InsideClimate: NY AG started RICO planning before any InsideClimate stories were released
Katie Brown, Energy in Depth
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Scientists today believe the egg did, but that hasn’t made the debate any less contentious. Here’s another debate that continues to see its fair share of controversy: Which came first, the release of InsideClimate’s meticulously cherry-picked account of what ExxonMobil knew about climate science and when? Or the launch of a campaign by the New York Attorney General’s office to prosecute dissenting voices on climate using RICO laws developed for taking down the mob?
To hear PR man and InsideClimate publisher David Sassoon tell it, InsideClimate came first – and those stories were what actually spurred the state attorney general’s office into action. Here’s what he had to say about the issue in his cover letter to the Pulitzer Prize board, dated this past January:
“Within weeks of publication, the attorney general of New York issued Exxon a subpoena seeking extensive disclosure of its records to see if its actions constituted fraud under the state’s consumer and securities laws. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and many others have called for a federal investigation under the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute, the law underpinning tobacco litigation of the 1990s.”
Ok, so: InsideClimate came first, and then the New York attorney general. Case closed, right? Well, not exactly. Yesterday, in a webinar hosted by the National Press Foundation featuring an interview with InsideClimate reporter Neela Banerjee, we were presented with a different set of facts entirely.
#1. New York AG Investigation Launched Well Before InsideClimate/Columbia School of Journalism Stories. For months, activists have been claiming the “investigative reporting” by the Rockefeller-funded InsideClimate News (ICN) and the Columbia School of Journalism was the catalyst that spurred AG climate investigations into ExxonMobil. But Banerjee openly admitted yesterday that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had been looking into investigating ExxonMobil well before these stories hit, confirming what Energy In Depth has uncovered over the past couple of weeks. As Banerjee said,
“Exxon’s arguments have now changed somewhat because of our work and the work that was done by Columbia University and published in the Los Angeles Times has dovetailed with efforts I think that started earlier at the New York AG’s office to look into Exxon’s funding of climate denial.” (emphasis added)
Banerjee’s admission also confirms what has already been uncovered by major media outlets that have reported on new emails written by key players in the #ExxonKnew campaign. For instance, in a July 21, 2015 email from Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientist (UCS) to Ed Maibach (who spearheaded a letter asking the Department of Justice to launch a racketeering investigation into ExxonMobil) Frumhoff states, “we think there’ll likely be a strong basis for encouraging state (e.g. AG) action forward, and in that context, opportunities for climate scientists to weigh in.” After emails revealed that Frumhoff was one of the activists who briefed the AGs ahead of their March 29 press conference with Al Gore, he was forced to admit his attendance: “I was invited to brief the attorneys general that gathered on March 29 on my work, and that is what I did.”
#2. The Rockefellers Funded Mike MacCracken’s Role in the InsideClimate Story. Banerjee also made an interesting comment regarding how the ICN team was tipped off on ExxonMobil’s documents by Michael MacCracken, who had collaborated with ExxonMobil scientists on some climate studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Not only is MacCracken on the board of the Climate Accountability Institute, which manufactured research that attempted to blame individual companies for climate change, but in a press release detailing activist events around the Exxon shareholders meeting a few weeks ago, MacCracken was listed as a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the very group that has been working with New York Attorney’s General office to launch the #ExxonKnew investigation. This is an affiliation that has never before been revealed in the press, his bios, or even on the UCS website.
Of course, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Climate Accountability Institute – both funded by the Rockefeller foundations – also held a 2012 workshop in La Jolla, Calif., at which activists brainstormed ways to launch racketeering investigations into ExxonMobil. MacCracken attended and spoke at that conference.
#3. InsideClimate Publisher David Sassoon Part of the Rockefeller “Family”. Banerjee also pointed out that ICN publisher David Sassoon told his investigative team to get cracking on an #ExxonKnew series after attending a closed door journalism conference in 2014 where he met Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who uncovered the Pentagon Papers. According Banerjee and ICN, Ellsberg told Sassoon to “find people inside energy companies to expose the origins of climate denialism.”
To hear Banerjee or Sassoon tell it, this meeting was the motivation to begin the series, but as always, there’s a little more to the story than that. David Sassoon previously served as a consultant to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), the organization that has funding the #ExxonKnew effort at least since the 2012 La Jolla conference, if not longer. As the New York Times reported in an article about Sassoon, InsideClimate is “an outgrowth of Mr. Sassoon’s consulting work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that emphasizes climate policy.” The Rockefeller Brothers Fund alone has strong financial ties to ICN, having given the group $800,000 in the past three years.
But Sassoon’s close relationship with the Rockefellers doesn’t end there. In a set of emails that recently came to light, Sassoon wrote to folks at a PR firm called Climate Nexus – which is a special project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and received $1.185 million from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund alone since 2012 – with an embargoed copy of its #ExxonKnew series, which he hoped they would push out to their network of climate bloggers.
The comments made by Banerjee further confirm that Rockefeller-funded organizations have been actively working not only to direct InsideClimate News to publish its anti-Exxon series, but also to lobby state AGs into launching investigations.
What’s abundantly clear is that #ExxonKnew was a plot that was hatched long ago, and has been many years in the making.
Link to blog post http://energyindepth.org/national/insideclimate-ny-ag-started-rico-planning-before-any-insideclimate-stories-were-released/
No surprise here. CO2 warming was “proven” before the first temperature reading was taken.
That would be adjusted.
And adjusted again.
No.
The theory of CO² warming’s possibility was established under laboratory conditions.
That theory has never been proven under natural conditions; especially when H₂O swamps the vast majority of Infra Red frequencies where CO² interacts.
CO²’s impact on atmospheric conditions includes an increase of water vapor, another condition that is not established in nature.
Clear low humidity days still show very rapid cooling upon nightfall, putting into question, the assumptions about how each CO² molecule’s lapse rate warms 2,499 other atmospheric molecules plus whatever surface molecules happen to capture infra red radiated towards the ground.
Earth’s atmosphere circulation has an amazing ability to cool itself. CO²’s exact contribution and participation under a multitude of atmospheric conditions is unknown and current models are purely and grossly speculative.
I totally agree. The Cult of CAGW have been able to push their fiasco, due to the fact that there was warming.
There are dozens of observations and analysis results (for example multiple periods of millions of years in the paleo record when there is no correlation of atmospheric CO2 level and planetary temperature, the 18 years with no significant warming plateau, or the fact that there are very, large cyclic warming and cooling periods in the paleo record that correlate with solar cyclic changes and the fact that the sun has been in the most active period in 8000 years during the recent warming) that support the assertion that there is no CAGW problem to solve. The majority of the warming in the last 30 years was due to solar cycle changes rather than the increase in atmospheric CO2.
The entire scientific basis of the AGW crisis was fudged, is incorrect.
There are two fundamental errors in the estimated warming for the so called no ‘feedback’ 1 dimensional, doubling of atmospheric CO2 calculation.
Comments:
1) If there is no significant warming without feedbacks due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2, then the with feedback warming will be basically the same as the without feedback warming.
2) Observations support the assertion that the planet resists rather than amplifies forcing changes.
3) Either case A) No significant forcing without feedbacks or B) Planet resists rather than amplifies forcing results in no AGW problem to solve.
1) No feedback calculation, 1 dimensional calculation done by Hansen and friends 30 years ago changed the laws of physics to hide the affect of CONVECTION COOLING on the calculation.
The infamous without ‘feedbacks’ cult of CAGW’s calculation (this is the so called 1 dimensional calculation that predicted 1.2C to 1.4C surface warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2) incorrectly/illogical/irrationally/against the laws of physics held the lapse rate constant to determine (fudge) the estimated surface forcing for a doubling of atmospheric CO2.
There is no scientific justification for ‘fixing’ the lapse rate to calculate the no ‘feedback’ forcing of greenhouse gases.
Convection cooling is a physical fact not a theory and cannot be ignored in the without ‘feedbacks’ calculation. The change in forcing at the surface of the planet is less than the change in forcing higher in the atmosphere due to the increased convection cooling caused by greenhouse gases. We do not need to appeal to crank ‘science’ that there is no greenhouse gas forcing to destroy the cult of CAGW ‘scientific’ argument that there is a global warming crisis problem to solve.
Salby in his most recent lecture estimated that increased convection cooling will reduce the no feedback doubling of atmospheric CO2 by a factor of two, from 1.2C to 0.6C. The estimate of a factor of two reduction is forcing is very conservative.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.ca/2015/07/collapse-of-agw-theory-of-ipcc-most.html
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B74u5vgGLaWoOEJhcUZBNzFBd3M/view?pli=1
Transcript of a portion of Weart’s interview with Hansen.
2) Ignore the fact that there is a great deal of water vapor on the low troposphere which reduces the forcing due to a doubling of CO2.
In addition to ignoring the fact that ‘greenhouse’ gases increase convection which reduces surface warming by a factor of 4, the without ‘feedbacks’ calculation also ignored the fact the absorption spectrum of water vapor and CO2 overlap. As the earth is 70% covered with water there is a great deal of water vapor in the lower atmosphere particularly in the tropics.
Redoing the double atmospheric CO2 level, no feedback calculation with a atmospheric model that takes into account the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and the radiation effects of water/CO2 absorption overlap reduces the surface forcing for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 3.7 watts/meter^2 to 1.1 watts/meter^2 ( also reduces surface for a doubling of CO2 by a factor of four). The 1.1 watts/meter^2 increase in forcing will result in surface warming of ball park 0.1C to 0.2C which is so small, the no feedback case is the same as with feedback case.
Check out figure 2 in this 1986 published paper that notes the 1 dimensional calculations were done for a dry atmosphere which is physically incorrect. The 1986 paper notes the surface forcing is reduced by a factor of four if it is redone with the estimated water vapor in the atmosphere.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%281982%29039%3C2923%3ARHDTIC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Yes, the Earth entered an ice age when the CO2 level was 10 times what it is now, and was increasing to 11 times what it is now. But we’re supposed to panic about the next 100-200ppm which will bring us to 1.5 times what it is now at the most, because THAT is going to be some kind of “tipping point.” LMAO at what is touted as “settled science.”
Oh what a lovely bunch of schemers, crooks one and all!
The liars club practices their deception over and over but once on stage the carefully crafted timeline and false indignation fell apart in the slightest breeze, the liars will now have to eat their young as a penance!
More lawfare from the left. The AG’s and the activist groups in the conspiracy should be counter-sued under civil rights laws.
I think these people forgot that when you point a finger at somebody there are three pointing back at you.
Sounds like they might need to be investigated for RICO.
Katie has documented much of the collusive planning to attempt destroying large public corporations along with independent minded scientists who don’t swallow CAGW Kool-Aid.
It certainly comes across that the Rockefeller’s highly diluted bloodlines prefer to destroy civilization, not further it.
Thank you Katie!
the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that emphasizes climate policy.”
I’ve thought for all these years the Rockefeller Brothers were emphasizing one world government with them in charge
Katie Brown, nice investigative work, but it would have rounded it out nicely if you had included the fact that Exxon researchers were pioneers in analysis of CO2’s possible effects on climate back in the 60s and 70s (when the scientific consensus was we were heading into a terrible cooling with half the world population dying of starvation, etc by 2000). Indeed, modern activist science has largely pirated and parroted Exxon’s early work and can make no claims to any discoveries. Exxon’s work was done before there was much more than a tiny glimmer of evidence of the effect. Since, the almost 2 decades of pause (despite feverish revisions of data) have largely settled the fact that CO2 is a very modest driver of climate.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/15/smoke-fumes-the-dumbest-attack-on-exxonmobil-evah/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/18/smoke-fumes-part-deux-exxon-knew-the-entire-theory-of-climatic-changes-by-co2-variations-is-questionable/
How Ironic. The Rockefellers are funding an investigation into Exxon with money made from Standard Oil Company, The original parent company of Exxon.
Exxon was one of the seven sisters formed after the breakup of the, Rockefeller owned, Standard Oil Company.
The well documented tactics of Rockefeller and Standard Oil to monopolize the US oil supply may well have constituted a RICO violation had the laws been on the books at the time.
There are none so holy as the reformed sinner. Believing they are without sin, they wish to cast the first stone.
Probably time to look at Rockefeller Foundation’s stock portfolio.
The only thing Standard Oil ever did was develop a method of refining oil that was cheaper than it’s competitors.
This allowed it to gain market share.
Some of it’s competitors responded by improving their own processes and as a result, they started regaining market share.
Other competitors decided it would be cheaper to buy politicians.
From the 4th generation on (taking J. D. Rockefeller, Sr. as generation 1) there have been Rockefellers bank-rolling leftwing antics. From what I gather, this is not unusual behavior for the scions of the rich.
When I saw they were funding the “Union of Concerned Scientists” , my immediate thought was how dumb old money can become .
Perhaps there happened some word flip. How about “Union Concerned of Scientists”?
Rainer Bensch; or “Unicorn Concerned Scientists” being as their chasing chimeras
I like to think that Exxon, being the business that created the Rockefeller fund money only to have the hypocritical ingrates attack the widow and orphan stockholders, will sue the bastards for every Exxon nickel back to issue as a special dividend.
Shows Rockefellers sense of humor. The original name of Exxon was Esso – as in SO – as in Standard Oil.
not sure of the relative timing, but –
“November 2, 2015 2:14 pm
Hillary Clinton is calling for a federal investigation of ExxonMobil’s climate change activities just months after the company neglected to renew its sponsorship of the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting”.
http://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-calls-for-exxon-probe-after-company-cuts-off-foundation-funding/
Schneiderman and her majesty are NY buddies
Hang on, who is Schneiderman? Did I miss something?
Are corporations that continue to pay given a pass on their activities? This looks (rather surprisingly) as if there are politicians involved in this, not just AG’s and private oil and big climate interests.
Who knew, how much did they know, and when did they know it?
This is beginning to sound like a Rockefellers version of Breaking Bad. Is there some poor hack chained to a desk cranking out high quality climate alarm PR for gangs of CAGW pushers to spread across key market areas?
Maybe they should watch the entire series. It ends very, very badly for those who cook up the crap the others profit from pushing.
Does Mr Pentagon Papers not realise that ‘one of the insiders’ might reveal publicly the (numerous?) conspiracies to defraud and deny first Amendment rights of legal persons? Once this starts to unravel a lot more insiders will be anxious to cut deals and squeal, loudly. Netflix, you are being out-done.
That’s the big story. Bill and Hillary! I wrote a more complete comment that isn’t showing up. Because I used a last name? To important not to allow more open discussion. This thing stinks all the way to the top left shelf in NYC!
Crispin –
Schneiderman is the elected Attorney General for New York and a RICO yahoo – lawfare …
These are all the New York left cabal! I refuse to believe that all these top Democrats weren’t conspiring together on this. Just think about the money and political power at stake in this and how connected the Clinton camp is. There’s no way they weren’t involved in this conspiracy. Spoils like this are currency to these kinds of jackals. They have to have a conspiracy and distribution to trade for political allegiance as a methodology to advance their political ambition. No one is better at this than the Clintons. No wonder she maintained her own illegal email server. These are some very cynical and immoral people.
excellent work…the beyond incestuous relationship between the Media, Greenpeace, the EPA, and the Rockefeller/ Ford Foundations and how that stage manages the “criminal investigation” really needs to be nailed down as this article does
The damage has already been done, as I am sure was the intention based on advice not to pursue the investigation but they did anyway. Like so much in the media, guilty until proven innocent. In the aftermath many still walk away believing in the guilt regardless.
From the article: “What’s abundantly clear is that #ExxonKnew was a plot that was hatched long ago, and has been many years in the making.”
The cast of potential criminals keeps getting bigger. Lots of conspiring going on. Conspiring to deny U.S. citizens their freedom of speech and thought. That’s illegal, no matter who you are, or what office you hold.
It also shows that they knew they were wrong about AGW. What other reason to do this?
For fossil fuel company, all that becomes too risky.
I would cease operations until the government seriously apologizes,
ask to resume and offer a get-out-of-jail-free card.
This administration would declare a national emergency, send in the National Guard and take over the oil companies by force.
Fancy that: Hillary Clinton calling for a federal investigation under the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute. The irony.
I wonder if any state AG’s have an interest in investigating the Rockefeller family to see if there was any discussion of shorting their own holdings in ExxonMobil. It would come under the heading of conspiracy to defraud anyone who owned and held shares of Exxon
Mr. Anthony Watts, contributers, commenters.
When working at VOEST, vereinigte österreichische Eisen und Stahlwerke, a colleague said :
Once archeologists will dismount this site
They will ask :
Why is that much steal buried under that mounting paperwork.
___________________________
So when there’s a RICO act against WUWT the RICO actors will get drowned in / slain by paperwork other then by hard evidence.
Greenpeace has had plenty of experience in causing trouble in Europe.
Now their activities are beginning to be revealed here. Who are the parties funding Greenpeace and why?
They are into electric power, logging/paper, fossil fuels and maybe water.
They also have ways to scare elected officials and others who might oppose them.
Like CND during the cold war, it does not take a very long time to work out who has an interest in destroying the fossil fuel powered economies of the west from within.
My main comment went missing.
– Did I violate a rule, moderator?
[No. You broke no rule. ALL replies [from] everybody are scanned for “key words and tricky phrases” equally. If the trigger phrase is tripped, the comment goes until reviewed – and usually accepted by a moderator. .mod]
The fun thing is that the “key words” and “tricky phrases” are constantly changing.
Just to keep us, and the moderators on our toes.
In B.C. we had a study come out that was extremely critical of salmon farming. Suzuki endorsed it of course despite the fact it was full of errors and exaggerations. Turned out it was secretly funded by the Alaskan salmon fishermen. The bigger the prize the dirtier the tricks. What prize is bigger than the White House?
Seems that the CIA knew in 1978 that CO2 caused cooling
http://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2016-06-06-10-00-28.png
Some of the biggest hits to alarmism were not scientific, calling everyone who disagrees “deniers” was a massive mistake.
Refusing to debate
Climategates
Making it politically partisan.
Just those four literally created millions of skeptics by making people who were otherwise disinterested, get interested.
Didn’t Shub say something very similar to this way back in November last year? He was reporting on a meeting (with the usual suspects) looking to find dirt on “big oil” back in 2012..
https://nigguraths.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/rico-teering/
________________
“While we currently lack a compelling public narrative about climate change in the United States, we may be close to coalescing around one. Furthermore, climate change may loom larger today in the public mind than tobacco did when public health advocates began winning policy victories.
…
says ‘one of the most important lessons to emerge from the history of tobacco litigation’ was the ‘value of bringing internal industry documents to light’.”
…
There was little doubt about their existence:
” … many participants suggested that incriminating documents may exist that demonstrate collusion among the major fossil fuel companies …”
Since they were so sure they exist, careful plotting was needed on companies whose vaults to raid
__________________
They picked Exxon.
“… a plot that was hatched long ago…”
This sounds literary rather than legal.
Legal would be, “this conspiracy to abridge the victim’s First Amendment rights was initiated long ago…”
Not only is MacCracken on the board of the Climate Accountability Institute, which manufactured research that attempted to blame individual companies for climate change
Matt Pawa, who was at the La Jolla workshop in 2012 and the March 2016 meeting with AGs – the latter of which he was advised not to confirm to the press by Lemuel Srolovic , chief of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s Environmental Protection Bureau, is also on the board of the Climate Accountability Institute.
Who else was there?
Thanks, Charlie.
Isn’t that double-dipping? Srolovic is already being paid to monitor climate as part of the environment. I wonder if he is on any other similar boards?
I don’t have a problem with politicians owning or being part of a business, non-profit, charity, etc., so long as there are no conflicts of interest AND they spend the time on the people’s business that they are being paid for. I also interpret no conflicts to include the appearance of impropriety as well as a direct conflict of interest.
They have no body.
They have no murder weapon.
They have a modelled reconstruction of the crime scene. But it has no direct correlation to a real place.
What they do have is a cook book precedent (tobacco ) to extort money from an industry with no intention of bankrupting the criminal because he will be their cash cow.
Following on from William Astley June 8, 2016 at 9:03 am:-
I found this interesting read about thermals. It goes into detail about thermals taking a great deal of heat from the surface towards 13,000ft or so, being replaced by cold air.
Now it seems that you could generalise heat removal and come up with a figure to put into a GCM, but when you read the detail, thermals as we all probably know, are a very localised phenomena.
However, the link goes on to describe how thermals move in location and strength from one side of a hill to another as the sun traverses during the day.
As thermals depend upon contrasting land surface use, which changes over time (or seasonal).
I can not imagine GCM modellers are anywhere near getting this correct.
https://www.aviationweather.ws/095_Thermal_Soaring.php
So, can we predict future temperature? Not for a long time, if at all (IMHO).
John D Rockerfeller starts Standard Oil..gets real rich..creates the Rockerfeller Foundation..’promoting the
well-being of humanity throughout the world’…eugenics (Dr. Joseph Mengele) was a lapse in judgement.
standard oil > Atlantic Richfield >ARCO> BP ESSO> Exxon> ExxonMobil AMOCO>BP Marathon Chevron
now this shiit
great !
Anybody remember the CIA’s MKUltra project? Much of the work of this was done at McGill University under Dr. Ewen Cameron. Where it gets interesting is that this university and also Cameron had received funding from the Rockefeller foundation:
See page 148 of http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/uploads/files/75f30fd8-a787-465e-9fa6-47c89c37a6d3-1954.pdf
Remember who did the investigations: The Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
In summary, you had a Rockefeller investigating possible wrong-doing by his wealthy family’s funding.
We have always been at war with ExxonMobil.
I sure hope Exxon does something about this. This is one viper nest that badly needs clearing out. I hope Exxon hits back and hard. They could open this right up for all the whole world to see. With this level of conspiracy EVERYONE would take an interest, the spotlight would be well and truly on.
Oops. I meant “all the world” or “the whole world”, not “all the whole world”. I really should read before I hit the post comment button.
All the hoo haw, remember, the CO2 content of the air (atmosphere) is very nearly zero, 0.04%, that’s 1 part per 2,500.
There has been a mass assumption that correlation = causation, which is sometimes not at all true. It seems high improbable that an increase in CO2 from 0.03% to 0.04% – and increase of 0.01%, or 1 part per 10,000, over 100 years or so, could have any detectable effect on the climate.
How can anybody confirm that 1 degree C of global warming in a century was caused by a 0.01% increase in CO2, rather than by any combination of other factors, esp. given the fact that the climate has been changing all the time for at least hundreds of millions of years?