The relentless march of the jackboots - today's edition

The post under this one concerns itself with the Freedom-Haters upending two major American universities over identity politics. There was no specific charge in the cases of University of Missouri Tim Wolfe, or Yale administrator and lecturer Erika Christakis. Screaming mobs were able to turn them into villains merely for declining to get on board with their completely fabricated agenda.

The Freedom-Haters are now using the same ploy with regard to the environment:

Scurry on board the Exxon prosecution express. Lest they be left behind and called “deniers,” Bernie Sanders,Martin O’Malley, the attorney general of New York and Al Gore this week all demanded criminal investigation of Exxon Mobil as a result of recent media “exposés.” 

Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire on Thursday agreed, saying, “There’s a lot of evidence that they misled people.”

Not one of these worthies likely examined the evidence, which tells a story quite different from the claim that Exxon somehow concealed its understanding of the climate debate. But the hurdle rate for “investigative” journalism has apparently become low. The allegedly damning documents that the Los Angeles Times and the website Inside Climate News (ICN) claim to have unearthed were published by Exxon itself, in peer-reviewed journals, on its website, and in archives created by Exxon for public use.

Technically, the reporters wallow in the equivocation fallacy. Uncertainty about whether X=2 is not the same as uncertainty about whether 2+2=4. Acknowledging and even studying man’s impact on the climate, as Exxon has done and continues to do, is not tantamount to endorsing a green policy agenda of highly questionable value.

And that’s the real problem. Read closely and the accusation isn’t really that Exxon misled the public by emphasizing the uncertainties of climate science, which are real. It’s that Exxon refused to sign up for a vision of climate doom that would justify large and immediate costs to reduce fossil fuel use. 

The irony is that, in keeping with the general trend of corporations acquiescing to the  left, energy companies have already established a track record of puking all over themselves to show that they buy into the climate-change fiction, yet it hasn't led to any massive change in national or even world behavior:

But wait, hasn’t this experiment been run? In the early 2000s, BP CEO John Browne began sounding a climate alarm. Ron Oxburgh,the chairman of Shell, gave a speech warning of planetary doom. In 2007, Alcoa, GE, Duke Energy, Ford, DuPont and others endorsed a U.S. cap-and-trade bill. Yet all this failed to move the ball in two successive congresses because Senate Democrats (the second time joined by President Obama) didn’t want to be blamed for jacking up gasoline prices.
The same experiment has also been run globally. Out of 196 countries, 196 have concluded that there is no way, with current technology, to take a big enough whack out of carbon-dioxide emissions at a cost their societies would be prepared to bear.

Exxon has even supported a damn carbon tax for the last six years!

But the goose-steppers are determined to make a criminal enterprise of it.

These goons hate human advancement.

And nothing is stopping them from halting it.