U.S. Supreme Court Stops Climate Lawsuit by 21 Kids, Temporarily
On Friday we told you that the Trump Dept. of Justice had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily stop a court case from advancing to trial next week (see DOJ Asks Supreme Court to Stop Climate Lawsuit by 21 Kids). Lawyers representing a group of 21 children filed a lawsuit in 2015 that aims to force the end of using all fossil fuels in the United States, to address so called man-made global warming. That case survived numerous challenges and was set to go to trial Oct. 29 in U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. But on Friday, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts slapped a halt on the case and ordered both sides to give him information by Wednesday of this week. So, we have progress. Still not reason to celebrate, but moving in the right direction.
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Lawyers representing a group of 21 children filed a lawsuit in 2015 that aims to force the end using all fossil fuels in the United States, to address so called man-made global warming (see 
Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project of EQT Midstream, continues to work on constructing its 303-mile long project from West Virginia into Virginia–despite a recent court order overturning some of the permits for the project (see 
More bad news for EQT Midstream’s Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned a permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for MVP in West Virginia (see 
In the absence of a guaranteed minimum royalty in Pennsylvania–an issue which continues to divide landowners and drillers–individual landowners are left to litigate in order to get what they are fairly due. Such litigation is time consuming and expensive, and without a certain outcome, which is why most landowners don’t do it. In Washington County, PA a couple who signed a lease with Range Resources have just filed a lawsuit against Range in county court alleging Range violated the terms of the lease by deducting post-production expenses.
We’ve seen this movie before. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (quickly becoming the Fourth Circus) has once again listened to the arguments of anti-fossil fuel groups including the Sierra Club and Chesapeake Climate Action Network and has overturned a recently re-issued permit that allows Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to use certain methods to build the pipeline across streams and rivers in West Virginia. The court action pretty much shuts down all work on MVP in WV.
We’re not quite sure how to tackle this story as there are so many aspects to it. Let’s start here: Two years ago lawsuits filed by some 200 West Virginia residents against Antero Resources were combined into a class action lawsuit. The lawsuits are called “nuisance” lawsuits because, according to the plantiffs, Antero is a nuisance to them (truck traffic, noise, lights at night, etc.). That massive class action lawsuit, filed in early 2016, is about to be heard by the WV Supreme Court–a court in disarray after all of its sitting justices were impeached and removed.
We’ve lost track of how many lawsuits have been filed by anti-fossil fuel groups against EQT Midstream’s Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), and Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). Among the flood of never-ending lawsuits was a lawsuit against both pipelines from a group of 50 or so landowners who tried to overturn the constitutional use of eminent domain to force hold-out landowners to accept the pipeline. The landowners tried to court-shop and find a court to aide them in their cause. Last Friday the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected that effort.
It’s this kind of story that makes our blood boil–we won’t lie. EQT tried to shaft an elderly couple in Ritchie County, West Virginia out of royalty money by slipping in not only post-production deductions never agreed to in the contract, but also by slipping in a deduction for WV severance taxes owed by EQT itself. Maddening!
In September, MDN told you that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a ballot measure backed by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in Columbus, OH, a measure meant to ban fracking to send a “you’re not welcome” message to Utica drillers, is in fact illegal and will not appear on the November ballot (see 
Line ’em up and knock ’em down. Last Friday a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (in Richmond, VA) heard four cases against Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) and Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), one after another, bing bing bing bing. Both pipeline projects, very important to the Marcellus/Utica region, are in various states of litigation, brought on by the odious Sierra Club and co-conspirators like the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Sometimes the law, and justice, is mysterious to us. Last November we told you about an Ohio Supreme Court case with profound implications for both landmen and for the drillers who employ and use them (see 
Last week we told you that the forces of good had overcome the forces of evil–evil being the Sierra Club and the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and their mission to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) from getting built (see 
The price tag to build the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline is going up. When first announced, the project, which will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA, was originally estimated to cost $3.5 billion. That number was tweaked this summer to $3.7 billion. Now MVP (i.e. EQT Midstream) says it will cost a whopping $4.6 billion–more than a billion dollars higher than the original estimate. Why the big hike? Two things, says MVP: (1) A work stoppage imposed by the courts and by FERC (thank you Sierra Club), and (2) heavy rain. The rise in cost is due more the former rather than the later. It was only yesterday we ran a story about how much it costs, per mile, to build a major pipeline in the northeast (see 
We have a lot of lawyer friends, and lot of loyal MDN readers are lawyers. With all due respect to our lawyer friends and readers, we are outraged at the amount of money awarded to the attorneys in a recent oil and gas case in PA. Let’s back up. This post is primarily a warning to drillers and their contractors to play it straight when it comes to classifying who is exempt from overtime and who is not. You know who’s really “hourly” and who isn’t, and if you screw that up, it will come back to bite you–in a major way. A group of oilfield service workers in western PA were, according to the workers, misclassified as exempt from overtime when working over 40 hours per week. They sued. The details are below, but the short version is that the eight employees who stuck it out until the bitter end won their case. Collectively they got just over $1 million in back wages and “damages.” However (and here’s our outrage), the lawyers got a “reasonable fee” of $2.3 million! Really? It’s “reasonable” that the lawyers got more than twice what the employees got?…