Any lawyers out there?
It seems to me that there should be a class action suit on behalf of the electric consumers of Texas (and other states) who have been harmed by the named environmental groups and their sponsors.
Let’s bankrupt the bastards who want to force their AGW religion on us!
I am a lawyer in Texas, and the answer, unfortunately, is there’s probably no potential law suit here. You can’t really sue someone for lobbying and filing law suits, which is pretty much all the environmental groups did here.
What happened here was that Gov. Perry issued an executive order after Katrina and the natural gas price spike to expedite the permit hearing process for new power plants, and it was under that expedited process that the permits for the eight TXU plants were sought. The environmental groups and others sued Perry arguing that his executive order was unconstitutional because he did not have the authority as Governor to impose expedited hearing procedures on the Administrative Law Judges who conduct the permit hearings. The judge agreed, even though the Chief ALJ agreed to comply with Perry’s ruling, which is within her discretion. I haven’t heard whether Perry appealed.
It was a ridiculous ruling, in my opinion. Unfortunately, though, there’s nothing there that gives rise to a private cause of action by consumers against the environmental groups.
The only thing I could think of that could form the basis of a suit by consumers would be if you could find some sort of anticompetitive practice by TXU. I don’t see how, though - the buyout doesn’t seem to implicate any antitrust issues, and the decision not to seek permits for new power plants is not the sort of thing that implicates consumer protection statutes like the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act or the consumer protection provisions of the Texas Utilities Code.