Climate review linked to lawsuits was 'sham' shrouded in 'secrecy,' Attorneys General allege. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine produced a biased climate report designed to bolster lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, a coalition of state attorneys general alleges in a Thursday letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The attorneys general allege NASEM's July report on attributing extreme weather events to climate change was shaped by funders, researchers and legal advocates connected to climate litigation - including the landmark Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County case now before the Supreme Court. The coalition is also aiming for NASEM's handling of a separate review of its climate-related work, arguing the organization has failed to adequately address potential conflicts of interest. "However, this review appears to be a sham, as demonstrated by NASEM's secrecy around all aspects of the review process," the Republican attorneys general wrote in their 12-page letter. "A truly independent review would appoint an external panel; use reviewers who are not activists, litigation participants, or NASEM employees; publish the review process and findings; identify the review's scope; and ensure the review's scope addresses the material criticisms of the Chapter." "In July, NASEM released a biased climate-attribution report, entitled 'Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026,' to aid climate plaintiffs, including in the pending" Suncor case, the coalition alleged. The dispute centers in part on the growing role of "attribution science," which researchers use to assess how climate change influences the likelihood or severity of individual extreme-weather events. That research has increasingly intersected with litigation seeking to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for alleged climate-related damages. NASEM's report itself acknowledged potential legal applications for the science, according to the letter. "Reinforcing its intended use in litigation, the Report states that attribution science 'may be relevant to policy and legal decisions pertaining to climate change and liability for losses sustained as a result of extreme weather and climate events,' may be 'useful in estimating marginal damages attributable to climate change,' and may inform 'responsibility or liability determinations,' including 'whether defendants may be held liable' in climate litigation," the attorneys general wrote. The attorneys general allege NASEM's report entered that legal battle at a particularly consequential moment. The letter comes as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in Suncor this October. Boulder County and the City of Boulder sued Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil in 2018, seeking damages under Colorado law for alleged harms caused by climate change. The companies argue states cannot use state tort law to regulate alleged harms arising from interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions and that such claims are governed by federal law. "The timing of the Report's release allowed plaintiffs' amici in Suncor to cite the Report, but prevented critiques from defendants' amici, whose filing deadline had passed," the coalition wrote. The letter specifically points to an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs that repeatedly cited the NASEM report after its publication. "Notably, one amicus organization supporting plaintiffs in Suncor bragged about the Report's timing, cited the Report over and over on ten of its pages, and received $100 million to 'accelerate climate action' from the Bezos Earth Fund - which also funded NASEM's Report," the attorneys general wrote. They stressed that agencies "may wish to look further into the nature of this convenient coincidence." "The National Academies took taxpayer money and used it to manufacture a scientific-sounding basis for climate lawsuits courts have already rejected, then timed a follow-up report to help plaintiffs in the Suncor case while locking out any rebuttal. Calling their own secret internal review 'independent' is a punchline," Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told the DCNF. Exploring Travel Maps Discover more Digital Newspaper Access Advertise With Us Subscribing To Newspapers "Federal agencies shouldn't need another minute to cut off funding to an organization laundering climate activism through the National Academies' name," Isaac continued. In the letter, the coalition also singled out the organizations that financed NASEM's report. "Each of the Report's three funders is connected to climate litigation," the letter alleges. The attorneys general point first to the Bezos Earth Fund, which helped fund the NASEM report and previously announced a $100 million grant to the Natural Resources Defense Council and $15 million to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Both organizations submitted amicus briefs supporting the plaintiffs in Suncor, according to the letter. The coalition also highlights financier Robert Litterman and the Heising-Simons Foundation, alleging both have financial or organizational ties to groups involved in climate litigation. "Another Report funder, Robert Litterman, is a board member and major funder for one of the nonprofit organizations that the government plaintiffs identify as providing 'most of the legal work' in Suncor," the attorneys general wrote. Discover more Subscribing To News Newspaper Subscriptions The letter alleges similar connections involving people who contributed input to the report, including Columbia University's Michael Burger. "The Report's Acknowledgments section thanks Michael Burger, without mentioning that Burger is 'Of Counsel' for the Sher Edling law firm," the coalition wrote. Sher Edling has represented state and local governments in numerous climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. Burger also co-wrote an amicus brief in Suncor and worked on litigation involving Honolulu, according to the attorneys general. "In other words, the Report gave the plaintiffs' supporters exactly what they needed, exactly when they needed it, to further their litigation goals, without affording the other side an opportunity to weigh in," the attorneys general alleged. "Agencies may wish to investigate this coincidence given the heavy overlap between the Report's funding and development and the Suncor litigation." Bezos Earth Fund, the Heising-Simons Foundation, Litterman and Sher Edling each did not immediately respond to the DCNF's requests for comment. "The National Academies has a history of bias that will not be forgotten just because it's feigning an 'independent' review of the controversial climate science chapter. Climate lawfare is a critical tool for trial lawyers and woke activists to weaponize the courts to push policy through lawfare," O.H. Skinner, Executive Director of Alliance For Consumers, told the DCNF. Skinner added that the activists "have built a huge dark-money-fueled apparatus to boost and support this lawfare and they don't want to see this manual changed." "The Attorneys General are right to question NASEM's federal funding and seek a charter review. As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in the Suncor case, neutrality needs to be restored, and the radical left-wing apparatus behind these cases questioned at every turn," he continued. "Critics have demonstrated that the Chapter materially misquotes the IPCC, directly contradicts the manual's statistics chapter, was apparently substantially ghost-written by climate plaintiffs' attorney Michael Burger, and had funders, authors, and reviewers that included climate funders, activists, and litigation participants," the attorneys general wrote in the letter. The controversy has also drawn congressional scrutiny. The House Science, Space and Technology Committee previously raised concerns about NASEM's conflict-of-interest policies. "The Congressional committee further noted that NASEM's January 2025 policy changes require NASEM committee members to merely disclose non-financial conflicts, such as professional and legal affiliations, with no protocol for mitigation," the attorneys general wrote. NASEM subsequently launched a review, but the attorneys general argue its structure and lack of publicly available information do little to address their underlying concerns. The coalition is now asking federal agencies to consider whether those alleged problems justify cutting NASEM off from federal funding. "Taxpayer money should not be funding NASEM's biased actions, which warrant suspension or debarment," the attorneys general wrote. "If NASEM continues to lend its imprimatur to litigation-driven advocacy, then Congress should find another source for objective analysis and consider revoking the 1863 charter that designates the Academies as an adviser to the federal government." Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of its original content, please contact [email protected]

18 Aug, 2026 Urban Heat Action Plans: progress, gaps, and priorities for protecting vulnerable groups of India. By Abhiyant Tiwari and Anshima Mishra, NRDC India India's heat governance is at an inflection point. For nearly two decades, Heat Action Plans (HAPs) have been the country's primary instrument for managing extreme heat, growing from a single city-level plan in Ahmedabad in 2013 into a sprawling policy architecture spanning 23 heat-prone states. As of June 2026, India's heat governance encompasses over 250 HAPs across various cities. The question today is no longer whether a city has a plan, but whether that plan protects the people most exposed to heat. India's heat governance has matured considerably in recent years. Following Odisha's pioneering 1999 plan, adopted after a heatwave that claimed over 2,000 lives the previous year, and Ahmedabad's globally studied 2013 plan, the National Disaster Management Authority has worked with the India Meteorological Department across 23 states to push HAPs toward becoming standing institutional mechanisms, anchored to colour-coded early-warning triggers rather than ad hoc emergency response. A newer generation of HAPs is also grounding response around heat vulnerability risk assessments and locally derived temperature thresholds for early warning, rather than a single national criterion applied uniformly across climatologically different cities. This is being matched by movement on the financing side: heatwave mitigation projects, such as cooling shelters and early warning systems, can be eligible for funding under the National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds (NDMF/SDMF), while the 16th Finance Commission has additionally recommended, that heatwave be added to India's nationally notified disasters list, which would open up the complete state and national disaster response funds (SDRF/NDRF) for relief and compensation as well. Yet progress in the number of plans has outpaced progress in their design. There is a meaningful difference between a heat-intentional measure and a heat-incidental one, and most HAPs lean heavily on the latter. Tree plantation drives, water kiosks, and shaded infrastructure often exist for other civic reasons and simply get folded into the heat narrative, rather than being designed from the ground up around who actually bears the heat burden. That burden falls unevenly. Street vendors, construction labourers, domestic workers, and small business owners remain peripheral to most plans, named in vulnerability lists but rarely designed for. So do the elderly, the chronically ill, residents of poorly ventilated informal settlements, and migrant workers who fall outside a city's data systems entirely. Most HAPs also operate at the city level, missing intra-city heat variation that can span several degrees between wards, so resources get allocated blind to where exposure actually concentrates. Few plans explicitly factor in the compounding heat exposure and unpaid care burden faced by women informal workers, even though they are among the most consistently exposed. The next phase of India's heat governance needs to be as forward-looking as the crisis itself, anticipating exposure rather than just responding to it. That starts with seeing risk more clearly: occupation and gender disaggregated heat-health data, paired with ward-level heat mapping powered by satellite and AI-based urban heat island analysis, would let cities direct resources to where risk is actually concentrated, not just where temperatures are highest on average. It also means reaching people faster. Heat alerts folded into the digital welfare and wage-payment systems millions of informal workers already use would travel further than posters and loudspeaker announcements ever could, and parametric heat insurance, paying out automatically once a temperature threshold is crossed, could offer workers and small businesses a financial cushion without the delays of conventional claims. And finally, it means building heat resilience into the city itself: treating nature-based cooling, tree cover, reflective and green roofs, revived water bodies, as core infrastructure rather than a beautification add-on. Heat and cooling are often treated as separate policy tracks, one a disaster-response issue, the other an energy and infrastructure one, even though they affect the same people for the same underlying reason: those most exposed to extreme heat are usually those with the least access to cooling. The Centre of Excellence for Heat Resilience and Sustainable Cooling, launched in April 2026 through NRDC's partnership with the Government of Maharashtra, brings the two together under one institutional mandate. Anchored eventually within Maharashtra's State Institute of Disaster Management, it offers a model for cross sectoral long-term HAP intervention at scale: research, capacity-building, and technical support that persist well beyond any single heatwave season. Extreme heat, as this issue argues, encompasses both rapidly intensifying and prolonged events, with health, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts that are unevenly distributed across populations. The next generation of Heat Action Plans must treat informality, gender, and granularity not as addenda, but as design parameters from the outset, anchoring response not just to temperature, but to who is left exposed when temperatures rise. * Press Information Bureau, "India has taken a proactive and forward-thinking approach to extreme heat risk management under leadership of Shri Narendra Modi: Dr P K Mishra", 7 June 2025: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2134746&reg=48&lang=2 * Down To Earth, "India's Deadly New Heatwaves", June 2026: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/amp/story/environment/AIDMI-survived-the-sun-for-centuries-why-is-it-killing-AIDMI-now * Down To Earth, "Heatwaves and lightning should be added to national disaster list, Finance Commission says", 2 February 2026: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/natural-disasters/heatwaves-and-lightning-should-be-added-to-national-disaster-list-finance-commission-says * Carbon Copy, "How Can India Finance its Heat Action Plans?", 16 June 2026: https://www.carboncopy.info/how-can-india-finance-its-heat-action-plans * The Print / PTI, "Fadnavis launches heat resilience centre at IIM Nagpur", 21 April 2026: https://theprint.in/india/fadnavis-launches-heat-resilience-centre-at-iim-nagpur/2910710/ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of AIDMI. * Share this