The Big Attack on Free Speech From Climate Alarmists
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by Kevin Mooney,
The California Gathering That Hatched Plan to Prosecute Skeptics of Climate Change
Before joining climate change activist and former Vice President Al Gore for a press conference in New York City, Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists, gathered with other environmental activists, trial lawyers and academics to plot strategy in at a seaside cottage in San Diego. A total of 23 environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics came together in the seaside San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla in 2012 to devise a “strategy to fight major corporations and institutions in the courts” over climate change.
“The Union of Concerned Scientists has a long history of left-wing activism,” Ron Arnold, executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a conservative educational group said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “It was informally founded but not incorporated in 1969 as an anti-Vietnam War protest group by students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
The organization, which incorporated in 1973, had assets of $46.5 million as of 2014.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, demanded that 17 state attorneys general who call themselves “AGs United for Clean Energy” provide documents on interactions among their offices—and with various environmental organizations.
Such details obtained through the lawsuit “reveal the incestuous relationship between climate change activists and partisan state attorneys general,” Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. He added:
They are subverting our democratic system by using the courts to silence the opposition to their economically costly, unneeded policy solutions for an unproven scientific theory. Americans should be outraged by this abuse of governmental powers by the chief law enforcement officials of these states.
According to a summary of the La Jolla gathering, the activists came up with the idea of using the federal law known as RICO—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—against the fossil fuel industry.
Congress passed RICO in 1978 for the purpose of prosecuting mob crimes. In recent months, though, climate change activists have sought to use it against organizations, corporations, and scientists that aren’t convinced human activity is responsible for catastrophic climate change.
Early on in the workshop, Richard Ayres, a Washington lawyer who is a co-founder and trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, first mentioned the RICO tactic as a possible weapon against fossil fuel.
Ayres’ environmental organization is a well-endowed, tax-exempt advocacy group headquartered in New York City. Public records show it had financial assets of $268.1 million as of 2013.
The RICO 20
Those attending took inspiration from successful litigation efforts directed against the tobacco industry in the 1990s.
20 academics from across the country who specialize in climate change, including … six from George Mason University, signed a letter dated Sept. 1, 2015, asking the Obama administration to consider pursuing a federal racketeering investigation against “the fossil fuel industry and their supporters.”
They addressed the letter to President Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The “RICO 20,” as the academics came to be known, argued that “corporations and other organizations … knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”
“The 1963 surgeon general’s report linking cigarette smoking to a higher risk of lung cancer was a scientific finding, plain and simple, one which has withstood the test of time,” Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research said, adding:
Unlike ‘climate change,’ originally labeled ‘global warming,’ the surgeon general’s report was never a part of a larger political agenda. From the moment man-made global warming was elevated to a problem requiring ‘urgent’ action at a well-orchestrated Senate hearing in 1988, the political class in the U.S. and elsewhere has used the issue to increase its power and wealth.
Yet despite numerous international conferences, congressional hearings, untold billions of taxpayer dollars spent on climate ‘research,’ the blatant manipulation of data, and a vast PR campaign, alarmists have never succeeded in establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between man-made greenhouse gases and a warming of the planet.
Four years after the meeting in La Jolla, Frumhoff gave a presentation in New York to the seven state attorneys general on the “imperative of taking action now on climate change” just before they held their March 29 press conference with Gore.
Hundreds of climate scientists from across the globe have contributed to reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which calls itself an “international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars, who have come together to present a comprehensive, authoritative, and realistic assessment of the science and economics of global warming.”
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change was set up as a rejoinder to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, which has produced reports promoting the idea that human activity drives catastrophic climate change.
In contrast, the nongovernmental group of scientists finds no consensus, no basis for predictions of future climate conditions, and no case for forcing a transition away from fossil fuels.
The organization’s reports demonstrate that an increasing number of scientists say natural variability, not human activity, is the primary driver of warming and cooling trends. In 2008, it joined with the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank based in Illinois, to produce a report entitled “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.”
A Threat To Free Speech
The coalition called AGs United for Clean Energy, also dubbed the “Green 20,” made its official debut during the press conference with Gore. All the original members are Democrats except Claude E. Walker of the Virgin Islands, an independent.
The stated objective of the coalition of attorneys general is to “defend climate change progress made under President Obama.”
To this end, some of the prosecutors subpoenaed documents, communications, and research aimed at acquiring the work material of more than 100 academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and individual scientists.
… congressional scrutiny has backed the “Green 20” into a defensive position, Chaim Mandelbaum, a Virginia lawyer said and told The Daily Signal that he suspects that the negative media attention on the relationship between the state attorneys general and green pressure groups prompted some of the elected officials to rethink their position.
“We see a substantial amount of collusion going on,” E&E Legal’s Mandelbaum told The Daily Signal, citing meetings between the state attorneys general and the Union of Concerned Scientists prior to the press conference with Gore.
Mandelbaum also said calendar entries indicate Pawa, the trial lawyer who founded Global Warming Legal Action, met with the attorneys general and gave them information suggesting Exxon Mobil has concealed facts about climate change. Mandelbaum said:
There’s a lot of evidence showing these outside groups are presenting the [attorneys general] with information that says Exxon Mobil is hiding information, when there is no evidence that this is true. It’s clear these outside [environmental] groups have been driving this agenda and trying to get the attorneys general to take some kind of action. We are talking about extremely open-ended investigations that are political and not really legal.
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