It appeared in The Wall Street Journal on April 1, but it was no April Fools’ Day joke. Phelim McAleer, a journalist currently writing about Chevron’s legal battle over alleged pollution in Ecuador, was covering California v. Chevron. The case is a civil action brought by the San Francisco and Oakland city attorneys, who accuse oil companies of creating a “public nuisance” by contributing to climate change and a conspiracy to cover it up.
No trial date had been set. Instead, Judge William Alsup ordered the litigants to gather for a “climate change tutorial.” The activists were touting this as an environmental coup d’etat, where fossil fuels would finally by exposed as the reason for climate change, but things didn’t go their way.
