Anyone perusing Climate Depot yesterday was sure to see a shocking headline pointing to an external link: “EVEN ENVIRONMENTAL LAWYERS ARE CLIMATE SKEPTICS.” What a claim! Who are all these environmental lawyers, and why are they skeptical about climate change? For confused readers looking for clarity, we followed the trail of links out of the Depot and found that, as usual, deniers are blatantly misrepresenting reality.
The initial Climate Depot blurb that caught our attention linked to, and excerpted from, a post from the GWPF’s website. This post, in turn, was an excerpt of a blog post at PersonalLiberty.com, which itself excerpted heavily from an Axios story covering the climate lawsuits against ExxonMobil and big oil.
In that original Axios story, Michael Burger, Executive Director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, is described as being “skeptical the lawsuits will succeed.” He’s quoted as saying the suits are “are very tough cases to win” because of the difficulty in ascribing causation for climate damages to specific fossil fuel firms.
How anyone could take that quote and make the leap to decide that Burger is a climate skeptic is a mystery. (Unless, of course, a writer is being intentionally dishonest and deliberately misrepresenting his position to get clicks. But we simply refuse to believe the deniers at GWPF and Climate Depot would do such a thing. As for the credibility of PersonalLiberty.com, well...it has a whole category dedicated to the New World Order for stories about the Bilderbergs and Trilateral Commission. Clearly no website honest enough to report on such sinister global conspiracies would deliberately inflame readers with false information.)
But it’s hard to see how turning a single misread quote into a headline ascribing climate skepticism to environmental lawyers en masse is anything but intentionally deceptive.
To be fair to PersonalLiberty.com (a blog founded by someone named Bob Livingston, who apparently thinks “organized medicine is literally a killing machine” and offers newsletter subscribers “secret health and investment strategies”), the story itself is a relatively accurate, if brief, excerpt of the original Axios piece. But the headline accusing Burger of climate skepticism is pure clickbait, uncritically parroted by GWPF and Climate Depot.
We took the apparently extraordinary and unthinkable step of sending an email to Michael Burger about this, something apparently no one from Personal Liberty, GWPF or Climate Depot thought would be prudent to do before ascribing beliefs to someone. As it turns out, this environmental lawyer who teaches, speaks and writes extensively on climate change and runs a climate change law center is not, as these headlines claimed, a climate skeptic.
“This is just silly,” Burger wrote to us. “I am obviously not a climate skeptic. I am uncertain whether these cases will succeed on the merits, at the end of the day, but that's entirely different. All litigation is a risk. No one can be sure of the outcome at trial. These are novel legal theories, and proving them out is going to be difficult. There is just no question about that. But I am also confident that there is a sound legal basis for each one of these cases, that science supports the existence of a direct causal relationship between fossil fuel use and all of the climate impacts described, and that there is a compelling story being told about why these companies should be held liable."
With that being said, and apologies for what is likely a well-worn play on his name, but it’s obvious that this story about Michael is a nothingBurger.
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