Fighting Fire with Fire : GOP AG’s warning to “AG’s United for Clean Power”
“If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud.”
I have been following the antics of 17 state attorney generals who formed (AGs United for Clean Power), which intends to promote the progressive climate change agenda by targeting the fossil fuel industry using racketeering statutes.
Recently, thirteen Republican members of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee Republicans sent letters to 17 state attorneys general and eight environmental groups requesting documents related to the groups’ coordinated efforts to deprive companies, nonprofit organizations, scientists and scholars of their First Amendment rights and their ability to fund and conduct scientific research free from intimidation and threats of prosecution.
Now, a coalition of Republican AGs, headed up by Alabama’s top cop, Luther Strange, issued a letter promising retaliation in kind, directed at “AGs for Clean Power.
Call this rebuke fighting fire with fire!
. . . . We all understand the need for a healthy environment, but we represent a wide range of viewpoints regarding the extent to which man contributes to climate change and the costs and benefits of any proposed fix. Nevertheless, we agree on at least one thing— this is not a question for the courts. Using law enforcement authority to resolve a public policy debate undermines the trust invested in our offices and threatens free speech.
. . . . If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration. If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud . . . .
. . . . Once the government begins policing viewpoints, two solutions exist. The first solution is to police all viewpoints equally. Another group of Attorneys General could use the precedent established by the “AGs United for Clean Power” to investigate fraudulent statements associated with competing interests. The subpoenas currently directed at some market participants could be met with a barrage of subpoenas directed at other market participants.
No doubt a reasonable suspicion exists regarding a number of statements relating to the risks of climate change. Even in the press conference, a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (“Kleiner Perkins”) identified “man- made global warming pollution” as “the reason” for 2015 temperatures, the spread of Zika, flooding in Louisiana and Arkansas, Super Storm Sandy, and Super Typhoon Haiyan. Some evidence may support these statements. Other evidence may refute them. Do these statements increase the value of clean energy investments offered for sale by Kleiner Perkins? Should these statements justify an investigation into all contributions to environmental non-profits by Kleiner Perkins’s partners?
. . . . Should these questions be settled by our state courts under penalty of RICO charges? May it never be. As Justice Jackson noted, our “forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” [emphasis added]
As a climate change skeptic, I find the Alabama Attorney General’s response truly heartwarming!
Read the full text:
(Featured image via Wikimedia Commons).
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Comments
This is “blah, blah, blah” posturing until the AGs do something. For example, subpoena every state university and every environmental group in their jurisdiction for all papers related to contact with the anti-free-speech AGs.
Until then, this declaration carries all the significance and weight of a Republican politician’s promise to his voters – none.
[Note, I said voters, not constituents. They keep their promises to their constituents; unfortunately those are the donors,not the voters.]
“… 17 state attorney generals who formed (AGs United for Clean Power), which intends to promote the progressive climate change agenda by targeting the fossil fuel industry using racketeering statutes.”
This is abuse of process. If this kind of action becomes the norm, we will break the social compact to the point that it cannot be resurrected.
As for fraud, NASA’s abuse of the temperature record makes that agency a prime candidate for investigation. Hint: It is no-fair cheating to eliminate the 1930s just because they were hot.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/nasa-massively-tampering-with-the-us-temperature-record/
The group at NASA interpolates even more aggressively—areas with gaps are interpolated from the nearest station up to 1,200 kilometers away
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/201501_gistemp/
That’s right: NASA makes up data points. What’s the weather like, 750 miles away from you?
Kleiner Perkins is a very large VC firm in Palo Akto. Al Gore is a Partner. Several years ago they decided that Green Energy – with massive federal and state subsidies was the way to go – upside to KPCB, downside of loan guarantees to DeptEnergy/US taxpayer. Pigs at the trough – to heck w old timely VC investments.
Great to see this approach – cockroaches will run from light on this one!!! Put some in jail for defrauding US Taxpayers – I am sure all sorts of federal laws were broken.
How many Alinsky rules can you count in this…???
Heh…!!!
This might impress me if the republicans in congress (lower case intentional) weren’t such paper tigers. They strut around, hold hearings, act outraged for the base…and never actually do anything.
The right idea, but until somebody’s in jail, it’s just noise.
When Voltaire wrote, in Candide, “Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres” [“In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others”], it wasn’t just talk. He was referring to the unfortunate Admiral Byng, court-martialled for failure to exert due diligence in the relief of Minorca during the War of the Spanish Succession. (To be fair to the Admiral, “due diligence” in that case meant defeating a French fleet of twelve battleships and five frigates.)
After the verdict, the Admiral was shot on the quarterdeck of HMS Monmouth—his own flagship. That’s the way to handle ne’er-do-wells.
Maybe, just maybe our side is finally starting to get.
Do anything and everything you can to undermined what they are doing. If someone thinks what they are doing is wrong let them sue. Just like Obama does time after time!!
Recently the Supreme Court decided in Universal Health Services v. United States ex rel. Escobar, on the circumstances in which the implied false certification theory can be a basis for liability under the False Claims Act
Does the concerted effort of State attorneys general constitute a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on interstate agreements or compacts without the consent of Congress?
Only true believers would do as the warmist AGs propose. They are dupes who don’t understand two things about the science of climate change:
1. The science really doesn’t say what the alarmists are saying about it – the language of AGW science is much more reserved and every prediction is qualified;
2. There’s science that does not support AGW or the claims of the alarmists (the AGs have probably fallen for that “97%” crap).
In reality, the last place the alarmists want this argument is in a court of law, where their opposition is permitted to defend itself, and introduce their own science as testimony and evidence. This is entirely unlike the advantage the alarmists have in the MSM, which only tells the public one side of the story.