" So lysenkoists will stop saying Exxon funds climate con deniers, right?"
:Lysenkoists only exist in the minds of deniers. Time to prosecute Exxon and Koch.
Are Climate Deniers Racketeers? or just Good Fellas?
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse website:
Washington, DC – Today, in his 98th weekly “Time to Wake Up” speech on climate change, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) highlighted the similarities between the tobacco industry’s efforts to mislead the American public about the dangers of its product and the ongoing effort by fossil-fuel interests to cast doubt on climate science.
Yet the fossil fuel industry continues its crafty, cynical campaign of denial and delay. Big coal, oil, and natural gas, and related industries like the Koch Brothers’ companies, profit by offloading the costs of their carbon pollution onto the rest of us. They traffic in products that put health and safety at risk, and they don’t tell the truth about their product.Sound familiar? It should, because the fossil fuel industry is using a familiar playbook, one perfected by the tobacco industry. Big tobacco fought for more than four decades to bury the truth about the health effects of its product.
But the government has a playbook too. It’s called RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The elements of a civil racketeering case are simple. The government must allege four things: defendants (1) conducted (2) an enterprise (3) through a pattern (4) of racketeering activity. ”Conducting” means everything from directing to aiding and abetting the activity. An “enterprise” can be any form of association or a common scheme. “Pattern” means continuity of the scheme, and for civil RICO particularly the prospect of ongoing conduct. “Racketeering activity” simply means the violation of designated federal laws, including the federal mail fraud and wire fraud statutes.
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