Dan A. Emmett’s contributions reflect an emerging trend in which left-wing donors bankroll climate litigation and climate-related academic literature intended to influence judges
Lawsuits seeking to hold the nation’s biggest oil companies accountable for global warming and extreme climate events—and academics looking to influence how judges rule on those cases—are bankrolled by a common donor, the real estate developer and environmental activist Dan A. Emmett.
The little-known California millionaire is funding both the law firm filing novel suits against oil companies and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and the tax filings of Emmett’s eponymous foundation.
He is reflective of an emerging trend on the Left in which philanthropic donations and nonprofit organizations are used to bankroll lawsuits aimed at quantifying the damage caused by climate change and forcing the nation’s leading oil producers to pay—and, at the same time, producing climate-related academic literature and course material intended to influence the judges overseeing that litigation. The Free Beacon reported in December that the New Venture Fund, a left-wing dark money group, gave $2.3 million to Sher Edling, the law firm behind a bevy of lawsuits targeting oil companies, and $1.3 million to the Environmental Law Institute, which runs a project to train judges overseeing climate-related lawsuits. (Emmett has also directed at least $25,000 to the Environmental Law Institute since 2019.)
Emmett has also gotten in on both sides of the action. Between 2017 and 2019, the Emmett Foundation gave $75,000 to a fund that directs charitable donations to Sher Edling, the tax filings show. The firm is known for filing suits seeking climate damages from oil companies, accusing them of causing everything from the rise of sea levels to heat waves. It asked Emmett to fund its 2017 lawsuit from three California communities seeking billions of dollars in damages from the likes of Shell, Chevron, and Exxon to address sea level rise, emails show.
Emmett encouraged Sher Edling to parlay his support into additional donations, pressing the firm in a 2018 email to identify him as a “serious supporter” when soliciting support. Since then, Sher Edling has received $16.6 million in charitable donations and has filed lawsuits against oil companies on behalf of Democratic-led states including Delaware, Hawaii, Minnesota, and New Jersey, and cities including Chicago, Honolulu, San Francisco, and New York. If successful, those lawsuits could force defendants to pay billions of dollars in damages, something experts say could cripple the industry.
The Emmett Foundation was simultaneously bankrolling the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which lauds Emmett as a “generous supporter,” doling out $160,000 to the organization between 2017 and 2024. The organization’s employees played an integral role in the development of a chapter on climate science included in a manual—the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence—that judges are supposed to use to adjudicate climate-related cases.
A senior fellow at the Columbia center who has called to “hold actors accountable for climate disinformation and other public deception schemes,” Jessica Wentz, is one of the two authors of the climate chapter. The chapter also cites papers written by Sabin Center founder and faculty director Michael Gerrard and executive director Michael Burger, who have promoted climate litigation in their academic work, including a 2018 paper titled, “Holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their contribution to climate change: Where does the law stand?” (Burger also serves as of counsel at Sher Edling.) The paper laments that a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from the cities of San Francisco and Oakland seeking climate damages from Chevron “before it went to trial on grounds wholly unrelated to the climate science.”
“Had the case proceeded to trial, the parties would have had an opportunity to dive much deeper into the scientific basis for attributing climate-related harms to these companies,” the paper states, citing “attribution studies” that are “increasingly capable of linking specific harmful events—such as hurricanes and wildfires—to climate change.”
Republican attorneys general have lambasted the climate chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. In a letter last month, a group led by Montana’s Austen Knudsen urged the Trump administration to strip funding from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), the manual’s co-publisher, noting that NASEM has refused demands to pull the chapter despite documented conflicts of interest, including that it was “authored by two academics employed by Columbia climate centers funded by Sher Edling’s climate litigation funders.” The other publisher of the manual, the Federal Judicial Center, removed the chapter from its website in February.
Emmett, the Sabin Center, NASEM, and Sher Edling did not respond to requests for comment.
Emmett, who has amassed his fortune through his Santa Monica-based real estate investment firm Douglas Emmett Inc., has used his charity to inject millions of dollars into climate activist organizations and environmental research institutes at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. He funds Harvard University’s Emmett Environmental Law Center, Yale University’s Center for Business and the Environment, UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change, and Stanford University’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.
In 2008, when Emmett provided $5 million to create Harvard Law School’s environmental law clinic, he said he made the donation because the “juggernaut that is doing the damage to the environment are unstoppable unless you have very good environmental laws” and lawyers who are trained to “understand how to use” them.
“In the climate change catastrophe, science is way ahead of the law in regulation and policy, so we have to train young lawyers to work on these issues,” he said.