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N.C. Not Yet Joining N.Y. 'Investigations' Of Oil, Coal Companies
Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dan Way, who is an associate editor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.
RALEIGH While environmental activists believe New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's investigations of oil giant Exxon Mobil and coal producer Peabody Energy could develop into a multistate class-action matter on the scale of the lawsuit against cigarette makers, North Carolina has not joined Schneiderman's campaign.
Environmental groups have pushed Schneiderman to determine if Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy misled the public about the public health risks from climate change.
"It doesn't seem that the New York Attorney General's Office has reached out to the North Carolina Attorney General's Office on this matter," Samantha Cole, a spokeswoman for North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, said in an e-mail response.
Cooper's office did not respond to questions asking if he endorses his New York counterpart's legal tactics, whether he would consider a similar filing in North Carolina, or if he sees a legal parallel between research questioning global warming and the multibillion-dollar Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 that North Carolina joined.
"We're not involved in the investigations of wrongdoing by Exxon Mobil or Peabody so have no comment about those investigations," said Kathleen Sullivan, spokeswoman for the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill.
Dustin Chicurel-Bayard, spokesman for the North Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club, referred questions to the national office, which was one of 40 environmental groups calling for a federal investigation of Exxon Mobil's climate research efforts. The national office did not respond to messages.
Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute and a former policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, has noted that legal probes like those in New York abuse government power to silence scientists whose research conflicts with studies favored by government regulators and environmentalists blaming changes in the planetary climate on human activity.
"This is the first time that a bad scientific proposition has been relentlessly pursued by a political faction globally," Monckton told Carolina Journal.
"There has been no global warming at all," Monckton said, noting that it's been more than 18 years since any rise in global temperatures has been found.
Monckton blamed the continued warming narrative on activists, academics, and bureaucrats with financial incentives to maintain tax-funded research that conforms to a political agenda.
The absence of evidence has not stopped those who say man is responsible for a heating planet have gone so far as to call for the use of laws created to punish organized crime to prosecute those conducing scientific inquiry that is skeptical of the apocalyptic global-warming rhetoric.
David Legates, a professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, was forced to quit as state climatologist over his skeptical views of human caused climate change. Legates' offenses, in the view of the proponents of human-caused climate change, included his contention that there was no clear evidence of sea level rise in Delaware.
Similarly, environmentalists harshly criticized North Carolina Republican lawmakers and Gov. Pat McCrory after a law passed in 2012 barred the state's Coastal Resources Commission and other policymakers from using sea level rise projections based on unreliable statistical models.
In a Spotlight report for the John Locke Foundation, Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, found that sea level increases of the magnitude the state commission projected were "not very likely at all."
Legates told CJ that climate research supporting man-caused warming is devolving into junk science among a government-funded, scientific technological elite.
At the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C., in June, Kathy Hartnett White warned about "the extent of the witch hunts to ostracize or professionally harm those valiant scientists that have stood up for the integrity of [the] scientific method" in the climate change debate.
White is the director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and former chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
"The empirical scientific method is one of the few crown jewels of Western civilization, and it is now under assault by the academies that have evolved it," White said.
"It is a very startling turn" that attacks on the scientific method are "either tolerated, or encouraged by, the highest levels of our government," she said.
Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is another skeptic of human-caused climate change. He believes solar effects play a much larger role in the Earth's heating and cooling cycles.
Critics accused Soon of failing to disclose fully funding sources for his research, which resulted in a February letter from several U.S. Senate Democrats demanding 10 years of detailed funding data from the John Locke Foundation, which co-sponsored a conference where Soon made a presentation.
Soon told CJ that the intrusion of politicians into scientific inquiry is nothing new, but the climate change movement "seems to be a very extreme case. I would say it's unprecedented," and becoming more of a threat to sound science.
Rather than silencing global warming critics, Soon said, "You ought to really have an open discussion of everything," especially given the complexity of the Earth and the "very uncertain area of science" regarding its climate.
Climate change activists want to create an atmosphere "where certain facts cannot be challenged," Soon said, "and many of the facts they cite should be challenged."
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Environmentalists envision multistate action mirroring tobacco lawsuit
RALEIGH While environmental activists believe New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's investigations of oil giant Exxon Mobil and coal producer Peabody Energy could develop into a multistate class-action matter on the scale of the lawsuit against cigarette makers, North Carolina has not joined Schneiderman's campaign.
Environmental groups have pushed Schneiderman to determine if Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy misled the public about the public health risks from climate change.
"It doesn't seem that the New York Attorney General's Office has reached out to the North Carolina Attorney General's Office on this matter," Samantha Cole, a spokeswoman for North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, said in an e-mail response.
Cooper's office did not respond to questions asking if he endorses his New York counterpart's legal tactics, whether he would consider a similar filing in North Carolina, or if he sees a legal parallel between research questioning global warming and the multibillion-dollar Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 that North Carolina joined.
"We're not involved in the investigations of wrongdoing by Exxon Mobil or Peabody so have no comment about those investigations," said Kathleen Sullivan, spokeswoman for the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill.
Dustin Chicurel-Bayard, spokesman for the North Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club, referred questions to the national office, which was one of 40 environmental groups calling for a federal investigation of Exxon Mobil's climate research efforts. The national office did not respond to messages.
Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute and a former policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, has noted that legal probes like those in New York abuse government power to silence scientists whose research conflicts with studies favored by government regulators and environmentalists blaming changes in the planetary climate on human activity.
"This is the first time that a bad scientific proposition has been relentlessly pursued by a political faction globally," Monckton told Carolina Journal.
"There has been no global warming at all," Monckton said, noting that it's been more than 18 years since any rise in global temperatures has been found.
Monckton blamed the continued warming narrative on activists, academics, and bureaucrats with financial incentives to maintain tax-funded research that conforms to a political agenda.
The absence of evidence has not stopped those who say man is responsible for a heating planet have gone so far as to call for the use of laws created to punish organized crime to prosecute those conducing scientific inquiry that is skeptical of the apocalyptic global-warming rhetoric.
David Legates, a professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, was forced to quit as state climatologist over his skeptical views of human caused climate change. Legates' offenses, in the view of the proponents of human-caused climate change, included his contention that there was no clear evidence of sea level rise in Delaware.
Similarly, environmentalists harshly criticized North Carolina Republican lawmakers and Gov. Pat McCrory after a law passed in 2012 barred the state's Coastal Resources Commission and other policymakers from using sea level rise projections based on unreliable statistical models.
In a Spotlight report for the John Locke Foundation, Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, found that sea level increases of the magnitude the state commission projected were "not very likely at all."
Legates told CJ that climate research supporting man-caused warming is devolving into junk science among a government-funded, scientific technological elite.
At the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C., in June, Kathy Hartnett White warned about "the extent of the witch hunts to ostracize or professionally harm those valiant scientists that have stood up for the integrity of [the] scientific method" in the climate change debate.
White is the director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and former chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
"The empirical scientific method is one of the few crown jewels of Western civilization, and it is now under assault by the academies that have evolved it," White said.
"It is a very startling turn" that attacks on the scientific method are "either tolerated, or encouraged by, the highest levels of our government," she said.
Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is another skeptic of human-caused climate change. He believes solar effects play a much larger role in the Earth's heating and cooling cycles.
Critics accused Soon of failing to disclose fully funding sources for his research, which resulted in a February letter from several U.S. Senate Democrats demanding 10 years of detailed funding data from the John Locke Foundation, which co-sponsored a conference where Soon made a presentation.
Soon told CJ that the intrusion of politicians into scientific inquiry is nothing new, but the climate change movement "seems to be a very extreme case. I would say it's unprecedented," and becoming more of a threat to sound science.
Rather than silencing global warming critics, Soon said, "You ought to really have an open discussion of everything," especially given the complexity of the Earth and the "very uncertain area of science" regarding its climate.
Climate change activists want to create an atmosphere "where certain facts cannot be challenged," Soon said, "and many of the facts they cite should be challenged."
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