The subpoena to Exxon Mobile here: DoJ Suing Exxon
NewsMax: Authoritarianism, always latent in progressivism, is becoming explicit. Progressivism’s determination to regulate thought by regulating speech is apparent in the campaign by 16 states’ attorneys general and those of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands, none Republican, to criminalize skepticism about the supposedly “settled” conclusions of climate science.
Four core tenets of progressivism are: First, history has a destination. Second, progressives uniquely discern it. (Barack Obama frequently declares things to be on or opposed to “the right side of history.”) Third, politics should be democratic but peripheral to governance, which is the responsibility of experts scientifically administering the regulatory state. Fourth, enlightened progressives should enforce limits on speech (witness IRS suppression of conservative advocacy groups) in order to prevent thinking unhelpful to history’s progressive unfolding.
Progressivism is already enforced on campuses by restrictions on speech that might produce what progressives consider retrograde intellectual diversity. Now, from the so-called party of science, aka Democrats, comes a campaign to criminalize debate about science.
“The debate is settled,” says Obama. “Climate change is a fact.” Indeed. The epithet “climate change deniers,” obviously coined to stigmatize skeptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to obscure something obvious: “Of course the climate is changing; it never is not changing — neither before nor after the Medieval warm period (end of the 9th century to the 13th) and the little ice age (1640s to 1690s), neither of which was caused by fossil fuels.”
Today, debatable questions include: To what extent is human activity contributing to climate change? Are climate change models, many of which have generated projections refuted by events, suddenly reliable enough to predict the trajectory of change? Is change necessarily ominous because today’s climate is necessarily optimum? Are the costs, in money expended and freedom curtailed, of combating climate change less than the cost of adapting to it?
But these questions may not forever be debatable. The initial target of Democratic “scientific” silencers is ExxonMobil, which they hope to demonstrate misled investors and the public about climate change. There is, however, no limiting principle to restrain unprincipled people from punishing research entities, advocacy groups and individuals.
But it is difficult to establish what constitutes culpable “misleading” about climate science, of which a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report says: “Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward).”
Did Al Gore “mislead” when he said seven years ago that computer modeling projected the Arctic to be ice-free during the summer in as few as five years?
The attorney general of the Virgin Islands accuses ExxonMobil with criminal misrepresentation regarding climate change. This, even though before the U.S. government in 2009 first issued an endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases, ExxonMobil favored a carbon tax to mitigate climate consequences of those gases.
This grandstanding attorney general’s contribution to today’s gangster government is the use of law enforcement tools to pursue political goals — wielding prosecutorial weapons to chill debate, including subpoenaing private donor information from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
The party of science, busy protecting science from scrutiny, has forgotten Karl Popper (1902-1994), the philosopher whose “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against people incapable of distinguishing between certainty and certitude. In his essay “Science as Falsification,” Popper explains why “the criterion of a scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” America’s party of science seems eager to insulate its scientific theories from the possibility of refutation.
The leader of the attorneys general, New York’s Eric Schneiderman, dismisses those who disagree with him as “morally vacant.” His moral content is apparent in his campaign to ban fantasy sports gambling because it competes with the gambling (state lottery, casinos, off-track betting) that enriches his government.
Then there is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who suggests using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, written to fight organized crime, to criminalize what he calls the fossil fuel industry’s “climate denial apparatus.” The Justice Department, which has abetted the IRS cover-up of its criminal activity, has referred this idea to the FBI.
These garden-variety authoritarians are eager to regulate us into conformity with the “settled” consensus du jour, whatever it is. But they are progressives, so it is for our own good.
Category Archives: Climate Change Fraud Lies
Shadow Lobbying in DC on Policy, it’s Dark
There is a certain Senator who generated a mission to Make DC Listen, knowing that individual American voices were drowned out by power, money and influence.
Hat tip to the Sunlight Foundation for this summary.
What is shadow lobbying? How influence peddlers shape policy in the dark
Earlier this year, we asked you to help us find out which Democratic superdelegates are also lobbyists. We didn’t want to limit it to just registered lobbyists, because there’s an increasing number of people in Washington who do what most of us would think of as lobbying activity, but avoid registering — known as “shadow lobbyists.” But that left us, and our readers, with some questions: What exactly is a shadow lobbyist? How do they avoid registering? How did we get here?
What is shadow lobbying?
Shadow lobbying refers to someone who performs advocacy to influence public policy, like meeting legislators or their staff, without registering as a lobbyist — and it’s a big problem for anyone who cares about transparency in Washington. (For further reading on this topic, you can’t do better than to read Lee Fang’s 2014 investigation of shadow lobbying at The Nation.)
If you just looked at the number of federal registered lobbyists, you would think lobbying was a dying profession. Since a peak of 14,829 registered lobbyists in 2007, the number has steadily declined; in 2015, it was 11,504. But it’s not that the lobbyists have packed up their offices and left D.C. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the amount of money spent on lobbying has remained near its 2009 peak, even as the number of lobbyists has supposedly decreased: In 2015, $3.21 billion was spent on lobbying, down only slightly from $3.5 billion in 2009. (Some estimate that number, which is based on reported spending on lobbying registrations, is actually up to three times higher; we’ll get to that later.)
Shadow lobbying is also sometimes known as the “Daschle Loophole,” named after Tom Daschle. A former senator from South Dakota, Daschle worked as a “policy adviser” at lobbying shops like Alston and Bird and global firms like DLA Piper after leaving the Senate, but never registered as a lobbyist. As The Huffington Post pointed out, that doesn’t mean his clients didn’t “receive the full benefit of his contacts and expertise, and that those assets can’t be used to influence legislation.” Last month, Daschle unexpectedly registered as a lobbyist; however, there are many who followed his blueprint of behind-the-scenes influence.
After years of lobbying, Daschle finally registers as a lobbyist
The pioneer of shadow influencing has put on paper what many have known for years — that he is, in fact, a lobbyist.
So where did all the lobbyists go?
The simple answer is nowhere. They’re still here — they just stopped registering as lobbyists.
The system of lobbying registration has never been ideal. Lee Fang notes that a General Accounting Office study in 1991 revealed more than 10,000 lobbyists who had failed to register, and of those who did register, “94 percent failed to complete their registration forms as required by law.” The 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), while far from perfect, cleaned up the system and clarified the definition of lobbying. In 2007, following the Jack Abramoff scandal, Congress passed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA), which extended the “cooling off” period — the period of time after a lawmaker or their top staff leaves Congress during which they are forbidden from lobbying.
As the law stands now, lobbyists are required to register if they spend at least 20 percent of their time lobbying on behalf of a client, or if they make at least two contacts with covered government officials (members of the House or Senate, their staff and select members of executive agencies). Firms are also exempt from registration if their total income from an individual client is less than $3,000 per quarter.
The problem is that this threshold is reasonably easy to get around. I spoke to James Hickey, the president of the Association of Government Relations Professionals (AGRP), formerly the American League of Lobbyists. (That’s right: Even the people who represent lobbyists no longer call themselves lobbyists.1) He believes the 20-percent threshold doesn’t work as a way to measure lobbying activity: “Personally, and it’s not AGRP’s position, it’s mine, I think anybody who lobbies should register” — whether it makes up 20 percent of their time or not.
Hickey said there should be some exceptions — people “that ask their CEO to come in one day of the year for a fly-in to talk to half a dozen members,” for example, shouldn’t register. But “as long as that 20 percent threshold exists,” he said, “there’s no way those who are in charge of enforcement can keep tabs on what are roughly estimated to be 20,000 lobbyists in Washington, D.C.” (Hickey told me that he registers even though he doesn’t hit the 20 percent threshold because of his position as president of the AGRP.) The Government Affairs Yellow Book, for example, includes information for 23,000 “government affairs professionals” in Washington, more than twice the current number of registered lobbyists.
There’s data to back this up, too. According to a 2012 study by the Center for Responsive Politics:
More than 46 percent of the active 2011 lobbyists who did not report any activity in 2012 are still working for the same employers for whom they lobbied in 2011 — supporting the theory that many previously registered lobbyists are not meeting the technical requirement to report or have altered their activities just enough to escape filing.
American University Professor James Thurber, who’s studied lobbying for more than 30 years and served on the American Bar Association’s Lobbying Task Force when it recommended strengthening lobbying laws, said, “Anyone who is paid to influence public policy, we should know about it” — whether it’s Boeing or the Boy Scouts. Thurber thinks there are around 100,000 people working in lobbying and advocacy in Washington.
Another lobbyist I spoke to, Paul Kanitra, agreed that there are those in D.C. who “take advantage” of the “gray area” created by the lobbying disclosure laws. He runs a firm called LobbyIt that focuses on smaller clients, and its ethos is very different to other lobbying firms. Its website claims, “Large corporations and their high priced representation have a stranglehold on the Capitol,” describing the firm as a “new breed of lobbyists [who] know the United States is supposed to be a government of the people and for the people.” Kanitra argued that the obvious value for a lobbying firm of hiring a former lawmaker is their contacts, saying, “I have to imagine they aren’t sitting the members of Congress down and having them do research and write white papers all day long.”
Why would a lobbyist want to avoid registering?
There are a lot of reasons. It’s certainly possible that lobbyists might not want the public to know that their client is lobbying Congress, or how much they’re spending on it, but that wouldn’t explain the big drop in lobbying registrations after 2007. One big explanation is the passage of HLOGA in 2007, which tightened disclosure and penalties for registered lobbyists, which we wrote about in 2014: “Before these changes in the rules, individuals registered under the LDA just in case. There was no downside. Now, being a registered lobbyist subjects people to additional campaign finance disclosure and gift rules, as well as steep civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance. So, political lawyers simply say don’t register.”
Hickey pointed, as many others have, to the Obama administration’s 2009 decision to bar former lobbyists from working on “regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years” in his White House, saying it had a big effect on lobbyists: “If by being registered I preclude myself from that opportunity, then I think I’m going to have to look carefully at exactly my threshold and how much I lobby, and if I can justify the fact that I don’t do 20 percent or more, then I’m going to go ahead and deregister.” Thurber thinks that while the 2009 rule did have a big impact, along with the 2007 law, shadow lobbying has been a problem since “well before” those changes. “Basically, there has been no serious enforcement for decades,” Thurber said. “That did not change with the 2007 reform, except there was a surge in de-registrations after 2007.”
He’s right: There is very little enforcement of the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The Department of Justice has never brought criminal charges against anyone for failing to register as a lobbyist. According to Fang, “The Justice Department has largely pursued cases in which a registered lobbyist has failed to update a quarterly statement or fallen delinquent, and the House clerk or Senate secretary has spotted the error.” (I reached out to the Department of Justice to check if any cases had been filed since Fang’s article; they told me that their “office is unaware of any criminal cases brought under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has not brought a criminal case under the LDA.”). Kanitra pointed out that those who do register actually put themselves more at risk of investigation than those who just circumvent the system entirely, because they’re then open to being penalized for submitting registrations late or putting something incorrect on their registration forms.
Thurber says we could know a lot more about shadow lobbying than we do. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) does an audit of lobbying disclosure, examining how well lobbyists comply with the registration compliance — but it only looks at those who are registered. The audit doesn’t scrutinize “people who are actually lobbying but are not registered, which is what’s going on mainly in town.” He says the GAO has that authority “to look at all kinds of advocacy” under the existing law, but doesn’t.
What can be done to shine a light on shadow lobbying?
Some, like Thurber, advocate for expanding the definition of lobbying activity to include marketing, public relations and advertising costs. He believes if you include “all the ads, all the shadow lobbyist activities, all the marketing,” the money spent on lobbying is more like $9 billion. Many lobbying firms also have in-house strategic communications arms, and those sorts of services aren’t cheap — and neither are TV ad campaigns. The Glover Park Group, which received $7 million in lobbying income in 2015, boasts about its content creation services on its website:
GPG’s creative group melds left-brain and right-brain thinking to create campaigns that drive conversation, educate, persuade, sell and move to action.
It’s the story that matters, whether we tell it through a new website or blog, traditional ads, such as TV, radio, newspaper and magazine ads, billboards or bus wraps, or interactive and native ads across the social, mobile web. We use every tool available: photos and videos, infographics and sharegraphics, informational one-pagers and brochures, chart packs, slide decks, reports and white papers, and more.
Whether it’s a 30-second spot on national TV or an interactive digital ad on a news site, our creative output is stronger and more effective because it’s built on the input that only GPG’s combination of research and experience can provide.
But other lobbyists I spoke to disagreed with Thurber’s proposal. Hickey said, “Public relations is really a different discipline. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they coordinate, but your goal for public relations is really company brand or product brand than it is for influencing legislation.” He argues: “If there’s no reference to that legislation, then it’d be hard for anyone to say that clearly falls in the realm of lobbying.”
Paul Kelly, a registered lobbyist and member of AGRP, concurred, saying these activities are protected by the First Amendment right to petition one’s government and that “policymakers ought to be very careful about treading into those waters to regulate those activities.”
Even Kanitra, who describes himself as an advocate for transparency and open government, sees problems with this idea. “The problem is, to find a definition that can’t be worked around is so incredibly difficult. I’m open to somebody telling me a specific threshold or a specific approach that would work that would actually wind up having an effect on the people who are abusing it now as opposed to the little guys.”
It’s certainly likely that some, maybe many, lobbyists would continue to find ways around any new regulation on registration. A good start would be enforcement of the existing law; until someone is held accountable for breaking the rules and circumventing the system, the laws have no weight. It’s also clear that there’s no shortage of informed ideas about reforms that could make the system work better, from the ABA Task Force recommendations to Thurber’s modest suggestion that congressional offices keep records of everyone who contacts them.
There will always be lobbying in Washington, and that’s not a bad thing. But it doesn’t have to stay in the shadows.
SCOTUS Ruled and EPA Ignores
EPA Continues To Implement Global Warming Plan Supreme Court Said It Couldn’t
DailyCaller: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials are moving ahead with a key part of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) despite the Supreme Court issuing a stay against the agency’s global warming plan in February.
The EPA submitted a proposal to the White House for green energy subsidies for states that meet the federally mandated carbon dioxide reduction goals early. The Clean Energy Incentive Program would give “credit for power generated by new wind and solar projects in 2020 and 2021” and a “double credit for energy efficiency measures in low-income communities,” according to Politico’s Morning Energy.
Te move seems to violate the Supreme Court’s stay against CPP preventing the EPA from implementing its plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants. EPA, however, argues it’s doing this for states that want to voluntarily cut emissions — despite this being part of CPP.
“Many states and tribes have indicated that they plan to move forward voluntarily to work to cut carbon pollution from power plants and have asked the agency to continue providing support and developing tools that may support those efforts, including the CEIP,” reads a statement provided to Politico from EPA.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is set to talk more about the plan Wednesday afternoon and will no doubt defend it from critics who will say the agency is violating a Supreme Court order.
“Sending this proposal to OMB for review is a routine step and it is consistent with the Supreme Court stay of the Clean Power Plan,” the EPA said.
EPA has been moving forward with aspects of the CPP despite the Supreme Court’s decision. After the court’s February decision, EPA began signalling it would continue to work with states that want to “voluntarily” move forward.
“Are we going to respect the decision of the Supreme Court? You bet, of course we are,” McCarthy told utility executives in February. “But it doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we’re working on and it doesn’t mean we won’t continue to support any state that voluntarily wants to move forward.”
Likewise, the head of EPA’s air and radiation office, Janet McCabe, has also suggested the rule will eventually be upheld.
“EPA utility rules have been stayed twice before, and ultimately upheld,” McCabe said while participating in a panel discussion in Bloomington, Ind., last week. “It’s only smart for states to keep working on this.”
“We stand ready at EPA to help any state that wants to move forward with their planning activities,” McCabe said, noting that some states pledged to cut CO2 after the Supreme Court stayed CPP.
McCabe was referring to an agreement signed by 17 states in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision pledging to push forward fighting global warming. The agreement, signed mostly by Democratic governors, promotes cooperation between states in promoting green energy, not explicitly mentioning global warming.
McCabe neglected to mention the 30 states and state agencies suing EPA to get CPP struck down. That coalition of states was also joined by dozens of business groups, the coal industry and labor unions fighting to keep coal-fired power plants from being forced to close.
“EPA has crossed a line by assigning itself vast regulatory authority that surpasses anything ever contemplated by Congress,” Jeffrey Connor, interim CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), said in a statement. NRECA opposes CPP.
“The fact is that EPA didn’t produce a rule simply to reduce emissions — it crafted a radical plan to restructure the U.S. power sector,” Connor said.
*****
From the White House:
The Clean Power Plan
The Clean Power Plan sets achievable standards to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. By setting these goals and enabling states to create tailored plans to meet them, the Plan will:
Protect the health of American families. In 2030, it will:
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Prevent up to 3,600 premature deaths
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Prevent 1,700 non-fatal heart attacks
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Prevent 90,000 asthma attacks in children
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Prevent 300,000 missed workdays and schooldays
Boost our economy by:
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Leading to 30 percent more renewable energy generation
in 2030 -
Creating tens of thousands of jobs
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Continuing to lower the costs of renewable energy
Save the average American family:
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Nearly $85 a year on their energy bills in 2030
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Save enough energy to power 30 million homes
in 2030 -
Save consumers $155 billion from 2020-2030
Obama’s Climate Change Treaty or Accord, Skirts Senate
Obama’s Violating the Constitution by Not Submitting Climate Treaty to Senate
DailySignal/Senator Mike Lee and Congressman Mike Kelly:
Today at United Nations Headquarters in New York City, Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives of over 130 nations will sign the Framework Convention on Climate Change agreement that was negotiated in Paris last December.
According to President Obama, this “historic agreement” will “hold every country accountable” if they fail to meet its carbon emission targets.
The White House has also acknowledged that the agreement contains “legally binding” provisions designed to create a “long-term framework” that will force the United States and signatory countries to reduce carbon emissions for decades to come.
Despite these facts, President Obama has already announced he will not submit the Paris Climate Agreement to the Senate for advice and consent. Instead, the White House claims the signature environmental achievement of the president’s tenure is just an “international agreement” not meriting Senate attention.
If the stakes weren’t so high, this claim would be laughable on its face.
Not only was this agreement’s predecessor, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, submitted to the Senate and approved as a treaty, but when the Senate ratified that treaty, the Foreign Relations Committee specifically reported that any future emissions targets agreed to through the Convention “would have to be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent.”
President Obama has chosen to ignore this directive.
He has also chosen to ignore the State Department’s eight-factor test that is used to determine “whether any international agreement should be brought into force as a treaty or as an international agreement other than a treaty.”
Those eight factors are:
1) The extent to which the agreement involves commitments or risks affecting the nation as a whole (the agreement’s carbon reductions will inflict costs on every American who consumes energy)
2) Whether the agreement is intended to affect state laws (the agreement will force states to meet emission targets)
3) Whether the agreement can be given effect without the enactment of subsequent legislation by the Congress (Congress will have to appropriate money for the agreement’s Green Climate Fund)
4) Past U.S. practice as to similar agreements (the agreement’s predecessor was submitted as a treaty)
5) The preference of the Congress as to a particular type of agreement (Congress wants to vote on this agreement)
6) The degree of formality desired for an agreement (the agreement is a highly detailed 31-page document)
7) The proposed duration of the agreement, the need for prompt conclusion of an agreement, and the desirability of concluding a routine or short-term agreement (the agreement sets emissions targets decades in advance)
8) The general international practice as to similar agreements (there are many, but the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer is just one example)
The only reason President Obama is not sending the Paris Climate Agreement to the Senate as a treaty is that he knows the Senate would handily reject it.
This is an unacceptable breach of Article II Section 2 of the Constitution, and Congress must do something about it.
That is why we have introduced a concurrent resolution in the House and Senate expressing the sense of Congress that the Paris Climate Agreement must be submitted to the Senate as a treaty for its advice and consent.
If President Obama fails to do so, then Congress must prevent its implementation by forbidding any payments to the agreement’s “Green Climate Fund,” an international slush fund included in the Paris agreement to induce developing nations to sign the agreement.
If Congress fails to specifically prohibit taxpayer money from being spent implementing the Paris Climate Agreement, then they will be complicit in President Obama’s subversion of the Constitution.
*****
More reading on the facts of the Accord, or whatever it is called that will not receive a Senate vote:
FAS: On April 22, 2016, as many as 155 countries intend to sign the new international Paris Agreement to address greenhouse-gas-induced climate change. No international agreement to date has attracted as many signatures on the opening day of the year-long signature period. Eight nations—all perceiving themselves as particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change—plan to deposit their instruments of ratification as well.
Delegations of 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement on December 12, 2015. It creates a structure for nations to pledge every five years to abate their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, to adapt to climate change, and to cooperate to these ends, including financial and other support. A single framework to promote transparency and track progress of Parties’ efforts applies, for the first time, to all Parties—whether rich or poor. The Parties also adopted a Decision to
give effect to the Paris Agreement. Both the Decision and the Agreement (hereinafter capitalized) are intended to be legally binding on Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the new Agreement, respectively, though not all provisions within them are mandatory. Both are subsidiary to the UNFCCC, which the United States ratified with the advice and consent of the Senate (Treaty Document 102-38, October 7, 1992).
The UNFCCC entered into force in 1994.
Whether the new Paris Agreement or Decision would require Senate advice and consent depends on the content of the agreements. If either were to contain new legal obligations on the United States, it would favor requiring Senate consent to ratification. However, the United States and other Parties to the UNFCCC accepted many legally binding obligations when they ratified the Convention, including control of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, preparation to adapt to climate change, international cooperation and support, and regular reporting of emissions and actions with international review. Some have argued that the Paris Agreement does not require more of the United States than it is already obligated to do under the UNFCCC, while others have argued that it does.
Purpose and Post-2050 Balance of Emissions and Removals
The agreement states that it aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.
This purpose is stated as enhancing the implementation of the UNFCCC, including its objective to stabilize GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at a level to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. In order to achieve this “long-term temperature goal,” Parties aim to make their GHG emissions peak as soon as possible and then to reduce them rapidly “so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.” In other words, the Agreement envisions achieving net zero anthropogenic emissions. While this is arguably synonymous with the UNFCCC’s objective of stabilizing GHG atmospheric concentrations, the Agreement puts a timeframe on the objective for the first time. However, as a collective objective, the Agreement provides no means to hold an individual Party accountable if the objective were not met.
Mitigation and Adaptation
The Agreement and Decision establish a single framework under which all Parties would:
communicate every five years and undertake “ambitious” Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to mitigating GHG emissions, participate in a single “transparency framework” that includes communicating their GHG inventories and implementation of their obligations, including financial support provided or received, not less than biennially (with exceptions to a few, least developed states), and be subject to international review of their implementation.
All Parties will eventually be subject to common procedures and guidelines. However, while developed country Parties (not defined) must provide NDCs stated as economy-wide, absolute GHG reduction targets, developing country Parties are exhorted to enhance their NDCs and move toward similar targets over time, in light of their national circumstances.
Further, flexibility in the transparency framework is allowed to developing countries, depending on their capacities, regarding the scope, frequency, and detail of their reporting. The administrative Secretariat of the Convention will record the NDCs and other key reports in a public registry.
The Agreement also requires “as appropriate” that Parties prepare and communicate their plans to adapt to climate change. Adaptation communications, too, will be recorded in a public registry.
A committee will, in a facilitative and non-punitive manner, address compliance issues under the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement contains provisions for voluntary withdrawal of Parties.
The Agreement permits Parties voluntarily to participate in cooperative approaches (implicitly, emissions markets) that “involve the use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes.”
Finance
The Agreement reiterates the obligation in the UNFCCC to provide financial support to developing country Parties to implement their mitigation efforts, calling for it to be continuous and enhanced. It uses exhortatory language to restate the collective pledge in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, of $100 billion annually by 2020, and calls for a “progression beyond previous efforts.” For the first time under the UNFCCC, the Agreement encourages all Parties to provide financial support. In addition, in the Decision, the Parties agreed to set, prior to their 2025 meeting, a new, collective, quantified goal for mobilizing financial resources of not less than $100 billion annually to assist developing country Parties. The Decision strongly urges developed country Parties to scale up their current financial support—in particular to significantly increase their support for adaptation. The Agreement recognizes that “enhanced support” will allow for “higher ambition” in the actions of developing country Parties.
Five-Year Assessments
In 2023 and every five years thereafter, the Parties are to perform a “global stocktake” to review implementation of the Paris Agreement and progress toward the purpose of the Agreement and the long-term net zero anthropogenic emissions goal.
Recall the Chatter About Being Prosecuted as a Climate Changer Denier?
The standing is being set for this to happen. How did we get here?
Subpoenaed Into Silence on Global Warming
Bloomberg: The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”
My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.
(I pause to note, in the interests of full disclosure, that before we met, my husband briefly worked for CEI as a junior employee. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)
Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”
That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.
State attorneys general including Walker held a press conference last week to talk about the investigation of ExxonMobil and explain their theory of the case. And yet, there sort of wasn’t a theory of the case. They spent a lot of time talking about global warming, and how bad it was, and how much they disliked fossil fuel companies. They threw the word “fraud” around a lot. But the more they talked about it, the more it became clear that what they meant by “fraud” was “advocating for policies that the attorneys general disagreed with.”
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gave the game away when he explained that they would be pursuing completely different theories in different jurisdictions — some under pension laws, some consumer protection, some securities fraud. It is traditional, when a crime has actually been committed, to first establish that a crime has occurred, and then identify a perpetrator. When prosecutors start running that process backwards, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re looking at prosecutorial power run amok.
And that approaches certainty when attorneys general start sending subpoenas to think tanks that ExxonMobil might have supported. What exactly would the subpoena prove? That ExxonMobil supported opinions about climate change? That the opinions tended to be congruent with its own interests? That this opinion might have been wrong, and if so, might have encouraged wrong beliefs in others? This is a description of, roughly, every person or organization in the history of the world, not excluding attorneys general. It’s also not illegal. Especially since, as the New York Times points out, “the company published extensive research over decades that largely lined up with mainstream climatology.” This isn’t preventing consumers from buying into a Ponzi scheme; it’s an attempt to criminalize advocacy.
I support action on climate change for the same reason I buy homeowner’s, life and disability insurance: because the potential for catastrophe is large. But that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square. Climate activists have an unfortunate tendency to try to do just that, trying to brand dissenters as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.
It’s an understandable impulse. It seems easier to shut down dissenters than to persuade people to stop consuming lots and lots of energy-intensive goods and services.
But history has had lots and lots of existentially important debates. If you thought that only the One True Church could save everyone from Hell, the Reformation was the most existentially important debate in human history. If you thought that Communist fifth columnists were plotting to turn the U.S. into Soviet Russia, that was also pretty existentially important. We eventually realized that it was much better to have arguments like these with words, rather than try to suppress one side of them by force of law.
Unfortunately those who wield the law forget that lesson, and we get cases like the CEI subpoena, intended to silence debate by hounding one side. The attorney general doesn’t even need to have the law on his side; the process itself can be the punishment, as victims are forced to spend immense amounts on legal fees, and immense time and money on complying with investigations. (And if the law were on the attorney general’s side in a case like this, then that’s a terrible law, and it should be overturned.)
Prosecutors know the damage they can do even when they don’t have a leg to stand on. The threat of investigation can coerce settlements even in weak cases.
The enemies of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ExxonMobil should hold their applause. In a liberal democracy, every guerrilla tactic your side invents will eventually be used against you. Imagine a coalition of Republican attorneys general announcing an investigation of companies that have threatened state boycotts over gay-rights issues, and you may get a sense of why this is not such a good precedent to set.
The rule of law, and our norms about free speech, represent a sort of truce between both sides. We all agree to let other people talk, because we don’t want to live in a world where we ourselves are not free to speak. Because we do not want to be silenced by an ambitious prosecutor, we should all be vigilant when ambitious prosecutors try to silence anyone else.