California May Outlaw Free Speech on Climate Change
OMG! California May Outlaw Free Speech on Climate Change
http://lidblog.com/omg-california-to-outlaw-free-speech-on-climate-change/
California is considering a bill to outlaw free speech by climate skeptics. It’s called the “California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016” According to the California Senate: This bill would retroactively extend the statute of limitation to 30 years for claims brought under the Unfair Competition Law alleging unfair competition with respect to scientific evidence regarding the existence, extent, or current or future impacts of anthropogenic induced climate change. The retroactive statute of limitation created by this bill would apply only to claims brought by specified public prosecutors. The explanation behind the bill makes it seem to be a way to target oil companies, as the examples it uses include: A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post. “Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.” Their problem with that advertisement is that at the same time they were casting doubts on climate change, they were also investigating whether it is true. One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels. (Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust, Big Oil Braced for Global Warming While it Fought Regulations, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 31, 2015. Let’s examine their claims for a moment. First of all, any corporate management that doesn’t constantly evaluate threats and opportunities is ignoring it’s responsibility and should be fired for malfeasance. The Mobile Oil research described above was exactly that type of effort. As to the ad mentioned by the California senate, Mobile Oil was entirely correct when it said, “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.” Let’s look at some examples: In 2008 Al Gore predicted in front of a German audience that the “North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years” and that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.” It’s …
Withdrawal of letter by climate change scientists urging prosecution of skeptics deemed a ‘mistake
Withdrawal of letter by climate change scientists urging prosecution of skeptics deemed a ‘mistake
Learned men of science get lesson in modern day spin doctoring.
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Defcon1 Legal Threat: California’s near miss on new laws to jail climate skeptics
Defcon1 Legal Threat: California’s near miss on new laws to jail climate skeptics
Here’s how a democracy becomes a technocracy: when the legislation decrees a government department edit is “truth” and threatens to jail anyone who disagrees. For a whole 3 months California’s Senate didn’t treat this bill like the democratic-leprosy that it is. Today it’s just been “moved to inactive” which means it is out of action for the moment — immediate threat over — but the fact that it was proposed and passed several Senate committee stages in California should rattle the bones of every freeman. A tyranny beckons. There are already laws that stop people from profiting from lies and deception. They apply to everyone. Why do they need climate skeptic specific laws? Because the skeptics speak the truth. This is nuclear stuff: Senate Bill 1161, or the California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016, would have authorized prosecutors to sue fossil fuel companies, think tanks and others that have “deceived or misled the public on the risks of climate change.” So close. Washington Post: A landmark bill allowing for the prosecution of climate change dissent effectively died Thursday after the California Senate failed to take it up before the deadline. Senate […]Rating: 10.0/10 (3 votes cast)
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ALERT: Landmark California bill would allow prosecution of climate-change skeptics
A landmark California bill gaining steam would make it illegal to engage in climate-change dissent, clearing the way for lawsuits against fossil-fuel companies, think-tanks and others that have “deceived or misled the public on the risks of climate change.”
The first-of-its-kind legislation — Senate Bill 1161, or the California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016 — is scheduled for floor action Thursday after clearing Senate committees in April and May.
The measure would allow state and local prosecutors to pursue claims against climate-change skepticism as a violation of the state’s Unfair Competition Law [UCL], as well as extend the four-year statute of limitations for such claims retroactively to Jan. 1, 2021.
“This bill explicitly authorizes district attorneys and the Attorney General to pursue UCL claims alleging that a business or organization has directly or indirectly engaged in unfair competition with respect to scientific evidence regarding the existence, extent, or current or future impacts of anthropogenic induced climate change,” says the state Senate Rules Committee’s floor analysis.
While the measure enjoys broad support by a bevy of environmental groups, the bill has also been described as an effort to ban free speech on climate change as well as chill donations to free-market groups.
Stephen Frank, editor of the conservative California Political Review, called the bill a “totalitarian statement by Democrats that the First Amendment is now dead.”
“Did you donate to the Pacific Legal Foundation? Do you support Americans for Prosperity? Are you a member of the California Republican Party, which has a platform approving of all forms of energy, including fossil fuel (oil)? Do you work for a gas station, an oil company, have your written a letter to the editor in favor of oil drilling?” asked Mr. Frank in a May 31 post.
“If so, you could find yourself with being charged in a court of law, thanks to SB 1161,” Mr. Frank said.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris belongs to a coalition of 17 state attorneys general that joined forces in March to pursue climate-change skeptics, starting with ExxonMobil.
The floor analysis cites as a rationale for the bill articles published last year by InsideClimate News and the Columbia Journalism School’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project accusing ExxonMobil of hiding its research on climate change, which the company has denied.
“By extending the
Analysis: Warmist Naomi Oreskes ‘Warps History’
Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes is best known to climate realists by her 2010 book,Merchants of Doubt and its scurrilous demonization of climate skeptics as paid hacks parroting the fossil-fuel industry’s self-serving opposition to the “consensus view” of man-made climate catastrophe, but that screed doesn’t reveal the flaws in her work.
A short, obscure, error-riddled essay titled, “My Science is Better than Your Science,” that she wrote in 2011 is more significant. It was a chapter in a book titled, How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge, and examined the 1991 origin of the “skeptics are paid industry shills” narrative supposedly found in a legendary set of “leaked Western Fuels memos.”
That short chapter is important because Oreskes totally misinterprets the “memos” as Big Coal’s plan for a vast national campaign with paid climate scientists that created the lasting public doubt about global warming. That’s the very same interpretation repeated endlessly by climate alarmists including Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan (1997’s The Heat Is On), Canadian public relations flak James Hoggan ’s attack website DeSmogBlog, and many others.
Appallingly, nobody in this parade of critics did any fact checking of the memos, not even historian Naomi Oreskes, which is a serious lapse for a historian. In fact, Oreskes and the others were using a garbled conglomeration of nearly a dozen different memos from different sources that were collected by Greenpeace and posted unsorted and in no rational order on one of its websites – because they never checked who they really came from.
Critics had no idea what they were looking at in the hundred-or-so pages of “Western Fuels memos.” They simply took the pieces that made skeptics look the worst and patched them together into an assumption-laden fairy-tale, historian Oreskes most unseemly of all.
Had Oreskes, the renowned Harvard Professor of the History of Science, bothered to interview any of the clearly identified sources of the “Western Fuels memos,” she would have discovered that less than one-third of the jumbled “memos” involved Western Fuels Association at all.
It’s ironic that the “Western Fuels memos” became known as “Orders from Big Coal” because Western Fuels Association is actually just the opposite of what the alarmist critics thought: It’s a small, not-for-profit, member-owned co-op serving 24 consumer-owned rural and small municipal electric cooperatives and other public power systems from Wyoming to Kansas. Oreskes never mentions …
Climate spin: Behind-the-scenes emails show warmist profs evading questions
By Maxim Lott
June 01, 2016
Newly released internal e-mails show George Mason University climate professors plotting a petition calling on government to prosecute skeptics of global warming using RICO laws designed to go after the mob. They got 20 scientists to sign their petition and sent it to government officials before withdrawing in the face of controversy.
The new emails show GMU professors Jagadish Shukla and Edward Maibach discussing everything from how to craft their petition to appeal to conservatives, to getting warnings from others that the petition would go over poorly, to evading media questions.
In the emails, the professors decided to ignore questions from FoxNews.com about why the lead petition author, Jagadish Shukla, used government grants to give himself and his family some $500,000 in salary and benefits in 2014 — which FoxNews.com reported in October. The professors decided to reach out to the Washington Post instead.
“They were running a well-used page in their playbook … get the legacy media to play defense for them,” Chris Horner, who forced the public release of the emails by filing a “Freedom of Information Act” request, told FoxNews.com.
The Freedom of Information Act allows citizens to demand to see the official correspondence of government employees (George Mason University is public.) Horner works at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a think tank that is skeptical that global warming is a serious problem.
Horner says he feel vindicated by the release of the emails, because George Mason University officials initially told him that there were “no records” of the professors discussing RICO prosecution in their official capacity.
But Horner and CEI proved that there were such emails by first obtaining some emails from professors at other universities who had corresponded on the subject with the George Mason University professors (who used their work emails.)
Armed with that proof, Horner and CEI sued George Mason University to release the emails, and a Judge’s ruling on May 13th made it happen.
The emails show GMU professors Shukla and Maibach planning to make a media splash.
“If we can find one co-signer in every one of the nation’s 435 Congressional districts, we will end up sending the letter to every member of Congress — which would be spectacular. The letter will get lots of media attention,” Professor Maibach wrote Shukla while planning the letter.
Shukla had first suggested the letter, saying …
Ethics Group Calls ‘Witch Hunt’ On Climate Skeptics ‘Orwellian’ Attack On Free Speech
…Five GOP Senators Demand AG Lynch Stop Investigating Climate Skeptics
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Showing a stunning disregard for the First Amendment last month U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged the Justice Department has asked the FBI to look into whether the disbelieving of the unproven climate change hypothesis by climate skeptics merits prosecution for fraud. In other words the Obama government was trying to scare skeptics into silence.
Thankfully some in our legislature have the guts to respond. Senators Ted Cruz
(R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Jeff Sessions
(R-AL), David Perdue
(R-GA), and David Vitter (R-LA) today sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanding that the Department of Justice (DOJ) end its use of law enforcement resources against political opponents of President Obama’s energy agenda.
“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,” the letter reads. “As you well know, 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.”
The letter demands that Ms Lynch confirm all investigations into any private individual’s views on climate change end within two weeks and that she promise not to initiate any future such investigations.
“Freedom of thought and inquiry is at the very heart of liberty,” Sen. Cruz said. “Sadly, the Obama administration and its allies in state attorney general offices across the country are threatening to use the power of government to intimidate and ultimately silence companies and researchers who do not agree with the government’s opinions about the allegedly harmful effects of climate change and what should be done about it. This is an abuse of power and a direct assault on the First Amendment. The Obama Justice Department should immediately cease any further consideration of such action and should instead do everything in its power to protect the freedom of thought of all Americans.”
Senator Lee added:
…“Threatening prosecution of those who dare to challenge the most outlandish scaremongering by climate activists strikes at the very heart of the Free Speech protections on