The energy industry is under relentless siege as the global warming blame game heats up, writes Keith Bryer.
Looking back on the 20th century and the first sixteen years of the 21st, future historians may find an extraordinary thread running through left-wing politics in the developed world – the systematic and never-ending assault on oil companies.
The assault has been relentless. It began with the 1911 antitrust laws in the US that were used to break up the Standard Oil Company into Esso, Sohio, Mobil, Amoco and Chevron.
It was seriously believed by some that that both world wars (and all subsequent ones), were driven by the oil companies, and not by the politicians alone.
Then in the last 30-odd years, communists and socialists of every stripe agreed that the oil industry, virtually on its own, was responsible for destroying the planet by emitting carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide
It is now rare to find commentators in the major media prepared to challenge a theory that defies history and common sense, especially as the basis is the assumption that carbon dioxide, and recently it seems carbon of any kind – even trees if you follow the weird logic of some extremists – is a poison.
Whole industries, entire governments with their associated bureaucracies, the UN, the EU, churches and universities have all embraced the idea of carbon emissions poisoning the climate and causing an impending world disaster of Armageddon proportions.
Those few who dare to challenge this orthodoxy are subject to ad hominem attacks of extraordinary viciousness.
They are pilloried, chased out of employment; their motives questioned, scorned, ridiculed, ostracised and treated as Protestants once were in 16th century Europe.
Is all this rational? Are oil companies and their products uniformly bad for human health and the world itself? Are the oil companies engaged in some vast conspiracy that works behind the scenes to suppress truth?
Such thoughts used to be the stuff that mad people spouted on street corners. Now it is in the mainstream of political life, taking on a momentum of its own.
In the US, public prosecutors (who are politicians first and professionals second it seems) have now chosen to use legal means to silence critics of global warming theory, on the grounds that it is not a theory but a fact, and to say otherwise is fraud.
The prime target of this assault on free speech is the Exxon oil company, of course. It is the largest company in the oil industry. Destroying it will be a major triumph for the climate alarmists and their socialist hangers-on.
It will be a victory for those who believe in a central all-powerful sate that controls every aspect of the life of its citizens. That this assault on essential democratic freedoms that were wrenched from the superstition and intolerance that gripped Europe before the industrial revolution, is a major shift from reason to emotion and fear.
Now no less than 16 US public prosecutors have banded together to demand that Exxon-Mobil hand over e-mails, paper memos, documents of any kind that so much as use words like “climate change”, “global warming” or “carbon dioxide emissions”, as well as all communications with those who oppose climate alarmism.
These guardians of US law and the US constitution and Bill of Rights want to hunt through decades of company documents in a massive fishing expedition to find Exxon guilty of something.
Those who follow the climate change phenomenon and its political offshoots have long been suspicious, and even alarmed, by some of its manifestations, and the steady march towards greater intolerance of dissent from its orthodoxy.
Climate change
The latest to join the Exxon hunt is the Massachusetts attorney-general Maura Healey who has broadened the chase to include 40 years of Exxon communications with a handful of conservative organisations known colloquially as “think tanks”.
Allegedly involved in the antiglobal warming doctrine is the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Beacon Hill Institute and the Acton Institute.
Curiously, neither the Beacon Hill nor the Acton Institute has ever received funds from Exxon. Never mind, they are conservative organisations, so bring them in for a grilling; they are bound to be guilty of something.
Healey isn’t the first attorney-general to target conservative groups that disagree with most Democratic politicians on global warming policy. The Virgin Islands attorney-general in March gunned for Exxon, issuing a subpoena to Exxon for its communications with dozens of conservative think tanks, policy experts and scientists.
New York’s attorney-general launched an investigation into Exxon’s global warming stance in November, based on reporting by liberal journalists at Inside Climate News and Columbia University, that Exxon had been covering up climate science for decades while funding right-wing activist groups.
He led a conference in March, which announced that more prosecutors would probe Exxon and fight against Republican attacks on federal environmental regulations.
Former vice-president Al Gore attended the event, as did a group of environmental activists. He even suggested that global warming sceptics should be jailed, claiming that freedom of speech did not mean the right to commit fraud. It was a veiled attack on scientific inquiry.
Exxon has responded by filing a complaint against the New York attorney-general, supported by two Republican attorneys-general. It has also filed against the Massachusetts attorney-general, claiming she has attacked Exxon as a calculated political stunt, alleging that she announced the results of her investigation before she served her subpoena to the company.
It will be a great legal fight that Exxon has the resources to bear. It is ironic that a private company should now bear the banner of individual liberty to prove that it is not the enemy of democracy but by force majeure, its defender.
* Keith Bryer is a retired communications consultant.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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