One Thing in Climate Has Remained Certain: Uncertainty
Tomorrow, the House Oversight Oversight & Reform Committee will hold its second hearing in a “year-long investigation” of traditional energy companies. Not only does using Congress’s inherently limited investigative powers to find scapegoats for its own failures to persuade seem on its face unconstitutional given a long-line of SCOTUS precedent (including, helpfully, from the McCarthy Era). It also is an investigation that the Committee and/or the Environment Subcommittee appear to be illegally staffing with donor-provided consultants in violation of House Rules and federal statute.
The focus of this second hearing has shifted. Last week, the Committee pivoted, and will provide a platform for academic and pressure-group climate activists to do their thing. But the hearing was first announced as an event to question members of the boards of directors recently placed there by environmental/ financial activists. Those parties are unable to add anything to the Committee’s stated pursuit of “decades of misinformation”, and their purpose was likely to aid Committee demands for more “climate” legislation and regulation.
The Washington Post story announcing the originally scheduled hearing drew attention to a statement by former Exxon Mobil CEO Lee Raymond that apparently the Committee/its outside consultants think is a real gotcha:
As CLW had already pointed out, that would be the same position set forth in a contemporaneous internal Enron memo (ok, memo after memo) capturing the debate.
The Enron that nonetheless was behind the climate industry, to “make Enron rich” off of mandates and subsidies
And so, in DC, Enron was the hero, others get persecuted and even prosecuted. It is purely coincidental that one company’s executives pushed the politicians’ agenda, to get rich via political enactments and much acclaim from the political class
while the other refused to play ball.
But the rich, sciency goodness gets even deliciouser. Some Spring cleaning just turned up an old Inside EPA story from October 2000,
CLW tracked down the affidavit:
As one regulatory commenter with George Mason University noted in 2001:
So, to review the bidding, Exxon Mobil concluded the science unsettled and dared say so out loud in 1997; Enron also said the same thing (internally) at the very same time while publicly pushing climate alarm to advance its bets; and three years later the Clinton-Gore-Carol Browner EPA admitted the same (under oath) in 2000, with a dull tweak, of our position is the science is always changing but whatever it’s bad. All in material agreement.
But one of these, not like the other, wouldn’t play ball with an agenda rather fulsomely exposed over the subsequent twenty years as being first and foremost about, well, to quote AOC’s chief of staff, “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
You do you, Washington.