as an appeals-court judge—it included four Shell subsidiaries, but not Shell Offshore, Inc., even though her father represented that Shell entity in court and administrative forums for at least thirteen years. He also worked for the American Petroleum Institute for two decades, chairing its subcommittee on exploration and production law. And those two roles could be crucial to the case before the Supreme Court: as Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which has played a key role in the fight to hold oil companies responsible, points out, Barrett père could be called for a deposition. “Justice Barrett’s father potentially has direct knowledge of and operational involvement in how Shell managed climate threats. He also faces reputational risk from his association with colleagues engaged in decades of corporate deception.”
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