A new, politically correct inquisition is underway in America today that would make the grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada, swell with pride.
New York Attorney General Eric “Torquemada” Schneiderman is leading a coalition of 17 other state inquisitors who are preparing to “as aggressively as possible” investigate and prosecute businesses that commit “fraud” by “lying” about climate change (aka weather).
Schneiderman is “a leftist’s leftist,” Matthew Vadum noted at FrontPageMagazine. “A zealous true believer intent on, in his own words, “slow[ing] down the bone-crushing machinery of the contemporary conservative movement.”
And now, even as the wheels come off the climate change bandwagon, and Americans continue not to care about the issue, Democrats like Schneiderman are amping up their efforts to enact their worldwide redistributive schemes under the pretense of saving the planet. Disagreeing with their worldview now constitutes prosecutable “fraud” and “lying,” which is very unfortunate because a lot of people — including many climate scientists — disagree with their climate change hysteria.
Via Hans von Spakovsky, at the Daily Signal:
Speaking at a press conference on March 29, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said “The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real.” He went on to say that if companies are committing fraud by “lying” about the dangers of climate change, they will “pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.”
The coalition of 17 inquisitors are calling themselves “AGs United for Clean Power.” The coalition consists of 15 state attorneys general (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington State), as well as the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands. Sixteen of the seventeen members are Democrats, while the attorney general for the Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, is an independent.
The inquisitors are threatening legal action and huge fines against anyone who declines to believe in an unproven scientific theory.
One of the first victims of the new Torquemada has been ExxonMobil, which is being investigated for allegedly funding research that questions climate change. “It’s too early to say what we’re going to find,” Schneiderman said, admitting that his five-month-old inquisition is basically a fishing expedition. “We intend to work as aggressively as possible, but also as carefully as possible.”
Exxon emphatically denounced the accusations as false, pointing out that the investigation that “uncovered” this research was funded by advocacy foundations that publicly support climate change activism.
Schneiderman, asked what he thought the effect of his investigations and prosecutions would be on free speech, insisted that because climate change dissenters committed “fraud,” they are not protected by the First Amendment.
This comes on top of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitting that the Justice Department is discussing the possibility of pursing civil actions against climate change deniers, and that she has already “referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which” federal law enforcement could take action.
Climate change blogger Anthony Watts argues that this “is the inevitable result of President Obama’s determination to ‘fundamentally transform’ the United States.” Obama famously promised in January of 2008 that his policies would ensure that electricity rates “necessarily skyrocket.” In 2016, he and his henchmen are aiming to “carve his energy and climate policy legacy in granite.”
Mr. O and his allies are on a mission: to rid the world of fossil fuels, replace them with “clean” biofuels (that are also carbon-based and also emit carbon dioxide when burned, but would require billions of acres of crop and habitat land) and “eco-friendly” bird-killing wind turbines and solar installations (that will require millions more acres) – and implement the goals of a dictatorial United Nations.
Former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres put it in the bluntest terms: “We are setting ourselves the task of intentionally to change [sic] the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years” – the free enterprise capitalist system. “The next world climate summit is actually an economic summit, during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated,” her UN climate crisis cohort Otmar Edendorfer added. “We will redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”
Watts notes that the alarmists are basing their hysteria on “a chaotic world that is totally at odds with what the rest of us see outside our windows.”
Even after “homogenizing” and massaging the raw data, climate alarmists can only show that global temperatures may have risen a few tenths of a degree (barely the margin of error) during the 2015 El Niño year, after 19 years of no temperature increase, following two decades of slight warming, following three decades of slight cooling and warming.
On the “extreme weather” front, tornadoes, snows, floods and droughts are no more frequent or intense than over the past century. No Category 3-5 hurricane has made US landfall in a record 125 months. Polar ice remains well within historic fluctuations, and sea levels are rising at barely seven inches per century.
Alarmists thus rely on computer models that predict even “worse catastrophes,” if global temperatures rise even 0.5 degrees C (0.8 F) more than they already have since the Little Ice Age ended and Industrial Era began. However, the models are hopelessly deficient, and totally unable to predict the climate.
Case in point: Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren (who once argued that forced abortions and mass sterilizations were needed to save the planet), is predicting that climate change will soon cause an epidemic of heat-related deaths in the summer months because people will be unable to handle the intense heat.
“In some parts of the world, when you look more broadly at this question, you see the likelihood that in the hottest times of the year it will be simply physiologically impossible to work outdoors,” Holdren said at a White House event on climate change Monday.
“That means agriculture, that means construction, people who try to work outdoors will basically be unable to control their body temperature and will die. This is a really, really big deal. And it’s going to be a big deal in the hottest parts of the United States as well as the Middle East, in South Asia and other places.”
The Obama administration released a not highly anticipated climate change report on Monday: “The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment.”
“The report projects that under middle-of-the-road emissions scenarios we could see from thousands to tens of thousands additional heat related deaths in the United States each summer,” Holdren said.
Oh my. Tens of thousands of additional heat-stroke deaths a year — that’s a lot!
Thank goodness the alarmists’ predictions are always wrong. Always. Holdren, in fact, has been singularly and spectacularly wrong over the years.
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