Whitehouse: Prosecute Climate Change Skeptics with RICO Statute

Who are these companies? What about the millions of New Englanders who shivered through the second heavy winter in a row, as roofs caved in and the snow fall reached telephone power lines? Maine Governor Paul LePage begged for pushback against the EPA and their emission rules, many of which were preventing families from warming their own homes.

Perhaps Sheldon disapproved, since heaters and stoves are climate change agents, too.

Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

Smoking kills, Shelly. The sun does not. The Sun is not in collusion with the Santa Ana winds or NorEasters to bilk billions out of unwitting consumers.

The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.

The sad irony, however, is that this deceptive, misleading pseudo-science blitz better describes the Climate Alarmism caucus. How much more government-funded pandering will everyday Americans accommodate?

Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups, alleging that the companies “engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.” 

Did Whitehouse and his legal colleagues put this statute to use to bring down Raymond Patriarca, the mob boss of New England and prototype of "The Godfathers" Vito Corleone? 

Tobacco spent millions of dollars and years of litigation fighting the government. But finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.

Big Tobacco were larger private firms with their own money. The climate alarmists, like Whitehouse, float on government funding to keep peddling their "sky is falling" rhetoric about the cold, the heat, and everything in between.

In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise. According to the court: “Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective — to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.”
The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking.

What parallels? Truth is unparalleled, and the record is looking bad for global warming enthusiasts. Whitehouse cites one researcher getting grants from electrical and fossil fuel industries, but one scientist does not a conspiracy of fraud create.

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

There's a lot of smoke, and a lot of mirrors, too, since the climate alarmism agenda has taken one hit after another for lack of evidence, integrity, and viability.

Now that Whitehouse wants to organizing a federal class action lawsuit against energy producers, and silence free speech in the process, perhaps it's time for grassroots conservatives across the country to prosecute Whitehouse for his climate change racket.