A California whistleblower will head to trial next week for his lawsuit alleging the Newsom administration pressured him to illegally withhold drilling permits during his time as the head of the state’s oil and gas regulatory agency.
Uduak-Joe Ntuk, the former head of the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), filed a lawsuit in September claiming he was pushed to stop issuing new well-drilling permits “without statutory authority or regulations.” Ntuk alleges that he filed a complaint with the state on January 4, 2023, and then nine days later he was “forced and coerced to resign.”
Now, the whistleblower suit is set to head to trial on April 1, National Review has learned.
Ntuk says he pushed back against orders to begin enforcing a law governing well drilling that was expected to be placed on hold pending verification of an upcoming referendum in November 2024.
The suit says he was encouraged to enforce S.B. 1137, which would prohibit new wells from being drilled within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, and other “sensitive” locations. While Newsom signed the bill into law on September 16, 2022, the oil industry then gathered the required signatures to put the proposal to voters.
After environmental activists reportedly held private meetings with senior state officials to voice concern over an increase in CalGEM permits for oil-field work within the buffer zone outlined in the law and to ask the state to slow permitting within the affected zones, Ntuk says he was “directed by the governor’s office to continue to implement S.B. 1137 even after [its] qualifying for the November 2024 ballot.”
Ntuk “felt that he did not have the legal nor constitutional authority” to halt all oil-well drilling permits statewide, according to the suit, which goes on to claim he was told to use the referendum’s verification process as rationale to stop issuing permits.
Ntuk, a former Chevron engineer whom Newsom appointed to lead the agency in 2019, accuses the state of wrongful termination, violation of the state labor code, violation of California’s Whistleblower Protection Act, retaliation, failure to prevent retaliation, and “constructive termination.”
CalGEM did not respond to a request for comment.
An attorney for Ntuk argues it does not matter whether Ntuk had discretion to deny permits, saying the question at hand is whether he thought he was being asked to break the law.
“What matters is what he reasonably believed,” attorney Jamon Hicks said in September. “If he has a reasonable belief, and he complains about that, he is protected as a whistleblower.”
Though Ntuk publicly explained his resignation in January 2023 by saying he was stepping back to focus on his family, Hicks said Ntuk only made these comments as he was concerned about being “blacklisted if he did not abide by what he was instructed to do.”
If true, the situation is just the latest example of the Left trying to force climate activism on Americans.
“The accusations here track exactly with the all-out campaign by Governor Newsom and his buddies like President Biden to impose progressive lifestyle choices on everyday consumers by any means possible,” O. H. Skinner of Alliance for Consumers tells National Review. “When they aren’t busy directly mandating progressive lifestyle choices by fiat, they spend time trying to shadow-ban popular gas-powered cars and other products by cutting off the disfavored energy sources.
“Whether it’s through public-nuisance lawsuits or the type of underhanded pressure alleged here, the result is the same: wipe away things people use and try to force everyone to live a progressive lifestyle, regardless of what consumers themselves actually want,” he said.
As National Review previously reported, Colorado has been embroiled in a six-year-long effort to strong-arm energy companies to comply with its climate vision through the use of a public-nuisance lawsuit. While public-nuisance lawsuits once centered largely on disputes between neighbors, the Left has grabbed onto the litigation as a tool that might be used nationally to circumvent normal legislative processes by instead asking courts to make decisions on a host of issues, from climate change to gun rights.
Public-nuisance claims argue that a lawful activity is unreasonably interfering with a public right. In climate cases, local governments argue that power generation is unreasonably interfering with “the right to use and enjoy public property, spaces, parks, ecosystems, and the environment; the right to public health, safety, emergency management, comfort and well-being,” among other things.
The Colorado municipalities are seeking a monetary judgment to finance health-care programs, to generally mitigate the costs of climate change, and to “green-fit” cities, streets, and public transportation.
The Supreme Court dealt a blow to ExxonMobil and Suncor last year when it declined to take up a lawsuit brought against the companies by the City of Boulder. The companies sought to move the case from state to federal court.
Skinner said activists have lost several of the climate-related nuisance suits that have ended up in federal courts, “in part because federal courts have said, ‘Look, you’re trying to solve a transnational issue that involves treaties between countries and greenhouse gases all over the world.’
“That implicates questions of federal law because it covers the entirety of the nation and frankly reaches outside of the nation,” he said, adding that such a question would be better answered by congressional policy than by a state or even federal court being asked to decide that one company is responsible for a “worldwide phenomenon.”
Meanwhile, just this week the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3–2 to approve a controversial rule requiring large, publicly traded companies to disclose climate-change-related information to investors. The new rule, which is already facing legal challenges, would require companies to disclose short- and long-term physical climate risks associated with their assets beginning in 2025.
Yet amid the broader push for green policy, the Biden administration is reportedly considering pulling back on its aggressive limits on tailpipe emissions that would have effectively forced automakers to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles.
In response to pressure from automakers and labor unions, the administration is considering shifting its plan to give automakers more time to increase sales of electric vehicles. Under the new proposal, a sharp increase in sales would not be required until after 2030, sources told the New York Times.
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