Tuesday
Nov032015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Who's behind the RICO push?
Nov 3, 2015 Greens Shub Niggurath has been taking a look at a report by the Climate Accountability Institute, a small California non-profit, with links to the renewable energy industry, and which features Michael Mann among its advisers. The Institute seems to have been coordinating efforts to bring racketeering charges against climate dissenters in the USA.
The report in question describes a 2012 conference at which the strategy was agreed and Shub's report makes for fascinating reading. The list of those who took part is interesting. Some were entirely expected - Naomi Oreskes and James Hoggan for example - but it was slightly more surprising to see Myles Allen there.
Reader Comments (81)
Is it correct that Myles Allan has given evidence to one or more Parliamentary Committees?
Let's hope that the next time this may happen, his collar is felt.
Presumably he was there to caution them that any malpractice would be subject to shaming and naming?
Unprovoked poking of a wasps nest with a stick is a dangerous game. These guys would do well to remember that while they're agitating to get others charged under RICO.
They want show trials -- Eugene WR Gallun
"surprising"?
"It's about two one hundredth of a degree in the late 1870's - ok? (...) This is the impact of the whole UAE email affair (...) this is the total impact of that affair..."
Bullshit by the ton.
I understood it was the US $ that was behind the RICO push. Shukla got 5.6M of them.
Why is it surprising that Myles Allen was there?
He has a record of saying anything for his audience regardless of plausibility.
He hasn't got a reputation as a man of integrity.
And the fun part is , these are the very type of people that constantly go on about the 'evil law' being misused and 'big government' that should keep out of peoples lives , and how 'personal freedom' is all important and yet they show no tolerance at all for the views of others when those views are not the same has theirs .
Which is about as shocking has the sun coming up in the east.
I assume Myles Allen didn't fly to California or use any other fuel from a "carbon producer" to get there.
Ha ha....so much for being conspiracy theorists. Well I don't want to be a barrack-room lawyer or encourage lawsuits but here it seems to me that we have here an actual conspiracy against a company and that IS illegal - at least in the UK:
http://www.inhouselawyer.co.uk/index.php/media-entertainment-a-sport/9716-the-law-of-conspiracy-dirty-tricks-corporate-rivals-and-brand-attacks
quote
There are four elements to a conspiracy claim:
1.a combination or agreement between two or more individuals;
2.an intent to injure;
3.pursuant to which combination or agreement, and with that intention, certain acts were carried out;
4.resulting loss and damage to the claimant.
.....
Lawful means conspiracy: a combination to perform acts which, although not themselves per se unlawful, are done with the sole or predominant purpose of injuring the claimant – it is in the fact of the conspiracy that the unlawfulness resides.
endquote
The only difficult part is showing that Exxon actually suffered any loss. Well of course they didn't because, despite the rhetoric, fuel is a necessity not an addictive drug. The activists themselves even have to use it to get to their meetings. So you can only be prosecuted if it works. Seems a bit too late to act by then to me but then the law is an ass.
Frightening.
The more so because most of the comments already on this page don't really seem to take it seriously.
As shub says at the end of his article they have already started down that route and if they want to find smoking gun documents then they will "find" them, as did Gleick.
And they've done enough demonising of oil companies already for enough people to believe the comparison witn tobacco companies.
Remember what happened to BP over the Gulf spill? These people are dangerous and as far as the politicians and the unthinking public are concerned they have the truth on their side.
The RICO push is a change of tack probably brought about by the failure of lawsuits such as Kivalina v ExxonMobil, a lawsuit brought by Matt Pawa, who is on the Climate Accountability Institute's Board of Advisors, and who of course attended this La Jolla workshop.
It's funny that public/politicians don't realize it's just activists hatred of 'oil'.. always oil companies, especially Western or USA ones.
why not cement, or steel, both equally as 'polluting'.
Or all the estate oil companies around the world.
because they are not the eco/typically left of centre political, traditional hate figures
(ie moved on from fighting Chevron in the rain forests in the 80's)
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’ve often wondered why they keep banging on about tobacco.
They are truly, truly bonkers and everything Dr Lew tried to pin on sceptics. But most of all they’re incapable of basic logic.
Tobacco is not energy, it’s an addiction but even the most craven victim to smoking will spend much more of their cash on energy. You could sue fossil fuel companies to hell and back and they’d just make us pay. Sure, the odd coal company might fall but fossil fuels won’t. Not while the alternatives are so pathetic. Because we’re tied to fossil fuels, the more society tried to extort money from the likes of Exxon, the more we’d hurt ourselves. It’s no hardship for non smokers to tax addicts but who’s going to embrace taxing themselves?
The second thing these people don’t seem to have noticed – tobacco survived the RICO trials. Tobacco is still big, lucrative business. Many former addicts are still addicts. What has changed is the balance between those who do and those who don’t to the point where smoking in public places could be curbed. It took more than 50% to be non smokers before we had the momentum to say no to passive smoking. Are the non users of fossil fuels greater than 50%? Are they greater than 0.000005%? It certainly wasn’t obscure court cases that made people stop smoking. Ultimately it was because they wanted to stop. People could see the benefits of not smoking outweighed the benefits of the habit.
One thing this shows clearly is how bereft of persuasive evidence warmists feel they are. Their ‘overwhelming’ proof is so flimsy they try to borrow 'successful' schemes from anywhere they can. Celebrity endorsements, moral blackmail, pop concerts, scary movies, secret army of industry funded fifth columnists, anything they think will work. Anything but admit their case is unpersuasive.
What is pleasing is their insanity is becoming obvious. I can well imagine that this mouth frothing is putting those who see it right off. Whatever Exxon may or may not have written decades ago, these people have been kind enough to let us know (via Shub and the Bish) exactly what they’ve been up to. Mike Jackson, I agree that these people are dangerous but making them a figure of fun is a step in the right direction.
Barry the Lefts selectivity is one of its stranger features, which makes it hard for a non-Leftist to understand the mindset or take it seriously. As you say, oil companies bad, cement companies good. Blood stained African dictators are good, blood stained south American ones are not good. Puzzling. Of course not taking them seriously is a big mistake. Conservative forces have given the Leftist-wrecker mentality a free ride for far too long. Their inconsistency, their intellectual incoherence, should be ridiculed at every point. Look where treating these people as just normal, rational people with a different point of view has got us!
"but it was slightly more surprising to see Myles Allen there."
No it's not. Wolf in sheep's clothing.
bill, that partisan complaint misses the point that every political wing has incoherent aspects. That’s because people follow their political instincts based on what they feel is right or wrong - not what they think is right or wrong.
They have to use their feelings. No-one has enough information to make a reasoned judgement about any policy. The correct judgement is almost always agnosticism. But that’s ineffective. And leaves the decisions to the fanatical.
For completeness here is an example of incoherence from the right.
(Note – this isn’t about whether the arguments are correct. Just that they are incoherent):
A) If the total wealth increases it doesn’t matter that it’s accumulated disproportionately by the rich as the wealth will trickle down.
B) DFiD is pointless as if we give foreign aid to the third world it just transfers wealth to the rich in the Third World country. That wealth will not trickle down to the very poorest in the world.
Every political viewpoint contains incoherence. But some work better than others.
Incoherence alone isn't a decisive blow.
Good work by Niggurath, and thank you for posting on it. The obsessive, mutually-reinforcing, febrile fantasising of these awful people is something to behold. I have put a note about it on the Moral and Intellectual Poverty of Climate Alarm thread at 'Discussion' in case that will help others track this down some day.
Barry Woods
They're serious.Because without oil all the rest are irrelevant. Oil is what underpins the whole of modern society.
Demonise that, make its use unacceptable and you are back in the dark ages.
Every single thing that is an "essential" to modern living, from the clothes we wear to the medicines we take requires the use of oil in some form either directly in its manufacture or in the winning and transporting of other products.
We will find a replacement in the fulness of time, when we need to, and that is the environmentalists' second-worst nightmare.
To quote Maurice Strong, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
TinyCO2
Normally I would agree. Mockery is usually a pretty effective tool but not when the person you are mocking has might (and to many people, right as well) on his side.
Not only that but the little people don't like excessively powerful groups and will take advantage of perceived weakness to get one over on them.
My example of BP was deliberate. The Gulf spill should never have been used to extort large sums of cash on the flimsiest of evidence but a large number of assorted entities hustled along by lawyers and with the support of the Obama government (for his own reasons no doubt) got away with just that.
The environmentalists have successfully demonised the oil companies for years. Think about it! The one commodity we can't do without, that none of us wants to give up (on a personal level not even the most rabid of environmentalists, 40,000 of whom are about to prove me right in 4 weeks time!) and yet we broadly support the likes of Greenpeace and FoE when they demand that these companies be "held to account" for their "destruction of the environment".
Cognitive dissonance doesn't start to describe it!
Coal and gas also underpin society. Electric generation... as does cement,steel..
Yet western oil companies are the only target for eco activists.. asking them why they don't target the other producers. Always gives a fun answer...
M Courtney I take your point but claim "more incoherence on the Left" partly because thats what I have observed and partly because any dogma which is book-based (Marx, acknowledged or not) has incoherence 'built-in' because the book can't cover every possible eventuality. Incoherent conservatives are nitwits, leftists are necessarily incoherent.
The odious Stanton Glantz a scientist?
- who knew?
What is clear is that these folk seek to impose their will and world view on the rest of us - using the facilities of a free society to actually bring about that society's downfall.
That "intellectually bankrupt climate activist movement" is resorting to bully boy tactics after their dishonest overblown screeching was essentially ignored.
How to deal with them eh?
Why do I get the feeling that the funders of these antics will turn out to have very deep pockets and be a conspiracy theorist's bonanza?
I dunno about Marx ... but Saul Alinsky is in there somewhere .....
bill, as a leftist I politely suggest that your observation is due to a sampling bias caused by your own viewpoint.
Neither side has a dearth of nitwits.
And while a book may be incomplete so is experience. All sides are inevitably incoherent.
But that doesn't matter.
Politics is the art of the possible as a right-wing German wrote. And he was correct.
The incoherence allows the practical political animal to fit into reality and influence it. A dogmatic, coherent self-assured viewpoint would founder on the first fact that didn't fit the view.
As I've said often, Green is not Red.
"I demand an Inquisition!" shouted Naomi............
"Roll out the rack, and put out some ads for torturers majoring in inquisition techniques - some bods from Gitmo - jus' perfect!"
Alinskyite or, taking a lead from the.........witch hunt episodes?
These green terrorists are getting a little ahead of themselves are they not, mind you Obama probably wishes it too.
This type of foray seems to becoming especially popular among the liberal chatterati on both sides of the pond, wrong headed but inspired pursuit , an odyssey in making totally unfounded allegations against anyone and anything which is perceived to go against the liberal received wisdom ah God ....................the list is long, as it is obscenely prejudiced.
Recently - over here we had the 'Hacked off' campaign which sought to demonize the press based on wildly accusatory claims which had no basis, in law, logic nor in reality. This [from Shubs link] smacks of the same desperate witch hunt and smear tactics, of which only Alinsky would wholeheartedly approve.
Indeed, we all of us realists should be very wary of these sort of quasi legal attempts at silencing and criminalizing innocent men and women and organizations - not that I have much truck with the endlessly arcane dealings of certain global corporates - for sometimes they are just as bad.
Finally, be apprised, Myles Allen is no friend of the climate realists and those who seek to glean and hammer out the truth, among - all the hair-shirt, shouty noise coming from the Alarmist poppycock promoters and the SJW-SWP branch of green activists.
Mike Jackson, the hatred of oil companies is many stranded. First but not foremost, they have polluted. It's a dirty, dangerous industry and needs a tight rein. Second and most important, oil is expensive. Energy full stop is expensive and people resent that, especially when companies make a lot of money from it. People forget that governments make a lot of money from it too, money that they benefit from. People don't see that black, smelly, poisonous stuff alows all the nice stuff to happen. I'm not sure what could be done to remove those blinkers.
Up to now fossil fuel companies have preferred to keep their heads down and hope trouble blows over. It's a tactic they're using again over AGW. They're as likely to make us all sign to say we recognise the dangers of AGW when buying fossil fuel energy, than take on environmentalists. They will always be the big, rich bully against the weak, damaged indivuals, even when their opposition is just as big and well funded or that it is individual emissions that are part of the whole. Having left it this long to speak up for the benefits of their product, it's probably too late to act any differently.
Mike, are you sure that the context of the Maurice Strong quote is correct? I could not find it in Strong's opening or closing speech in Rio.
Barry Woods
Sorry if I repeat myself but why divert your efforts and attack electricity generation, cement, steel when you can cop the whole lot in a oner by attacking oil? Get rid of oil and you've got rid of "everything"!
MCourtney
The incoherence is yours in in this instance.
"A) If the total wealth increases it doesn’t matter that it’s accumulated disproportionately
by the rich as the wealth will trickle down."It will always be accumulated disproportionately in any society that doesn't have a command economy and in those instance it probably won't increase anyway.
Sometimes it will be the rich that benefit; sometimes not, and in a free society there will be a trickle-down effect.
B) DFiD is pointless as if we give foreign aid to the third world it just transfers wealth to the rich in the Third World country. That wealth will not trickle down to the very poorest in the world.
Quite correct. In a dictatorship the dictator hangs onto the cash. He's not interested in the peasantry, just in his own pocket.
And there is a trickle down effect in reality. It stops at the president's family and bodyguard and assorted sycophants, that's the difference.
Mike Jackson, the argument you make would work better if you realised that the words "by the rich as the wealth will trickle down" were included for a reason.
There is no point in claiming that the issue was the accumulation of wealth. It wasn't.
It was the increase in inequality in a community that was the issue.
In the West that is considered Good if total wealth increases.
In the Third World that is considered Bad if total wealth increases.
There is incoherence there.
Which is fine. The world is a complex place.
M Courtney, M Jackson, the important part is that there is a reason for the wealth to trickle down, not just that there is wealth. In undeveloped countries there is very little home supplied products for the wealthy to spend on whereas the developed countries have many and varied ways to liberate one group of its cash and deliver it to another. Charity often interferes with the local economies eg Africa is flooded with cheap western discarded clothes. Why would anyone buy locally made products? There's no demand for local manufacturing so those businesses don't grow to the point where they can make the cheap clothes for westerners to discard in the first place... even if they could start a manufacturing plant on solar power.
In response to Phillip Bratby, someone wanted to know if CAGW should be the only ones to abstain from the substance they condemn. To which the short answer is - well duh! Anyone who believes in something and wants others to be convinced should do everything they can to avoid sinning. There is a plethora of avenues these days for remote collaboration. I know, I'm trying to do just that over a mere 100 mile journey. But then I care about wasted time, energy and money.
Actually the bigger joke is that:
"Collectively, multinational oil companies produce just 10% of the world's oil and gas reserves. State-owned companies now control more than 75% of all crude oil production"
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704852004575258541875590852
So their mantra about capitalist profiteering is entirely misguided in the first place! And of course transportation is only responsible for 30% of CO2 emissions so we are down to only 3% of emissions originating from big oil (presumably no more than 1% being from any of the big 3).
What is needed for these single-issue fanatics is just another issue. They are the same loony lefties who rioted about globalisation (don't hear much about that now do we?). In the 70's their progenitors were even terrorists themselves so I guess using the law is a step up in morals from there.
What a laugh it'll be if Russia, China and India tell the UNFCC just to eff-off in Paris. The West will then be faced with the absolute certainty that they alone are prepared to jeopardise their economies based on 97% hysterical uber-pessimism (that 3% being the basic physics).
Don't feed the troll. She enjoys it.
What a tragedy!
Robotnik makes a perfectly valid point (whether you agree with it or not) about confusing "dating back to" and "dating from" but then cannot resist being needlessly offensive about the person who made the mistake.
I genuinely find that sad. What a miserable life some people must lead!
MCourtney
I took out the "trickle down" bit from your quote because it's a cliché. Also a red herring. It has been used by the "right" to justify wealth differentials (needlessly in my opinion) and by the "left" as a stick to beat the "right" with. Mainly because they cannot resist the temptation!
Either way I wandered a bit OT. Sorry.
The intentions of the Climate Accountability Institute should be obvious from their name. You don't need telepathy.
In this arena, the need and type of political evidence is decided in advance, then you go out and find it. If you can't find it, you make it. If you can't make it, you fake it. That is, lie. It is fairly typical of national American politics, in a way which still makes British politics look charmingly quaint and polite to the point of naivety. British politicians stand for office, American politicians run for office.
Myles 11 Degrees Allen was probably invited to add a bit more European moral relativity.
It is curious quite how much traveling about that warmist leaders do. I suspect it's due to their lack of hard evidence. They feel (probably correctly) that without the one to one contact, the tears the passionate speeches, they'd get nowhere. Emotional blackmail works so much better when you're eye to eye. I remember when Anthony Watts decided to drive to a meeting (with some climate body) so he could take in a few weather stations, rather than flying. It was a very simple act but said a lot about his integrity.
I've been wondering if we do not want a RICO investigation. We all know that such an investigation would show that there is no collusion, no money. I know that the press will run with it while it is ongoing, but people no longer trust the FBI (I assume they would investigate) like they once did. Middle class people now fear and mistrust the police, so the fact of an investigation would not be nearly as bad as many fear for sceptics' PR.
What percentage of these professional agitators are academics, with their lifestyles funded by taxpayers?
Under UK Planning Law, there have been uses of buildings and land considered undesirable. 'Tripe boiling' was considered highly undesirable.
Climate science and its associated agitating should be considered as tripe boiling, and tripe boilers such as Naomi Oreskes and Myles Allen kept at a distance from students, and public funding.
Michael Mann seems very keen on getting others into court, but seems somewhat reticent about going there himself.
Doubting Rich, the warmists are counting on the no smoke without fire rule. Almost every researcher will have at some time or another received funds from some company, often indirectly but it can be spun into a message that the person has been bought. Foolishly companies think it will buy them PR to fund research and education. Ha. Companies have also funded think tanks that suit their political mindset. For some twisted reason society thinks it's ok for Green billionares to fund green activism but free market groups must go unfunded. THe US is slightly more balanced but only because both sides are gobby and not because of any reasonableness.
Only if an investigation were allowed to put things into perspective would there be no case to answer but I fear the warmists would spin corruption if even 5p had been given to sceptics. I myself have recieved money from a fossil fuel company... true, it was a rebate because they'd overcharged me but with the right lawyer and the wrong jury, I'm sure I could be found guilty of being a sceptic for money.
What is always patently obvious with these scandals is how enormously under-resourced we sceptics are compared to the Climate Extremists. If some sceptics had pushed the Rico thing, this news would have been out within hours, but instead it always takes weeks, and usually only because for some noble crusader working in their own time to uncover the scandal.
Just imagine the dirt and criminal activity that would be found if there were a proper investigation!
Everything you need to know about Myles Allen
M Courtney, you're forgetting that warmists have a bottomless bag of excuses why we haven't seen loads of warming. They've had to dial back on the 'natural cooling has balanced CO2 warming' idea because we're reaching a point where the 'natural cooling' would see us colder than the Little Ice Age, without the CO2. They've had to bury it somewhere else - it's in the ocean, down the back of the sofa... A few more years and we'd have to be in a full blown ice age to explain why CO2 isn't causing rapid warming.
M Courtney (Nov 3, 2015 at 3:47 PM), you seem to be providing us with first hand evidence of that old saying about "not trying teaching a pig to whistle because it's not only a waste of time but it also annoys the pig" :-)
Can you imagine if it would be the other way around and these would be some leaked minutes of a "denier" meeting discussing the strategy of atacking the warmists...
If you shut down tobacco companies, you hurt mainly the poor via much higher prices. Not that many smoke now and you don't need cigs to live. However, if you shut down oil companies....this is insane. Let us assume that they merely cripple the oil companies. Since we still need oil it will be more expensive. Lots more expensive. I assume this is exactly what they want.
Craig Loehle and does anyone thing the oil companies mind selling a small amount of oil at a very high price compared to selling a lot of oil at a lower price?
@ZT
Myles Allen hobnobbing with the CAI crew just vaporizes his credibility.
Being arrogantly dumb enough to try on a live magic trick on Newsnight - case closed.
The tobacco template is being re-purposed all over the place - mainly in "Public 'Elf" and 'ole Stanton is surfin the wave providing consultancy to blinkered control freak bigots who've got a travel, accommodation and "honorarium" budget commensurate with Stanton's self regard.
Myles Allen is too good a mathematician to produce the self-serving material he does without having drunk the kool-aid, so it is no surprise to see him involved with these unpleasant people.
What I don't understand about the troll is that it should be self-evident that people here are neither deniers nor dishonest. They may be wrong, but that's different. With apologies to M Courtney, a lot of people on the left can't accept that honest people may disagree, and therefore think the only way to deal with opponents is to call them out as baddies and wait for them to repent. Ad-homs therefore take the place of rational argument.
Any onlooker here can see shades of opinion about the extent, effects and projections for global warming/climate change rather than blanket denial, which is ironically the default approach of all the people cooking up excuses for the hiatus. Nobody "denies" basic physics although many question whether a simple equation that holds in very limited conditions can be extrapolated to cover the very complex global circulation, about which the well-informed know they understand little.
ZT, interesting link to Myles Allen failing to use loaded dice correctly.
Shub's report, the subject of this thread, contains references to preloading the public's imagination and legal process.
If they had any evidence, they would not need such subterfuge.
They are just producing more and more evidence, that they have no evidence. They will then use lawyers to claim that their own admission of proof of no evidence, is not admissible in court as evidence.
Corrupting science, law, religion and politics, would make any Dictator proud, as the praise from collaborators demonstrates.
M Courtney (Nov 3, 2015 at 4:12 PM), my apologies for potentially de-railing your dialogue with a light-hearted quip.
Nevertheless, I get rather irked when someone accuses people here of being ignorant of physics and the scientific method... particularly when many here have a first degrees in physics, plus post-graduate degrees in science or engineering (astronautics in my case).
Dave Salt, no problem.
It's just that, as an outsider here (look at Nov 3, 2015 at 4:28 PM | David S) I recognise how hard it is when people pile on.
We can learn from each other if we are courteous and respect the fact that we have different views.
Having said that, I've derailed this thread enough (expert troll, me) and I have a long drive ahead of me so please don't be offended when I don't reply for a while.