AGs, Biden Admin Targeted Industry to Become “Partners” to Impose “Climate-car” Auto Standards; Will DoJ Follow Through on Threat re: Litigation Campaign?
Climate-industry observers should take close note of the model described here in which targeted industry become the federal government’s “partners” — not so much Gangster Government, but more a combination of Hostage-taking and Wolfpack Government: hunt for weak members of a targeted herd, emphasize how going along might be good for their health then, with the help of these new “partners” isolate any holdouts and ultimately announce agreement on your demands.
This model seems to also be on the minds of these same parties as they maneuver the federal government to aid their targeting of energy companies, also in the name of “climate”.
Flash back to the end of last year, when the Biden-Harris campaign unambiguously promised to weaponize the US Department of Justice toward this end: “Biden will instruct the Attorney General to” do all manner of things to impose a political agenda or target opponents, including, “(iii) strategically support ongoing plaintiff-driven climate litigation against polluters.”
When asked about this both Biden and Harris immediately dismissed the idea that they would ever do what they promised on their campaign website they planned to do, all of which is described in this op-ed.
Soon, Minnesota AG Keith Ellison — who joined with the Rockefeller Family Fund and a Bloomberg legal group to use his Office in pursuit of the very campaign the Biden-Harris team promised to rescue — published a plea, why aren’t you doing what you promised to do?
After the campaign’s recent setback at the U.S. Supreme Court and with more troubling revelations emerging about who and what is actually behind these lawsuits, watch for the federal government to claim some pretext for entering or otherwise “strategically assisting” the states’ “climate” lawsuits — which are “part of a coordinated, national litigation campaign…[of] two dozen nearly identical lawsuits filed since 2017 in carefully chosen states”, and represent “merely filing and maintaining state suits …for national policy goals.”
As with the auto GHG or “Biden Climate-car standards just rolled out, the progressive AGs have a confidentiality agreement for the purpose (reading its purported scope — everything, filed anywhere, so long as it has to do with GHGs — one sees that it is most certainly not a valid “common interest agreement”).
They and the feds are not seeking just hundreds of billions of dollars, coming from the consumer if passed through the nominal litigation targets, energy companies. They also are demanding the targets join in as willing, dare we say, “partners” to help grease the climate regulatory agenda into place, something that democracy has denied the climate industry for so long.
Previous movements to use DoJ to use RICO to go after opponents of the climate agenda remind us that nothing, ever, is off the table for them.
With the same movement’s long history of tying its various governmental announcements to large PR events designed also to promote the agenda, do not be surprised if this comes during next month’s annual “Climate Week” confab or the November 1-12 Glasgow “COP26”.
Whenever it comes, this further weaponization of law enforcement and use of prosecutorial power for financial and policy shakedowns should prompt public outrage, and judicial opposition.