Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has just been subpoenaed, as part of Al Gore’s Climate Witch hunt. This is a move which so blatantly reeks of McCarthyite abuse of power, even some proponents of climate action are horrified at the attack on freedom which this subpoena represents.
The following is the statement of the Competitive Enterprise Institute;
CEI Fights Subpoena to Silence Debate on Climate Change
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today denounced a subpoena from Attorney General Claude E. Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands that attempts to unearth a decade of the organization’s materials and work on climate change policy. This is the latest effort in an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President Al Gore.
“CEI will vigorously fight to quash this subpoena. It is an affront to our First Amendment rights of free speech and association for Attorney General Walker to bring such intimidating demands against a nonprofit group,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “If Walker and his allies succeed, the real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy will be hit by one costly regulation after another, while scientific and policy debates are wiped out one subpoena at a time.”
The subpoena requests a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information. It demands that CEI produce these materials from 20 years ago, from 1997-2007, by April 30, 2016.
On March 30, 2016, Attorney General Schneiderman, former Vice President Al Gore, and attorneys general from Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont, as well as Attorney General Walker, held a press conference in New York City to announce “an unprecedented coalition of top law enforcement officials committed to aggressively protecting and building upon the recent progress the United States has made in combating climate change.” Schneiderman said that the group, calling itself “AGs United for Clean Power,” will address climate change by threatening criminal investigations and charges against companies, policy organizations, scientists, and others who disagree with its members’ climate policy agenda.
CEI has long been a champion of sound climate change policy, and opposed previous attempts to use McCarthy-style tactics by officials aiming to limit discussions between nonprofit policy groups and the private sector regarding federal policies. CEI is being represented in this matter by attorneys Andrew M. Grossman and David B. Rivkin, Jr., who recently founded the Free Speech in Science Project to defend First Amendment rights against government abuses.
Source: https://cei.org/content/cei-fights-subpoena-silence-debate-climate-change
The text of the subpoena is here.
Here is a response from Bloomberg, which frequently takes a pro climate action position;
Subpoenaed Into Silence on Global Warming
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”
My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.
(I pause to note, in the interests of full disclosure, that before we met, my husband briefly worked for CEI as a junior employee. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)
Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”
That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.
…
Prosecutors know the damage they can do even when they don’t have a leg to stand on. The threat of investigation can coerce settlements even in weak cases.
Read more: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-08/subpoenaed-into-silence-on-global-warming
In my opinion, this hysterical executive overreach will be the downfall of the climate alarmist movement in America, just as outrage at the excesses of the McCarthy era brought an end to that dark period of American history.
You don’t have to be a climate skeptic, to recognise that an attack on freedom of speech, in whatever guise, is an attack on everything which America stands for.
More than anything, this authoritarian, un-American attempt to silence dissent betrays the weakness of those perpetrating this attack on the CEI. In a Republic, people who have a compelling case to offer, don’t have to intimidate their political opponents into silence, to win the argument.
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Carl ,Good question re … (main problem getting the message out ) Not sure if it is any one thing but many in the media are not scientifically literate so they rely on “scientists ” or organizations who the media can claim as sources beyond repute . Al Gore for example , with basically no science background ,used the vagueness of “the science is settled ” and scientists tell us language as cover to provide the air of scientific proof or concencious when in fact tens of thousands of scientists don’t agree with the alarmist exaggeration of the global warming industry . Many in the media bought it , and sold it hard because most of them no longer had the will or resources to question . They also wanted to transition their failing business model with a drive to electronic versions and be seen as green to get customers to think they were saving the planet in doing so . Bottom line, initially and for many years most in the media were so busy pumping scary global warming stories out they were never going to back off their new found source of unsubstantiated and overblown earth catastrophe stories that could be churned out at will with no accountability .
The same intimidation technique (reduced funding and job security ) that was deployed against scientists is now being modified to try and bully “deniers ” into silence . The scientist have served their purpose.
The positive news is there are more and more scientists no longer prepared to let the abuse of the scientific method continue and more in the media with some backbone open to both sides if not outright condemnation for one of the biggest frauds in history .
When Time magazine was pumping .. be afraid be very afraid global cooling stories in the 1970’s did they ever print a retraction when it was obvious the world wasn’t turning to an ice ball ? No, they just let time wash away the evidence till they and other media could pump the global warming scare . The global cooling scare was also supported with references to scientists that were apparently credible . Where are they now ?
The difference this time is the $$Trillion industry hatched around carbon credits , grants to renewables , massive tax increases , hedge fund gamblers , supportive research , climate modellers , jobs for climate police and who can forget the green lobby groups relying on peoples fear for fund raising campaigns to save things like growing populations of drowning Polar bears .
The message is getting out thanks to Climate Gate , goofy failed predictions of an ice free Arctic , jail time for an EPA senior manager , no warming in almost 20 years , and a growing body of knowledge and experts that the promoters of scary global warming cannot contain . The big bad climate wolf is now ignored by the public because that have real concerns they want addressed and they no longer see fuel poverty as a good reason to die .
The global warming promoters knew it was over when they raced to replace and rebrand global warming with the vague term climate change . Everyone knew they still meant scary global warming but the evidence was showing them to be shall we say misleading . Some would simply say bald face liars .
Consistent and unrelenting truth about the overblown global warming fraud combined with peoples own sense of honesty will continue to push the scary global warming (climate change ) industry out where it belongs . Trash .
If these people are willing to use the law to bully people they disagree with in violation of the Constitution, what other illegal activities are they willing to resort to in behalf of their “cause”?
Let’s keep “McCarthy” out of it becasue he was ultimately proven to be moslty right. The AGW folks are more like the facists and communists that McCarthy was fighting.
Oh Craig that was absolutely beautiful in the way it shows your total ignorance. Rather than point out how the article could be wrong you just went on a major rant which I found astoundingly immature.
Deception and lying for corporate profit are not protected by the first amendment. The tobacco lobby was taken down for the same reason.
So when Phiddling Phil Jones admitted in his Feb 2010 BBC don’t-go-to-jail interview that he had been deceiving and lying for 12 years, faking warming he fabricated and added to global temperature databases,
that isn’t protected by the first amendment – you finally admit that.
And when Angry Bird Mikey Mann told Congress the world was ending but his data was secret in case he needed to profit from it as part of his personal corporate pursuits,
and then accidentally released it on an FTP server
and it was found to make nothing but hundreds upon hundreds of hockey sticks,
you admit: he isn’t protected under the first Amendment when he lied and deceived for his own profits.
And when Rowboat ”selling heating supplies is like running Auchwitz” Hansen told the world he thought the laws of atmospheric energy don’t allow mankind to calculate the temperature of Venus without resort to some fake ”green house effect”
lying and deceiving the world so he could make his corporate book profits,
you admit:
that fraudulent deception isn’t covered by the First Amendment.
And when SKS bloggers were bulldozing science, putting their *OWN* faces onto portraits of Nazis who were murdering and butchering millions and the entire world watched in horror – since they know it didn’t warm any past 1998 – that corporate lying and deceiving isn’t protected under the First Amendment.
You don’t really have a lot of dignity left after you admitted you know your peoples’ lying and deceiving – reserving to Congress the right to DO that for the sake of their corporate profits – it’s illegal.
RE tobacco lobby take down ? Maybe but not sure I get or agree with the comparison . Co2 helps plants
grow and tobacco burns them with a few added bad and addictive sweeteners thrown in . Most Co2 is from natural sources and no one seems to get all lathered up about those or says we need to control those pesky natural sources . Just the ones from humans . Why is there no shut down green houses lobby ?
Patch’s is pulling out all stops but the courts will look at the facts as they should . Deflection , set up , really ? … three times ? Ok go with that . We will see who is credible .
WRONG ANSWER, ya …
[No, wrong response. Your remaining words are also pruned. With extreme prejudice. .mod]
The court case, when it comes, will be a good opportunity to turn this around in a way that puts the warmists on the defensive. CEI should focus on challenging the claimed “consensus” on anthropogenic warming, and in particular concentrate attention on natural climate changes and oscillations on multiple timescales, from glacials and interglacials to changes in the coldness of winter or wetness of summer from year to year. Then demand of the prosecution that, if they are so sure that recent warming is anthropogenic, when so many other similar warming episodes during the Holocene have not been anthropogenic, then they must show how they base this claim on a robust understanding of the causes and mechanisms of natural climate change. Without demonstrating such an understanding, claims that recent warming are mainly anthropogenic have no scientific or logical basis. Whereas in the scientific community they can get away with this dissonance, in a court of law they will not be able to.
The reality of course is that despite billions spent on computers and complex simulations, we are as far away as we have ever been from understanding climate, from being anywhere near a transition from descriptive to analytical. Bring this fact into the spotlight. Turn the heat on the warmists are hold up their arrogant and vacuous hubris for all to see.
Good luck with that.
who is John Galt
The slow kids have come out to play law.
What we are witnessing in this latest attempt to bully, silence and intimidate from the earth has a fever industry is not unlike the last minute of a typical fireworks display . The show is almost over , people are leaving and they are sending anything left up at once .
It is a fitting end because the scary global warming promoters have walked into a bear trap set by themselves .
Maybe they can bring in a few character witnesses to show the court how solid their soap box is .
A few potentials:
How is former IPCC Chair Pachauri ‘s alleged sexual harassment case going ? The warmists made him do it claim ? India’s court will sort that out soon .
Has former senior EPA manager Beale finished his prison term for felony theft ? Pretending to be CIA really ? All under the watch of that tight ship EPA who paid him for years after he retired .
How is Shukla doing with the Congressional Committee investigation of alleged political activity ( trying to encourage RICO charges against organizations that don’t drink the scary global warming cool aid ) , while his non profit research organization Global Environment Society received over $60 million dollars in federal funds since 2001 ? How did the payments align with George Mason University policies ?
Bring it on AG’s, the world can’t wait to see the cast of characters to be called as witnesses .
Pachauri is now suing the lawyer working for the complainant because she released details of other complainants. He has been protected so far by friends in high places. I am not confident he will be convicted.
This news is almost too bizarre to comprehend fully at this time, but two thoughts occur to me.
First, it seems apparent that the U.S. dodged the bullet, as people say, when Gore could not win his efforts at recount in 2000. He becomes more unhinged and tyrannical with each passing year, and one ought to wonder what the pressures of the office of POTUS might have pushed him toward.
Second, someone mentioned the need for strong, universal anti-SLAPP protection. But the case between Mann and Steyn shows the folly of such a hope. Bad actors simply go judge-shopping in all jurisdictions. It is all too easy to find sitting judges who do not understand the law and cannot be educated. They make incoherent rulings and ball up a case so that the anti-SLAPP law becomes SLAPP itself.
I always thought that thought control was practiced by organizations like the Gestapo in the Third Reich and KGB in Stalin’s Russia but I was wrong. Welcome to the American version of thought control. The AG of Virgin Islands has started it up in order to root out those pesky non-believers in the sacred scripture of global warming. This is only the beginning. It took Hitler several years to put Gestapo in full control of what was safe to say. And she is not alone, with RICO people like senator Whitehouse also setting their sights on climate deniers. I hope there are people, right and left, who see this as a danger to our democracy and take appropriate action.
Patch’s is pulling out all stops but the courts will look at the facts as they should . Deflection , set up , really ? … three times ? Ok go with that . We will see who is credible .
If I were the CEI I would talk to my attorney about filing a criminal complaint counter-charging “Deprivation of rights under color of law” under 18 U.S. Code § 242. The law states:
“Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.”
The law covers the actions of federal, state, or local officials regardless of wither the official is, or claims to be, acting within the their lawful authority. The law applies if the official’s actions are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties.
And the official cannot claim immunity – it even covers federal judges. Persons acting under color of law within the meaning of this statute include police officers, prisons guards and other law enforcement officials, judges, and others who are acting as public officials. It is not necessary that the crime be motivated by animus toward the race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin of the victim
Dave Kelly:
Hm. Using a civil rights statute against leftards in government. A definitely poetic approach, though it requires the malevolent jobholders of His Fraudulency’s administration to effect the move, doesn’t it?
Sooner would we see action unsealing Obozo’s college records.
It could happen, in a Cruz Administration.
Sorry, this is inapplicable. Note the words “on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens”. Since the CEI is manifestly not and alien, and can have no colour or race, this provision can have no application to it.
The purpose of the law is to prevent grater penalties being applied to a person who is not a US citizen, or who has a coloured skin, or who is of a race (however determined) than those applied to a citizen.
Regarding your statement.
“Sorry, this in inapplicable…. The purpose of the law is to prevent grater penalties being applied to a person who is not a US citizen, or who has a coloured skin, or who is of a race (however determined) than those applied to a citizen.”
No, look at the text of the law more carefully. Note in particular the use of the words “or” in the statue.
For emphasis the part of the statue your citing reads:
“,OR to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, OR race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens,
The statue applies to any attempt to subvert the constitutional rights of any citizen. To quote the FBI:
“U.S. law enforcement officers and other officials like judges, prosecutors, and security guards have been given tremendous power by local, state, and federal government agencies—authority they must have to enforce the law and ensure justice in our country. These powers include the authority to detain and arrest suspects, to search and seize property, to bring criminal charges, to make rulings in court, and to use deadly force in certain situations.
Preventing abuse of this authority, however, is equally necessary to the health of our nation’s democracy. That’s why it’s a federal crime for anyone acting under “color of law” to willfully deprive or conspire to deprive a person of a right protected by the Constitution or U.S. law. “Color of law” simply means the person is using authority given to him or her by a local, state, or federal government agency.”
Oops, upon further investigation, it looks like your right.
Looks like I’m going to have to eat crow on this on.
The new Gore Effect, putting the chill on free speech.
This is right up there on the absurdity scale with when the Italians prosecuted the scientists for not predicting the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake.
20 years worth of e-mails in 30 days????
That alone is an abuse of power.
A gross misuse of the term “fraud”. If related to Exxon stock filings, it can only be with respect to notifying stockholders of regulatory risk, which they already do. If the claim is that Exxon products change the climate, then so does every product out there. Energy is used to make everything. No, in fact the AGs don’t like Exxon engaging in political activism–but in fact Exxon gives money for basic research, supports alternative energy and has not said climate change is a myth, as far as I know, and if they did it would not be illegal.