by H. Sterling Burnett
Heartland Institute

The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands is targeting dozens of think tanks, businesses and consumer groups, and individual researchers in his widening probe of organizations that have written skeptically about purported human-caused climate change and policies proposed and implemented to fight it. His efforts are a witch hunt, an assault on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech in an effort to silence political opponents…

The subpoena was revealed by documents uncovered by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute to be part of a national, coordinated legal campaign by state attorneys general in collaboration with radical anti-fossil fuel groups to use the legal system against companies and organizations that disagree with and advocate against policies to address global climate change. The efforts are spearheaded by New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, but were informed by and coordinated with leading environmental advocacy groups, who, the Washington Free Beacon reports, met on January 8, 2016, at the headquarters of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a foundation that funds liberal causes. At he meeting, the Free Beacon reports, “RFF, Greenpeace, [and] other environmental groups discussed ways to ‘delegitimize [ExxonMobil] as a political actor,’ ‘force officials to disassociate themselves from Exxon,’ and ‘drive divestment from Exxon.’”

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