The Supreme Court’s Ethics Code Is a Joke. Big Oil Knows That. | Oil companies want the Supreme Court to intervene to dismiss lawsuits about climate change. Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito both have big conflicts of interest on that front.

>So why doesn’t the oil industry want to wait for a final judgment? Presumably, because allowing the case to proceed would mean the plaintiffs can, in a phase called discovery, compel the companies to release various materials that they don’t want released—like documents revealing their deceptive conduct. So they’re asking the Supreme Court to step in. And they seem to be betting that, this time, their allies on the court will throw ethical considerations to the wind to grant them the review they’ve been so furiously pursuing.

>What do judicial ethics codes have to do with climate deception? It all comes down to simple math. Every year, the Supreme Court receives many thousands of cert petitions. To grant a writ of certiorari, four of the nine justices must agree to take one of these cases. Given that lower threshold, any time a justice recuses themselves based on conflicts of interest it reduces the likelihood that a case will be heard. In this case, multiple justices have conflicts of interest that should take them out of the running to consider these suits—if such principles matter to the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.