Obama to Make it Criminal to Disagree with His Views

Will Climate Change Dissent Become Illegal?

With its tacit support for environmental activism and the science of “climate change,” the Obama administration is now weighing seriously the prospect of prosecuting corporations for denying the administration’s views on the subject.

As stupefying as it sounds, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated at a Senate Judiciary meeting that “This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on.”

First, a little background: last year, twenty climate scientists wrote an open letter to President Obama proposing that the precedent set in the case of the tobacco industry, which was charged and successfully prosecuted for fraud under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act during the Bill Clinton administration, should be applied to companies in the oil, gas, coal and other energy industries.
The idea of using RICO to prosecute such companies was the brainchild of Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a Senate environmental committee member and longtime proponent and enforcer of environmental regulations.

It should come as no surprise that National Journal ranked Whitehouse the second most liberal senator in Congress in 2007, his first year on the job. As of November 2013, Whitehouse had made 50 weekly speeches about climate change on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Fact-checking website Politifact has taken issue with Whitehouse’s many statements that solar and wind energy will reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, calling such statements “mostly false” and castigating “inaccuracies in Whitehouse’s speech.”

While Senator Whitehouse has had his own run-ins with critics regarding improprieties including possible insider trading and false claims related to the supposed abolition of Medicare under House Speaker Paul Ryan, Whitehouse’s academic colleagues who wrote the aforementioned letter backing the use of the RICO law are a much more tarnished lot.

The lead writer of the letter, Professor of Climate Dynamics Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University, is embroiled in a scandal relating to his leadership of the nonprofit Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES).

As it turns out, IGES gets all of its funding from the U.S. government, which last year gave it grants of $3.8 million. It appears that in addition to the $250,000+ annual salary that Shukla enjoys as a professor, he paid himself $330,000 to head IGES (a 28-hour-per-week role) in addition to paying his wife $166,000 to work for the organization.

Unfortunately, under Virginia law, professors at public colleges are barred from outside employment in jobs that essentially duplicate work they are performing for their respective academic institutions.

Shukla is not the only letter signer to be enveloped in disgrace. Signatory Kevin Trenberth of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has not once but twice been caught promoting climate exaggerations and half-truths.

In the 2009 scandal now known as Climategate, his email stating “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” gave him the unshakeable nickname of “Travesty” among climate science skeptics.

‘Travesty’ Trenberth caused much embarrassment to his colleagues at a conference on hurricanes at Harvard University when he presented research that argued that more intense hurricanes were being caused by global warming. It turns out that Trenberth wasn’t an expert on hurricanes nor did the research show that which he was claiming.

In fact, the hurricane experts who had actually written the research for the IPCC resigned in protest because their papers stated that influence from global warming on hurricanes was minimal.

Instead, Trenberth had misrepresented the findings for the sake of press releases and media announcements to advance his climate change agenda and secure further funding for his group at the UN.

It should be noted that the former head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to resign from that body and from The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) over three sexual harassment and stalking cases, conflict of interest charges and financial anomalies.

His climate change Nobel Prize co-recipient Al Gore had his own sexual harassment scandal in 2010, wherein Gore was accused of acting “like a crazed sex poodle” and “a sexual predator” by masseuse Molly Hagerty prior to the former vice president’s high-profile divorce after 40 years of marriage.

Loretta Lynch isn’t the only attorney general to make waves regarding the legality of global warming skepticism. Maura Tracy Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, served ExxonMobil with a subpoena in April of this year accusing it of misrepresenting its knowledge about climate change and committing securities and consumer fraud.

A month earlier, Healey and 19 other state attorneys general convened a meeting to discuss targeting the company. ExxonMobil has fought back with a complaint in federal court, saying that Healey’s subpoena is an “effort to silence, intimidate, and deter those possessing a particular viewpoint” and that her demands “constitutes an abusive fishing expedition.”

ExxonMobil claims that Healey is not a “disinterested” prosecutor but rather is being politically motivated and is biased against the company.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Attorney General Claude Walker filed a subpoena against ExxonMobil seeking communication records regarding advocacy or research from policy organizations and think tanks such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Federalist Society and the Reason Foundation.

The Libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute called Walker’s demands “a blatant attempt to intimidate and harass an organization for advancing views that you oppose.”

At the Heritage Foundation, senior legal fellow Hans Von Spakovsky said Walker’s subpoena was “a truly outrageous abuse of [the AG’s] authority and a misuse of the law… This investigation is intended to silence and chill any opposition. It is disgraceful and contemptible behavior by public officials who are willing to exploit their power to achieve ideological ends.”

Law professor Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee said that the territory’s action “looks like a concerted scheme to restrict First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with.”

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, has defended ExxonMobil, saying that subpoenas such as those issued by the Virgin Islands and Massachusetts could “set a precedent that anyone can be criminally investigated” for having views that were different than those of the current presidential administration.

In late May, five Republican U.S. senators pushed back on U.S. Attorney General Lynch, warning that a “witch hunt” against energy companies amounts to an abuse of power.

The five senators — Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, David Vitter of Louisiana and David Perdue of Georgia — released a letter to Lynch in which they argued that “initiating criminal prosecution for a private entity’s opinions on climate change is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and an abuse of power that rises to the level of prosecutorial misconduct… These actions provide disturbing confirmation that government officials at all levels are threatening to wield the sword of law enforcement to silence debate on climate change.”

Throughout this time, reports have abounded that the collusion of multiple states’ attorneys general and private groups against the interests of ExxonMobil and other energy companies are being funded by deep-pocketed investors including ExxonMobil predecessor Standard Oil’s founding family the Rockefellers.

In 2015, the Climate Change Business Journal noted that the combined value of the salaries, research grants and awards in the field of “climate change science” totaled $1.5 trillion dollars per year.

It may now be apparent what the chief driver of all these political efforts and activist organizations is.

When there is such a largesse of money to be had by taking one side in a political argument, it should be none too surprising that all the science that’s needed to back up such claims quickly materializes.

~American Liberty Report


Most Popular

These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.

To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].

Family-Friendly Content

Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More



Most Popular
Sponsored Content

These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.

To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].

Family-Friendly Content

Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *