Last week U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Congress that her department has discussed taking civil legal action (under RICO, the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) against “climate deniers” (whatever those are—I don’t know any).

“This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” she said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing March 9, a hearing in which Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) took a prominent part in encouraging Lynch to act.

Whitehouse of course has championed such action for nearly a year, and I have pilloried the idea as anti-First Amendment and anti-science on this website here, here, here, and here. Whitehouse argues that the First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud—intentionally presenting information one knows is false in order to harm someone else or benefit oneself financially—and of course he’s right about that. But with the enormous number of scientists debating all kinds of different perspectives on the warming effect of CO2 derived from fossil fuel combustion, the benefits of rising CO2 to agricultural and other plant growth and therefore to all animals and people, and the benefits of the energy derived from fossil fuels, it’s going to be well nigh impossible to prove a fraud case (though it might be possible with regard to some of the climate alarmists’ antics, e.g., as exposed in Climategate emails or the infamous hockey stick graph).

Frankly, I consider the ominous language to be nothing but saber rattling, designed to intimidate. The odds that the Justice Department would seriously try this seem slim to nonexistent. But the intimidation will surely have a chilling effect on some climate skeptics, which is the real point anyway.

 

 

Featured image “Freedom of Speech” courtesy of “Always Shooting,” Flickr Creative Commons.