House Judiciary Committee probes climate lawyers’ involvement in controversial judicial training

The House Judiciary Committee is probing connections between two attorneys involved in key climate lawsuits against energy companies and a judicial training project that’s come under fire for allegedly biasing judges against the plaintiffs. 

The committee sent letters Wednesday to Roger Worthington, owner of the law firm Worthington and Caron, and David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project. 

Worthington is the lead attorney for Multnomah County, Oregon, in the county’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil and other oil companies. The lawsuit is seeking $52 billion for damages stemming from a heatwave event in 2021, which the oil companies allegedly caused. 

While the event brought high temperatures for several days, and is associated with 72 deaths in Multnomah County, it didn’t break the state’s temperature record, which was 119 degrees set in 1898, long before the burning of fossil fuels was putting significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

In its letter to Worthington, the committee is asking the attorney for documents and communications with the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and its Climate Judiciary Project (CJP).

Allegations of bias

The CJP bills itself as providing “judges with authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law.”

However, it’s been criticized for providing one-sided information on energy and climate that biases judges in favor of the plaintiffs. 

Energy advocacy groups have called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the group. In August, a coalition of 23 state attorneys general called on Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to defund ELI out of concerns that CJP is biasing judges, and the CJP’s behavior has been the subject of Senate hearings. 

According to the committee letter, Worthington & Caron may have had pre-publication access to materials that were prepared by ELI for the CJP’s training. The document, the letter states, includes what appears to be peer-reviewed comments, which indicate it was a pre-publication copy. 

“Worthington & Caron having pre-publication access to judicial training modules raises significant concerns regarding potential improper ex parte contact with judges as well as calling into question the veracity of representations that ELI has made to the committee about CJP’s contact and engagement with parties in litigation,” the letter states. 

Just the News reached out to Worthington & Caron through its website, as well as the personal social media account of Worthington. Neither message received a response. 

Pattern of research support

Worthington has been involved with climate research that supports climate litigation, including providing funding for studies that could be favorable to plaintiffs in climate cases. 

Chevron filed a motion in the Multnomah case, alleging that Worthington was involved in two studies that were submitted in support of the plaintiff’s case. One study published in May 2025 asserted that climate change contributed to 130 deaths and $160 billion in economic losses through wildfires. 

The article discloses that Worthington partially funded the study. One of the county's experts relied on the paper, and Worthington's connection to the research was not voluntarily disclosed by the expert, Chevron asserted in its motion.

The motion also points out that a draft of another study, “Carbon Majors and The Scientific Case for Climate Liability,” which claims that Chevron’s emissions are solely responsible for trillions in heat-related damages, appeared on the law firm’s website prior to its publication. While the link to the study draft on the firm’s website is now broken, the draft remains on an internet archive site. 

The county directly cited the article in court documents, and it was also cited by the county's expert. 

Court rebukes failure to disclose

During the hearing on Chevron’s motion, another attorney for the county said that Worthington played no role in the study, but the county also stated it would fight any effort to order discovery and an evidentiary hearing to determine the extent to which Worthington may have influenced the studies.

"It's a little cute to argue on the one hand, there is no evidence of any shenanigans and also, the Court does not have the power, inherent, statutory, otherwise, to engage the mechanism that Courts usually use for the discovery of evidence," the court said. 

The court denied Chevron’s motion to dismiss the studies, but not without criticizing the county for failing to voluntarily disclose Worthington’s involvement in studies that were directly and indirectly submitted in the case. 

ELI disappears from acknowledgments

The draft version of "Carbon Majors" acknowledges that the Environmental Law Institute's Climate Science in Judicial Education provided funding for the article, but mention of ELI funding is absent from the published version.

The acknowledgments of the published study list three ELI-linked judges, including Judge Travis Laster, vice chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery. Fox News reported last summer on 2022 emails from Laster to five other judges in the ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project. In the email exchange, Laster shared a YouTube video that contains information about trends in floods and sea levels that depart from IPCC science on the topics. 

In the email, Laster asked others not to share the link to the video, saying that “the powers that be will be happier that I said" not to share it. 

Second attorney questioned

The committee sent a second letter to David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project. 

Bookbinder previously represented the Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County, Colorado, which is suing Suncor Energy and others, alleging damages caused by climate change and efforts to deceive the public about the risk. 

The energy companies have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Constitution doesn’t allow for government entities to sue under state laws for injuries alleged to have been caused by pollution coming from sources outside the state. 

The committee letter refers to a document it had obtained, which indicates that Bookbinder had “had pre-publication access and provided peer review for materials” that were prepared for ELI by two individuals who have played key roles in developing curriculum for ELI and the CJP. This happened, according to the letter, when Bookbinder was representing the county in its suit. 

Just the News reached out to Bookbinder through his email at the Environmental Integrity Project and didn’t receive a reply. 

‘Climate justice’ deemed objective

For reasons that are unclear, ELI has declined to disclose which judges have participated in its CJP training. However, according to CJP, it has hosted over 2,000 judges at over 44 events since its founding in 2018. 

According to a report from the American Energy Institute, the CJP has received millions in funding from entities that are financially backing climate litigation as a means to advance climate agendas. 

The JPB Foundation, committed $2 million in funding to CJP and $4.45 million to the Collective Action Fund, which is a project of the New Venture Fund and supports climate lawsuits filed by state and local governments against energy companies. 

The Hewlett Foundation, which advocates for transitioning energy from fossil fuels to intermittent wind and solar power, gave $500,000 to the CJP and $150,000 to the Climate Action Fund.

While ELI has maintained its training is objective, the CJP training modules show otherwise. The curriculum includes modules on “climate justice” and presents only the most alarming research concerning the impacts of climate change. 

Diversity of perspectives

In August, the Department of Energy produced a climate assessment report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” The report was an effort on the part of Energy Secretary Chris Wright to create more inclusive research into the impacts of climate change, including that which disputes that it’s an existential crisis. 

The report was written by five researchers whose work has often challenged the “crisis” perspective on the impacts of climate change and was usually excluded from other assessments that the federal government produced. The scientific conclusions the researchers present are nowhere to be found in the CJP curriculum, nor is any work of theirs cited. 

A module on solutions to climate change overtly advocates for the wind and solar industry, as well as technologies it presents as viable without any dispute, such as battery-powered semi-trucks. 

Just the News reached out to ELI to ask if it was reviewing the curriculum to consider how it could diversify the perspectives it presents to judges, as well as any comments it has on the committee’s letter. The institute did not reply. 

Kevin Killough is the energy reporter for Just The News. You can follow him on X for more coverage.