By June 28, 2016 Read More →

Activists brag about getting California AG, legislators into RICO climate campaign

Activists aren’t even trying to hide their collusion with the AGs and legislators

activists

Image from the #Exxonknew campaign. Source: Climaterocks.com

By Katie Brown, PhD, Energy In Depth

If there was ever any doubt that the climate RICO campaign is about politics rather than the exercise of the law, look no further than the Democratic National Committee’s incorporation of investigations into oil and gas companies’ work on climate science into its official platform.

Of course, it will come as no surprise that the same activists who spearheaded that effort are the ones working hand in glove with the Attorneys General launching investigations into ExxonMobil.

Leading the charge is Bill McKibben, co-founder of the Rockefeller-funded 350.org, who presidential candidate Bernie Sanders actually handpicked to sit on the DNC platform committee to make these decisions.

McKibben has written numerous op-eds in favor of investigating ExxonMobil and he also attended that closed-door meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund in Jan., which was held so activists could brainstorm how to establish “in the public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution.”

RL Miller of Climate Hawks Vote – who was also pushing for climate investigations into oil and gas companies to be included on the DNC platform – has bragged that she was the reason California Attorney General Kamala Harris joined in the climate RICO effort. From her blog post:

Climate Hawks Vote has been leading the call to investigate and prosecute Exxon, having written the first petition to the Department of Justice and continuing petitions to state attorney generals including Kamala Harris (California), Brian Frosh (Maryland), Tom Miller (Iowa), and more. (And we endorsed Kamala Harris for US Senate after she responded to a Los Angeles County Democratic Party resolution — which I wrote — to investigate Exxon.)”

That’s not all. In another recent blog post, Jason Barbose of Rockefeller-funded Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) bragged that his organization was responsible for the passing of the Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016, a bill that would legalize the prosecution of climate skeptics. As he put it in a blog post,

“This legislation, authored by Senator Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) and sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists, help law enforcement hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their actions. Specifically, it would extend the statute of limitations of California’s Unfair Competition Law to 30 years for deceptive behavior relating to the scientific evidence of climate change.” (emphasis added)

This collusion of activists with the California AG’s office comes to light after we learned that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s office happens to include several attorneys with close ties to the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) – a Rockefeller-funded group in Boston that also, coincidentally, just launched its own climate lawsuit targeting Exxon.

Newly released emails also revealed that Peter Frumhoff of the Rockefeller-funded Union of Concerned Scientists was already working closely with state AGs long before the InsideClimate and Columbia School of Journalism stories were ever published.

Frumhoff continued this work by attending a closed door briefing with the state AGs ahead of their March 29 press conference with Al Gore, when they announced their investigations. Those same emails also show that the New York Attorney General’s office specifically told activists not to reveal that they had attended this meeting with the larger group.

Erich Pica of the Rockefeller-funded Friends of the Earth, who testified in favor of adding #ExxonKnew to the Democratic platform board last week, actually met with Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh in February, just days before Frosh announced he was considering an investigation into Exxon.

We also know that the subpoenas served by the Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker were issued through a Washington, D.C. law firm, Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, where Matt Pawa used to work.

Pawa was one of the activists who briefed the AGs ahead of their March 29thpress conference. While at Cohen Milstein, Pawa partnered with several Democratic AGs on lawsuits against Exxon and other companies.

Therefore, it’s no wonder that Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel recently explained the situation this way:

“The first thing to know about the crusade against Exxon by state attorneys general is that it isn’t about the law. The second thing to know is that it isn’t even about Exxon. What these liberal prosecutors really want is to shut down a universe of their most-hated ideological opponents.”

With these activists not even trying to hide their collusion with the AGs and legislators – and even bragging about it – it couldn’t be clearer that the motivation is politics, not the pursuit of the law.

 at EnergyInDepth

Posted in: Politics

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