Algorean Fools and Frauds
Judge William Alsup has laughed off suggestions that he’s currently presiding over the “global warming” equivalent of the Scopes Monkey Trial.
But like it or not this is essentially what is being played out right now in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco.
The climate alarmists have finally got their day in court against those pesky free-thinking intelligent people they call “climate deniers.”
Big mistake. The overconfident alarmists appear to have bitten off more than they can chew. They imagined that they’d fool the world into thinking that this was a case about ordinary, wronged citizens – specifically the cities of San Francisco and neighboring Oakland – taking on the evil, sea-level-raising, planet-destroying might of Big Oil.
In reality, as is becoming clearer by the day, it’s the “science” of climate change which is really on trial here. And given that the “science” of climate change is so shaky that it might as well be called “witchcraft” this is not a discussion that’s likely to end well for the shysters who are promoting it…
Background
The origins of this case lie in #Exxonknew. Its purpose is to attack the fossil fuel industry using much the same methods once employed against the tobacco industry. The plan was dreamed up in 2012 by a small group of climate activists meeting in La Jolla, California.
The cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing five Big Oil firms – Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell – alleging that they have conspired, Big-Tobacco-style, to conceal the harm of their products. Apparently, these oil majors ought to be compelled to pay billions of dollars in compensation for the damage they have done, inter alia by causing sea levels to rise.
The Judge
Already, the plaintiffs have run into a major problem. Judge William Alsup – who by rights really ought to have been one of their guys, given that he’s a Clinton appointment who lives in California – turns out to be the real deal. As this excellent overview by Tony Thomas in Quadrant notes, he has a reputation for not just taking anybody’s word for it:
While presiding in Uber v. Waymo, for example, he asked for a tutorial on self-driving car technology. In Oracle v. Google, he taught himself some Java programming language, to help understand the case.
The very last thing the plaintiffs needed was a judge who does his homework. They needed one who would take their junk science at face value.
Already, Judge Alsup has pretty much dismissed the Exxonknew conspiracy theory. “From what I’ve seen, and feel free to send me other documentation, but all I’ve seen so far is that someone [from an oil major] went to the IPCC conference and took notes. That’s not a conspiracy,” he saidl.
This does not augur well for the plaintiffs.
Big Oil
The oil majors have been about as helpful as a chocolate fireguard in this case. You’d think that with all those billions, they’d have a little to set aside to make a decent fight in defense of their own industry. But in fact, for reasons ranging from cowardice to convenience to cynicism, most of them are heavily invested in the alarmist cause. Exxon’s Rex Tillerson wanted the U.S. to stay in the Paris Climate Accord; Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden is a veritable Uriah Heep when it comes to grovelling about the evils of his industry; BP once tried to rebrand itself “Beyond Petroleum” lest anyone confuse it with a company whose business model depended on extracting sticky black stuff from the ground.
When the judge asked the various parties to give him a tutorial on climate change, only Chevron bothered to do so. Instead, most of the best scientific arguments have been made for them by skeptics offering amicus curiae – ‘friends of the court’ – briefs. Despite what you hear claimed by climate alarmists, skeptics receive little if any financial support from the oil industry because the oil industry just doesn’t want the flak – and it knows that skeptics are so committed to their cause they’re prepared to say this stuff for free, so why bother?
The post Algorean Fools and Frauds appeared first on LewRockwell.
Leave a Reply