By David French
Friday, April 08, 2016
The attorneys general of New York and California are on
the warpath. They’re fed up with dissent over the science and politics of
global warming, and they’re ready to investigate the liars. California’s Kamala
Harris and New York’s Eric Schneiderman have Exxon in their sights, and they’re
trying to pry open the books to see whether the corporation properly warned
shareholders “about the risk to its business from climate change.” Not to be
outdone, Attorney General Loretta Lynch revealed that the federal Department of
Justice has “discussed” the possibility of civil suits against the fossil-fuel
industry. The smell of litigation is in the air.
Some people are worried about little things like the
“First Amendment,” “academic freedom,” and “scientific integrity.” Not me. I
hate unscientific nonsense. So if Harris and Schneiderman are up for suing
people who’ve made piles of cash peddling exaggerations and distortions, let’s
roll out some test cases. I’ve got three ideas:
United States v. Al Gore: Ten years
ago, the former vice president of the United States launched an extraordinarily
lucrative career by selling climate doomsday. While promoting his Oscar-winning
documentary, An Inconvenient Truth,
he made a shockingly false statement. He said that unless the world took
“drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gases, it would reach a “point of no
return” in ten years.
Ten years have passed. Is there a scientific consensus
that the world has reached a “point of no return?” No? Gore’s documentary
grossed almost $50 million worldwide. I’d suggest that number as a starting
point for damages. But of course you’ll need to subpoena all his business
records and communications. We wouldn’t want him hiding his ill-gotten gains,
and goodness knows that public schools could use some cash.
New York v. ABC/Walt Disney Company:
If you thought the case against Gore was compelling, I
present to you this complete absurdity from ABC.
Broadcasting from the heart of New York, Good Morning America claimed that in
2015 milk would cost almost $13 a gallon, gas would be more than $9 a gallon,
“flames [would] cover hundreds of square miles,” one billion people would be
malnourished, and Manhattan would be flooding — all because of climate change.
ABC is a for-profit company, part of the Walt Disney
conglomerate. Last year, Disney held approximately $88 billion in assets. Some
of those assets represent the ill-gotten gains from exaggerations and
fearmongering used to stoke public hysteria and increase ratings for a flailing
morning news-and-lifestyle broadcast.
United States v. United Nations: In
2007, the chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
Rajenda Pachauri, said, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. . .
. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is
the defining moment.”
The IPCC has received tens of millions of dollars while
hyping the threat of global warming. While its current factual predictions
can’t be tested until the dates pass, Pachauri’s statement is patently false
and at odds with “settled science.” And we all know that settled science
settles everything.
These three cases are just the start. Environmental
scaremongering is a lucrative business, and the evidence
of exaggeration is everywhere.
If Lynch, Harris, and Schneiderman file their first lawsuits now, they can file
a second round by Christmas, when the season’s first snowflakes provide the
next set of litigation targets — all the hysterics who predicted the end
of snow.
Or maybe — just maybe — these liberal attorneys general
aren’t truly interested in the truth and are instead radical ideologues hoping
to shut down dissent. Perhaps they’re trying to advance their political careers
by appeasing the social-justice Left and further establishing the new pagan
religion of environmentalism. There is a chance that we can’t trust the
government to be fair.
In that case, forget everything I said. A nation can’t
sue its way into clarity, but it can sue its way into oppression. The First
Amendment still matters. Rather than settle scores, let’s extend the debate.
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