John Podesta, 'Expert Witness' on Spending Billions to Destroy American Energy

So it should come as no surprise when he surfaces to testify as an "expert witness" in a lawsuit seeking to overturn most of President Trump's energy policy.

John Podesta—the Democratic operative who oversaw former president Joe Biden's climate agenda and steered billions of taxpayer dollars to green energy interests—testified for two hours in federal court on Tuesday as an "expert witness" in support of 22 children alleging that the Trump administration has violated their constitutional right to life by pursuing policies friendly to oil, gas, and coal.

Podesta argued the court should block the federal government from implementing President Donald Trump's energy-related executive orders, according to a spokeswoman for Montana attorney general Austin Knudsen, who is intervening in the case. That includes orders protecting the coal industry, encouraging oil drilling, eliminating electric vehicle mandates, reversing crackdowns on gas-powered appliances, and terminating all Green New Deal-style policies.

Violated their constitutional right to life? Road apples! If this case is predicated on producing some evidence that these kids' lives are actually endangered by cheaper gasoline, lower electrical rates, and an abundant supply of all the plastics and other materials that are derived from petroleum - like pharmaceutical precursors - then all I can say is, good luck with that.

So, you might ask, who would be nuts enough to file such an egregiously frivolous lawsuit?

The Oregon-based left-wing nonprofit Our Children’s Trust filed the lawsuit in a Montana federal district court on behalf of the 22 youth plaintiffs in May 2025. If successful, the case could wipe out the executive orders that have served as the centerpiece of Trump's energy agenda and thus dismantle Trump's efforts to boost energy production and roll back policies favoring the green energy industry.

I'll hazard a prediction and guess that this lawsuit will fail. But it wastes time and money, it serves as a distraction, however minor, and just generally interferes.

Feature, not bug. And it's just one of many.

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Any judge worth his salt should dismiss this case with prejudice, then turn to the plaintiff's attorneys, bang his gavel, and bark, "You all get 30 days in jail for contempt of court for wasting my time."

So, you might ask, why is John Podesta any kind of an "expert witness?" Well, he does align with the particular narrative in play, the being that the Earth is about to catch fire and incinerate all life on the planet unless everyone in the United States (but not China or India, both of whom are consuming fossil fuels with wild abandon) immediately adopts the lifestyles of the Amish. 

For the purposes of Our Children's Trust, Podesta is perfect; a political hack with little or no grasp of the facts. What he is good at is throwing away flipping huge bundles of taxpayers' cash at climate and green energy boondoggles.

Podesta joined the Biden administration in September 2022 to manage the roughly $375 billion in grants, loans, and rebates that Democrats earmarked for green energy and climate programs under the Inflation Reduction Act.

In that role, Podesta helped dole out $20 billion to eight climate nonprofits, $7 billion for solar panel installation projects, $3 billion to fund green energy equipment at U.S. ports, $2 billion for environmental justice initiatives, and hundreds of millions of dollars for school districts to buy electric buses. During that time, the Biden Department of Energy also issued $108 billion in loans for green energy projects, including electric vehicle battery and solar panel factories.

Every penny of it, wasted.

We've covered this ground time and again. Low-energy-density power sources can't replace high-energy-density power sources. Not only are wind and solar power intermittent and unreliable, but the footprint required for them to replace our current generation systems would be daunting, not to mention the expense. Not that Democrats have ever cared about expense. Podesta was heavily involved in dumping billions into these questionable schemes, and now he's serving as an "expert witness" in a case that, if successful, would force the federal government to dump billions into more of these questionable schemes.

I wonder - might he have some interest in seeing this happen?

All of this is being done in the name of a hysterical claim that the lives of 22 children are literally in danger if we continue with our current energy policies. How fragile are these kids, anyway? The air in the United States, today, as I write this, is cleaner than it's been since before the Industrial Revolution. The global climate is doing what it has done since the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, demonstrating a prolonged gentle warming trend, with some dips and spikes. 

Furthermore, the global climate remains as it was: a vast and complex system with billions of inputs and outputs, thousands of cycles in oceans, atmosphere, and the planet's orbit, cycles ranging from tens of years to thousands of years, and, yes, some influence from humanity's actions - and all it takes is one good volcano to show us how puny our efforts are.

John Podesta, we might note, is doing what he's always done: proving himself to be a leftist political hack of the first water. He's an attorney - nothing wrong with that, except to note that he's anything but an expert in climatology. He was instrumental in the Biden-era green energy waste of billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money, and now he's returning to type, perhaps hoping that the next Democrat president will give him a job wasting billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money.