Big Oil is the new Big Tobacco and must be destroyed in the courts on RICO charges. This is the latest big idea in environmental circles – and it didn’t come from nowhere. It was in fact the invention of a tiny group of innocuous-looking green activists at a workshop three years ago in California.

Before I reveal their identities, let me give you some examples of just how successful they have been.

Hillary Clinton has called for an investigation into what Exxon really knew about climate change. (By weird coincidence, this came just after Exxon stopped funding an organization called the Clinton Foundation). Sheldon Whitehouse and three other Democrat senators have written to Exxon accusing it of supporting “climate denial” and “anti-climate policy advocacy.” A bunch of climate alarmist scientists have written to President Obama urging him to use RICO legislation against corporations which may “knowingly have deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” (Though they’ve been a bit less vocal since one of their number got himself embroiled in the “largest science scandal in US history”) Two separate journalistic investigations have claimed that Exxon’s scientists “knew” about the threat of global warming as early as the late 70s and that the company is guilty of some kind of cover up. Now Scientific American has jumped on the bandwagon too.

It’s all mendacious nonsense, as I explain here. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that unscrupulous lawyers, shyster politicians and green NGOs won’t go ahead and seize this flimsy excuse to intensify their war on capitalism in the guise of concern about the environment. Exxon, for example, may have no case to answer. But that won’t stop its operations, its reputation and its share value being seriously disrupted by a potential lawsuit, however ill-founded and vexatious.

So who are the people responsible for this cynical, dishonest, scientifically ill-founded assault on free markets, the oil industry and, by extension, you and me?

Well, you’ll certainly know the name of their ring-leader, that tireless climate activist, left-wing academic and self-publicist Naomi Oreskes. But the others who attended the “workshop” which Oreskes “conceived” in La Jolla, California in 2012 may be less familiar. You can see a photograph of them enjoying the California sun next to some palm trees here. (Funny, isn’t it, the way people who are forever banging on about global warming nevertheless seem drawn to staging their meetings at places which are warm and involve extensive air travel?). They all look nice, smiling, jolly, relaxed: they could be doctors, record company executives, landscape gardeners, bridge enthusiasts…. But they’re not. What are they are is a bunch of malign, scheming zealots on a mission to enslave the free world to their fanatical green agenda.

The fat guy with the beard is one Stanton Glantz – a prominent tobacco control activist scientist. The others, as Shub Nuggarath reports, are lawyers, climate scientists, communication professionals, PR agency heads, bloggers and journalists. They have been flown out to La Jolla by the Climate Accountability Institute (whose board of advisers includes one Michael Mann) to attend a workshop titled: ‘Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control.’

You’ll find all the details in this excellent investigation by Shub Niggarath who demonstrates clearly how everything that has since come to pass – from the fishing for allegedly incriminating documents and the use of lawyers and lawfare to the identification of Exxon as a key target – was laid out at that meeting.

Among the attendees was IPCC lead author Myles Allen, of Oxford University. Allen is often cited by the BBC and in British newspapers as if he were a neutral expert on “climate change”, which clearly he isn’t: he’s an ardent activist as we can tell both from his presence at this workshop and also from his statements.

As Dennis Ambler notes in the comments below Niggurath’s blogpost.

Very interesting to see IPCC author Myles Allen in the photo. He is from the Department of Physics and the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, is an ardent AGW promoter and was a Lead Author on IPCC AR5, WG1, Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional. He is also been co-responsible for the Carbon Budget idea, in a paper titled “Towards The Trillionth Tonne”, which spawned the “Leave it in the Ground” and “Stranded Assets” memes. In 2003, he claimed the floods in the UK in the year 2000 could be scientifically attributed to “global warming”, saying also, “while scientists had been more easily able to link climate change to the European heat wave of 2003 – an event which resulted in 40,000 deaths, drought, fires and crop failure – establishing the link to floods had been a longer process. He said: “Whether or not a flood occurs in any given year is still an act of God but with the help of thousands of volunteers we are beginning to see how human influence on climate may be starting to load God’s dice.” He was on the compensation angle even then: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2910017.stm

“The vast numbers affected by the effects of climate change, such as flooding, drought and forest fires, mean that potentially people, organisations and even countries could be seeking compensation for the damage caused. “It’s not a question we could stand up and survive in a court of law at the moment, but it’s the sort of question we should be working towards scientifically,” Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, UK, told the BBC World Service’s Discovery programme.” “Some of it might be down to things you’d have trouble suing – like the Sun – (I don’t think he meant the tabloid), so you obviously need to work how particularly human influence has contributed to the overall change in risk,” the scientist, who has worked with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said.” “But once you’ve done that, then we as scientists can essentially hand the problem over to the lawyers, for them to assess whether the change in risk is enough for the courts to decide that a settlement could be .” You can read much more about Allen and his climate games here:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/playing_climate_games.pdf

What we can learn from this story, I think, is something I’ve noticed depressingly often in my years covering the great climate change scam. Only a tiny number of people are actually dictating the global environmental agenda but they are capable of punching far above their weight because they have infiltrated the right institutions (Allen’s Oxford University; Oreskes’s Harvard; the various IPCC working groups, etc), because they are lavishly well funded by the Green Blob (the Climate Accountability Institute, for example, is part financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) and because like all hard-left entryists they are supremely well-organised and fanatically dedicated.

If I were Exxon right now, I think I’d be urging the tax authorities to look into the Climate Accountability Institute. As a non-profit, isn’t it legally forbidden from engaging in such nakedly political campaigning?