On September 14, the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division II, ruled that a trial court decision to release climate scientists’ emails had improperly ignored an Arizona statutory protection for university records. In this case, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (“E&E Legal”) has been attempting to use open records laws […]
Lauren Kurtz
19 posts
On August 21, the federal District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the decision by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to withhold NOAA climate scientists’ research documents from release to the conservative group Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch sought to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) – […]
A July 2016 federal court decision has upheld Wyoming laws that impose criminal and civil penalties for collection of “resource data”[1] when the collection involves trespassing on private lands, even when the trespass is unintentional, and even when the trespass is incidental to the collection. The Wyoming legislature enacted these […]
On June 14, an Arizona trial court ruled that the University of Arizona must turn over more than a decade of university climate scientists’ emails to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (“E&E”), a group that, in its own words, “pepper[s] universities around the country” with open records requests as […]
In recent months, there has been a growing succession of actual and proposed investigations into fossil fuel companies, and their purported collaborators, over whether these groups lied to the public or investors about the risks of climate change. The investigations come amid a series of reports that the fossil fuel […]
Since July 2015, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) has engaged in an ongoing campaign for internal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) documents and emails, because he believes NOAA has “altered [climate] data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda.”[1] NOAA has produced some […]
Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) is continuing his campaign for internal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) documents, including new claims from an unnamed whistleblower that NOAA scientists “potentially violat[ed] NOAA’s scientific integrity policies.” Rep. Smith has also now threatened to use an unspecified “compulsory process” to obtain the desired documents […]
On November 4, 2015, Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada. Less than 48 hours later, the new administration announced it was ending restrictions on federal scientists’ public communications.[1] The previous Conservative government, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, tightly vetted communications from all […]