Prosecute climate change skeptics! Use RICO Act!

Oh-oh! Global warming RICO letter writers may have opened Pandora's Box

October 2, 2015

By Thomas Lifson

Finally, we may be getting some cosmic justice for the gang of warmists who have spread hysteria over their shaky theory of global warming. Owing to an outrageous act of witch-hunting dissenters, a congressional investigation has begun, and who knows what it will uncover?

It was an outrage when a group of 20 scientists published a letter to President Obama and AG Lynch demanding RICO prosecution of those who question the theory of global warming, based as it is on models that have failed to accurately predict the Earth’s climate for the last 19 years. Not only is criminalizing scientific investigation a bad idea, but the underlying contention that skeptics are funded by greedy polluters is false, a myth deliberately spread by the gang that profits from hysteria, as Russell Cook demonstrated on these pages yesterday.

The letter was published on the website of the Institute for Global Environment and Society (IGES), a nonprofit funded almost exclusively by government grants. The first sign that something was amiss was when IGES disappeared the RICO letter from its website. A bit later, the “404 not found” page was replaced by this:

The letter that was inadvertently posted on this web site has been removed. It was decided more than two years ago that the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) would be dissolved when the projects then undertaken by IGES would be completed. All research projects by IGES were completed in July 2015, and the IGES web site is in the process of being decommissioned.

Inadvertently? Somebody is trying to cover his posterior, aware that misconduct has taken place. It is bad enough that the entire website is about to be taken down. Perhaps they got an inkling of what was headed their way. Lachlan Markay of the Free Beacon delivers the news:

A congressman is asking a taxpayer-funded environmental group to preserve records related to its president’s campaign to bring federal racketeering charges against climate change skeptics.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, revealed the committee will be investigating calls from George Mason University meteorologist Jagadish Shukla and nineteen other scientists to bring civil racketeering charges against companies and organizations that pay for scientific research that questions catastrophic human-induced climate change. (snip)

“IGES’s recent decision to remove documents from its website raises concerns that additional information vital to the Committee’s investigation may not be preserved,” Smith wrote in a Thursday letter to Shukla.

Smith asked Shukla to preserve all internal documents and communications that could be relevant to the committee’s investigation, and to ask all current and former employees and contractors to do the same.

The investigation will likely focus on taxpayers’ extensive support for IGES through grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Shukla’s letter to Obama and Lynch “raises serious concerns because IGES appears to be almost fully funded by taxpayer money while simultaneously participating in partisan political activity by requesting a RICO investigation of companies and organizations that disagree with the Obama Administration on climate change,” Smith wrote.

Smith’s letter cited prior reporting by the Washington Free Beacon revealing that IGES has received $63 million in government funds since 2001, which comprised 98 percent of its total revenue in that time according to annual tax filings.

In addition, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute made a request to the Virginia governor’s office for materials related to Shukla. The governor’s office has promptly responded, as reported by Anthony Watts of the invaluable Watts Up With That website: