Pace University’s law school has an Environmental Litigation Clinic, similar to a host of other activist operations providing donor-supported faculty and swarms of young lawyer-trainees for various left-wing environmental causes. Foremost among those causes is the climate litigation campaign.
Several years ago, using Illinois’s Freedom of Information Act, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) obtained from the office of then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan a memo claiming “Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic” authorship. That memo had been forwarded to the Office by major Democratic Party donor (and namesake of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School) Wendy Abrams.
Abrams had brokered a meeting between the AG’s Office and a plaintiff’s lawyer bringing “climate” lawsuits against oil companies and recruiting AGs to investigate his litigation targets.
The memo, 17 single-spaced pages titled “Revocation of ExxonMobil Authority to Do Business in New York,” was sent to Abrams by Christine O’Neill at Pace, executive assistant to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was at the time listed as “Professor Emeritus” on the Clinic’s website.
O’Neill’s transmitting email opened, “Hi, Wendy, Bobby asked me to email the Exxon Mobil document that he sent to [then-New York AG] Eric Schneiderman.”
The memo sought to recruit the NYOAG to “appl[y] the corporate death penalty” and prohibit the company from doing business in the state. Kennedy’s gambit seemed reasonably likely to bear fruit. Just months prior, emails subsequently obtained under New York’s Freedom of Information Law reveal, Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund had successfully convinced Schneiderman to launch an investigation of ExxonMobil under the state’s breathtakingly sweeping Martin Act (it turns out Wasserman’s daughter had clumsily boasted about his involvement at the time). This investigation was followed by a lawsuit against the company, which failed spectacularly.
The Pace/RFK Jr. memo reads like a Greta Thunberg speech. The memo described its targets, political opponents of the climate agenda, and particularly CEI, as “a kind of flat earth society.” Its author(s) continued:
- Entire ecosystems will collapse, impacting everything from pest control, to trout habitat, fisheries, and cranberry production. …
- Exxon responded to roars of outrage in 2006 over its sociopathic antics. …
- Mainly elected leaders understand that government officials have a duty to demonstrate that government is able to safeguard the public from sociopathic corporate conduct. …
- Under the most generous construction, Exxon’s conduct was immoral. In the worst and more plausible construction, Exxon is guilty of criminal negligence that will contribute to the deaths of human beings, the extinction of species and hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, …
- ExxonMobil has made itself the template for unsheathed arrogance of unregulated power, greed, and callous disregard toward the cataclysmic misery presaged by its actions. …
The litigation campaign unleashed by, among others, Mr. Kennedy, is so abusive that Kennedy-esque adjectives well and fairly describe it. And so several years later, when running for President, Mr. Kennedy was confronted in an interviewwith Reason with his prior calls to jail energy company executives. In response, Kennedy turned the discussion around to that thematically similar position in this memo, that corporations should be given the death penalty and have their licenses to operate revoked.
The exchanges pertaining to this question weave between climate, tobacco, other “pollution” and COVID, such that it is difficult to draw conclusions other than that Mr. Kennedy is in no hurry to make clear his current position on deploying the government’s resources in this manner. “Depends” might best describe it.
The rare unvarnished statement, for example, that Kennedy does not believe that climate “skeptic” think tanks or other organizations should receive the death penalty is hedged by qualifications such as, unless their purpose is to deceive. In the eyes of the authorities (and authoritarians) of the moment. It is aspects of the conversation that may leave those seeking answers unsatisfied.
Citing specifically to geoengineering and “what’s happening to the whales off the East Coast of North America,” Kennedy said, “There’s a lot of things I know now that you know I think the issue is more complex today than it seemingly was at that point.”
Mr. Kennedy makes several references to “the information I was dealing with at that time” of his man-on-the-street interview with Marc Morano, in which he called for jailing executives. “Having seen what happened in the COVID-era, I probably would not have made that speech, or made that statement.”
This week, Mr. Kennedy goes before the Senate to explain his views in pursuit of the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. What a time for lawmakers and the public to learn if whatever he learned has led him to unambiguously abandon his 2016 call to enlist law enforcement against political opponents?
If so, he has learned quite a lot. What was that, specifically?
This week’s hearing(s) offer an opportunity for the public and lawmakers (and defendants in the litigation wave Kennedy helped promote) to attain, for the record, the benefit of these lessons.