Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million but then dropped the case, is appealing a recent court order that he pay the journal’s publisher more than $400,000 in legal fees. Those fees are based on an anti-SLAPP statute, “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
As we have previously reported, Jacobson:
…who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.
Jacobson dropped the suit in 2018.
Two years ago, Judge Elizabeth Wingo ruled that Jacobson would have to pay the defendants’ legal fees. He appealed a ruling that he pay Clack $75,000 in legal fees.
In a July 5, 2022 ruling, Wingo ordered that Jacobson pay the National Academy of Sciences $428,722.92, a reduction of 20% from the total fees paid by the society. That payment was due within 60 days. But Jacobson – who is now representing himself – filed a notice of appeal on July 8, and appealed on August 25.
Jacobson is confident that he will win his appeal, he told Retraction Watch. In comments we’ve made available in full here, he noted that California’s Labor Commissioner in June ordered Stanford to reimburse him for nearly $70,000 in legal costs and interest because it considered the lawsuit — an attempt to protect his reputation — as a responsibility of his job.
Stanford, which had declined to intervene on behalf of Jacobson with PNAS, has appealed that ruling. Jacobson said the labor commissioner said it would decide whether Stanford would need to reimburse him for the $75,000 payment to Clack if he lost that appeal. He presumes that would also apply to the $428,000 payment to the NAS.
The lead attorney for the NAS did not respond to our request for comment.
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Science, and academic publishing, is a contact sport. Suing someone because they disagree robustly and question your assumptions is a mockery of science, and glad the lawsuit was thrown out, but how did Jacobson ever think this was a defensible idea? We don’t accept things on authority, and providing evidence (or a range of possible values), is just a normal part of the scientific process, extending into advocacy of specific policies.
the crazy thing though is how many people have bought into the whole renewables* fairy tale to begin with. Now we’re gonna see the results this winter in Germany and other places who refused to use basic common sense and simple math.
*PV, Wind and hydro electricity generation actually aren’t renewables.
Josh, great comment. Jacobson had fun trying to promote fear of nuclear for years with all kinds of nonsense. Now he’s caught & brought to Justice for his fast & loose accusations. Pay up, Jacobson! Put your money where your mouth has so confidentially been for years. Your buddies in BigOil&Gas should help you now. But they seem to have fled your side!
(There is no privacy box to check?)
It brings to mind a popular tweet about sowing and reaping.
Jacobson claims that new technologies such as nuclear will take too long to deploy. I’m going solar and all electric now. It took months to get electrical approval because with all electric, I need 400, not 200 am hookup (electric car, electric heat and cool, electric water, induction stove and so on). Our city said that if other’s upgrade on our block, the city does not have enough transformers to do it, the wire would have to be upgraded and the substation would have to be upgraded. These changes city wide will realistically take 10-20 years. Extend that to the whole country, probably a 30-40 year transition. We have plenty of time to bring new techs on line and scale them. In the mean time, we better allow for fracking and natural gas as a bridge, and must start now on carbon capture tech.
Other than that, his lawsuit was childish. Rebut him in another paper.