Why Greg Abbott and Big Oil Bought Themselves a New Judicial System
While you weren't looking, Texas Governor Abbott baked corruption directly into the Texas judicial system by creating a Big Oil court system
Texas courts are now officially slathered in oil. In September 2024, while we were all dancing at Kamala rallies and hiding our pets from ravenous Haitians, Texas Governor Greg Abbott unleashed his plan to destroy the environment.
The plan worked like this:
Cook up a brand new appeals court system bought and paid for by the oil industry. Task it with handling business cases. Order the state legislature, which in Texas is little more than a rubber stamp for Abbott, to approve the scheme. Launch it in September 2024.
Abbott signed House Bill 19 into law in June 2023.1 The bill established a new appeals court system geared toward business cases adjudicated by oil-friendly justices chosen by Abbott to two-year terms.
The new court of appeals opened for business in September 2024. If you think that two years seems like a teensy-weensy term in office for appeals court justices, your instincts are correct.
Its inaugural justices were hand-picked by the governor, so if he doesn’t like their rulings, he can quickly replace them. That’s the whole point.
Abbott, who has been bribed to the tune of $42 million in campaign money from big oil2 over the years, has now embedded his very own district court system into Texas governance to help add more extreme climate change, pain, and death to his grim record against humans.
He has already institutionalized and normalized the death of women by promoting and passing draconian anti-abortion laws, including a fascist law that encourages ratting on fellow citizens.
He’s torn apart migrant families and placed razor-laced barbed wire3 into a 100-mile stretch of the Rio Grande as part of a grotesque murder game whose unwitting contestants are anyone daring to cross the border into the United States.
Now, he’s taking aim at all humans by attacking efforts to address climate change (again). This, of course, is in addition to his battles against the federal government under Biden on every front through lawsuits against various federal agencies whenever the feds tried to enact some kind of environmentally friendly change to the way we do things in this country.4
With new forest fires roaring across Canada every summer, a recent NASA study5 found that Canada’s intense forest fires of 2023 released fuel emissions equivalent to a “large industrialized nation:”
Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, NASA scientists have found. That’s comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation…
…The research team used satellite observations and advanced computing to quantify the carbon emissions of the fires, which burned an area roughly the size of North Dakota from May to September 2023.
The effects of climate change, brought to you by Big Oil, are well documented. Hurricanes in the south and southeast regularly decimate cities like New Orleans, Miami, and Houston, leaving behind a trail of death and financial loss that dwarfs the hurricanes of yore.
Fires blister the west from Colorado to Northern Canada. Extreme drought events affect many parts of the United States, including Texas. Parts of Arizona are on the brink of becoming uninhabitable because of extreme heat.
Soon, your biggest gamble if you move to Las Vegas will be on your life.
The rest of the world is getting hammered, too. Big Oil, thanks also in no small part to Americans’ love of cars and their resistance to covering the cost of climate change with higher taxes on gas, is a literal death machine.
Baked-in corruption
The judges Abbott has chosen is a who’s who of oil guys.
This is called baking in corruption.
The new court is called the 15th Court of Appeals. Its specific function is to litigate business court cases.
With the alacrity of a hit man offered a $25 million bounty on John Wick, Elon Musk moved SpaceX’s headquarters to Texas so that he could litter Texas coasts with the carcasses of dead “starships.” The new appeals court will also let him suck out what little water is left in Texas aquifers with impunity, and run his automotive factories like sweatshops.
The court will handle cases involving business, as well as state agencies like the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, which is better known in Texas for regulating the oil and gas industry than for dealing with railroads.
The court will, according to the law firm GreenbergTraurig, have statewide authority to handle the following types of cases:6
appeal from an order or judgment of a new Texas business trial court;
challenge to the constitutionality or validity of a state statute or rule; and
appeal by or against the state, state subdivisions, or state employees in their official capacity, except for certain types of litigation, such as personal injury and eminent domain.
According to Public Health Watch:7
Among the significant TCEQ permitting cases that will pass from the 3rd Court to the 15th Court in September are proposed expansions of the Exxon Mobil chemical plant in Baytown, near Houston, which experienced a major accident in 2019, and the Valero refinery in Corpus Christi. The Exxon Mobil permit is on the TCEQ’s July 17 agenda and is expected to be approved; if that happens, residents of the already-polluted community are likely to appeal.The Valero permit was approved by the TCEQ in June, against the recommendation of an administrative law judge, and is also likely to be appealed if the agency doesn’t reverse its decision.
One look at the new justices Abbott has chosen will offer some clues on the haul Big Oil and oligarchs will feast on in Texas.
Chief Justice Scott Andrew Brister
Brister is Abbott’s choice as chief justice of the new court of appeals. He was originally chosen by former Texas Governor Rick Perry to sit on the Texas Supreme Court, which routinely rules in favor of big business in major cases and has been a major force in Texas gerrymandering.
Scott K. Field
Field was an appellate judge in Williamson County, which is known to Austinites mostly as the red collar county to the north that regularly keeps ultra-conservative Representative John Carter, of the 31st District of Texas, in office. Carter is best known for co-sponsoring the STOP Screwworms Act, but that’s another blog.
Field was voted out of his seat on the 3rd Court of Appeals in 2022 because Williamson County is slowly morphing from a ranching and farming county into a suburban one, and is therefore turning purple. Texas Republicans are scrambling to gerrymander their state again to offset the kind of human decency that turning purple might engender.
April L. Farris
Farris is the former president of the local chapter of the Federalist Society Not much else needs to be said, eh?
If you’re not familiar with the Federalist Society, this means you don’t know who owns and runs the U.S. Supreme Court. Here’s a primer I wrote last August:
The new appeals court will expand in 2027 to five justices through statewide elections.
Adrian Shelley, the Texas director of Public Citizen,8 a group that attempts to protect consumers during these dark times, has said that Abbott’s new toy is a…
“…slanted playing field the pro-corporation Legislature invented, with referees appointed by Gov. Abbott. This takes judge-shopping to a new level. It’s BYOC — bring your own court — for polluters and powerful interests.”
Even if you don’t look at it from the standpoint of Abbott’s ability to replace justices he isn’t happy with, a two-year term is often not enough time to handle a complex case involving corporate malfeasance. If a case not to Abbott’s liking simply drags on for two years, he can replace the justice with another, who will, of course, need time to ramp up on complex details.
An extremely complex case could drag on forever.
Elections in 2027 won’t change that. Uninformed voters will simply affirm Abbott’s picks.
The scary thing is that Texas is a model for other red states. Once Texas puts this in place, other states will follow suit.
It’s not hard to foresee states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia, for example, creating district courts to make it even more difficult to sue the various pieces of their prison industrial complexes or to codify, again, racism.
The Christo-nationalist right-wing state is growing its tentacles while the trump regime hits us between the eyes with the worst of his scandals of the moment. It’s hard to keep track of it all.
One way you can help maintain awareness of these growing tentacles is to restack this and alert your neighbors and friends that the threat to their livelihood is coming from many directions, and to get out there and vote for the smallest of offices whenever an election comes their way, no matter how red or blue their district may seem.
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Notes
“Welcome to Texas: Texas Governor Signs Law Creating Specialized Business Courts.” 2023. Sidley.com. Sidley Austin LLP. June 12, 2023. https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2023/06/welcome-to-texas_texas-governor-signs-law-creaing-specialized-business-courts.
Burns, Rebecca. 2023. “Big Oil Tries to Buy Its Own Courts.” The Lever. May 11, 2023. https://www.levernews.com/big-oil-tries-to-buy-its-own-courts/?source=post_page-----04a7aca63fdf---------------------------------------.
“Texas Deploys More than 100 Miles of Razor Wire to Secure Border.” 2024. Texas.gov. 2024. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/texas-deploys-more-than-100-miles-of-razor-wire-to-secure-border.
Now of course, with the revitalized EPA also in the hands of big oil, these lawsuits are no longer necessary.
Read it while you can. It blames climate change, which means it will be taken down by the maga regime as soon as they discover it: “New NASA Study Tallies Carbon Emissions from Massive Canadian Fires - NASA.” 2024. NASA. August 28, 2024. https://www.nasa.gov/earth/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-emissions-from-massive-canadian-fires/.
“Introducing Texas’s Fifteenth Court of Appeals | Insights | Greenberg Traurig LLP.” 2024. Gtlaw.com. 2024. https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2024/7/introducing-texass-fifteenth-court-of-appeals. The article cites Texas Government Code § 22.220(d)(1) for more intricate details.
Morris, Jim, Leah Clark, and Manuela Silva. 2024. “New Texas Appellate Court Alarms Environmentalists.” Public Health Watch. July 10, 2024. https://publichealthwatch.org/2024/07/10/new-texas-appellate-court-alarms-environmentalists/.
“Public Citizen.” 2025. Public Citizen. March 3, 2025. https://www.citizen.org/.
I had to look at Abbott’s approval rating. At least it’s on the decline. That dude needs to go.
Great piece👍🏻