California has become central to the world-wide climate change debate, as some local officials, spurred on by trial attorneys and activists have waged an aggressive legal campaign against energy manufacturers. The public deserves to know the high cost of this litigation, who is behind this assault on California’s business climate, and why.

The European Union’s Parliament recently invited a man named Geoffrey Supran to testify about a paper that he wrote accusing ExxonMobil of misleading the public about global warming. His co-author is Naomi Oreskes, and she has a long history of pushing for litigation against the energy industry. Conveniently, she’s made a career providing tailor-made “research” to bolster her cause. In Washington, as Congress begins planning for hearings in support of its Green New Deal agenda, it may invite Oreskes or Supran to testify there too—providing another platform for their brand of activism. But, it’s simply an anti-fossil fuel crusade dressed up in academic clothing for trial lawyers looking to get paid.

Beginning in July 2017, several California communities - notably Oakland and San Francisco - filed so-called “public nuisance” lawsuits in federal court, alleging that energy manufacturers should be held financially accountable for climate change impacts such as rising sea levels and wildfires. Local officials in these cities, teaming with trial attorneys, hoped they could score both political victories and new streams of revenue. The attorneys themselves stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Thankfully, public nuisance lawsuits have fallen on deaf ears in the courts so far. This past June, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California – a Clinton appointee - dismissed the lawsuits filed by San Francisco and Oakland, arguing the issue of climate change “deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.” The lawsuits are now under appeal.

To their credit, some California mayors have denounced these lawsuits as legal wild goose chases. Huntington Beach Mayor Mike Posey, for example, wrote that his coastal community has “no plans to go down the public nuisance path.” Posey explained that such lawsuits only serve to hurt manufacturing and could eventually be aimed at cities themselves.

Leaders like Mayor Posey are acting as voices of reason. Others, like Naomi Oreskes, are simply stirring the pot. She was part of a group who in 2012 met in La Jolla, California to hatch the public nuisance lawsuit strategy against energy manufacturers. Alongside the Union of Concern Scientists and trial attorney Matt Pawa, Oreskes was the brain trust for how to use lawsuits to damage the fossil fuel sector and make money for attorneys, all in the name of climate change.

But while Oreskes masquerades as an academic, she’s really just another anti-energy fanatic. A “Professor of the History of Science,” Oreskes never earned an academic degree in the field of climatology, meteorology, or atmospheric sciences. She is a geologist by training, with a Ph.D. from Stanford, a B.S. in mining geology from the University of London, and work experience as a mining geologist in Australia. Her climate change work has been bankrolled by The Rockefeller Family Fund as part of a campaign to damage U.S. energy companies.

Despite her leading role in climate circles, Oreskes's work has been characterized by at least one leading expert as “unreliable, invalid, and biased.” For example, Oreskes co-authored a paper in 2017 alleging ExxonMobil’s public statements on climate change “were misleading.” And although she claims to have examined ExxonMobil’s communications from 1977 to 2014, there was no ExxonMobil until 1999. In reality, most of the advertorials Oreskes claimed misled the public on climate change were published by Mobil before the companies merged in 1999, while the internal climate research was largely conducted by Exxon.

An error this obvious is troubling, but even more so considering that Oreskes’s deeply flawed “study” has repeatedly been cited by those suing energy manufacturers. Oreskes even added her name to a legal brief filed this year with other academics urging the California lawsuits be moved to state court, hoping for more favorable judges.

These lawsuits are dangerous. They threaten the 30,000 manufacturers that call California home. They also target a state that is literally an energy production powerhouse, with abundant supplies of crude, sunshine, geothermal resources, and hydropower electricity generation. Instead of seeking to run even more companies out of California, adding to the 10,000 employers who have already left in recent years, we should focus instead on common sense approaches to climate change.

If we really want to create positive change for California, we should devote our attention to looming challenges such as unfunded pension obligations, affordable housing, and water resources, rather than on misguided approaches like public nuisance lawsuits spurred on by agenda-driven voices like Naomi Oreskes. That strategy is a win for all of us, not just for trial attorneys.

Theresa Harvey is the President & CEO of the North Orange County Chamber of Commerce