So a bunch of left-wing US Attorneys General have held a meeting in New York — presided over by discredited professional climate-alarmist Al Gore — to discuss how best to use the legal system to wipe out climate scepticism once and for all. They did so under the shamelessly political slogan: “AGs for Clean Power.”

Now the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands — some utter nonentity called Claude Earl Walker — has gone a step further by actually subpoenaing the Competitive Enterprise Institute to give up ten years’ worth of documents pertaining to its relationship with ExxonMobil.

Walker is trying to nail the oil giant using a criminal statute originally designed to convict drug dealers and mobsters.

The voluminous, harassing 14-page subpoena says Inquisitor Walker is investigating ExxonMobil for “misrepresenting its knowledge of the likelihood that its products and activities have contributed to and are continuing to contribute to climate change in order to defraud the Government … and consumers.” This supposedly violates the Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which is the Virgin Islands’ version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO.

Well good luck with that, Claude Earl Walker, whoever you were — which will be nobody by the time the CEI’s lawyers are done with you. The prosecution case you are about to lend your name to is about as futile, fatuous and imbecilic as launching a class action against dentists for providing insufficient information to children about the Tooth Fairy; or against parents for failing to divulge the truth about Santa Claus.

That’s because the phenomenon you claim ExxonMobil deviously concealed from consumers and the U.S. Government does not actually exist. So how can they possibly be prosecuted for fraud on the basis of having failed to talk sufficiently openly about something that remains in the realms of fantasy?

And how is this even remotely legal, anyway? How can licensed officers of a U.S. state assume for themselves the power to launch vexatious, politically motivated, criminal prosecutions against people and organisations who have done nothing remotely illegal — whose only “crime” is to have expressed uncertainty about a dubious scientific theory concerning the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide on global climate?

It’s so bizarre, so contrary to any sane or fair person’s notion of how the justice system should operate in the world’s most powerful democracy, that if the details if this story weren’t well documented and in the public domain I’d find it extremely hard to believe it was actually real.

You’ll remember how it started: with a meeting staged four years ago, in lovely, globally warmed La Jolla, California by a bunch of some the world’s most aggressive green activists, among them the academic and self-publicist Naomi Oreskes, Oxford professor Myles Allen, and anti-tobacco campaigner Stanton Glantz.

This meeting – part funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other left-leaning institutions – led to the proposal that Big Oil should be brought down using the same RICO tactics that were used to attack Big Tobacco.

The idea was then enthusiastically adopted by environmentalist shill Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (who has a strong interest in promoting the green cause: his wife makes an absolute fortune out of it)

Then a bunch of climate scientists wrote to President Obama suggesting the idea — only to become somewhat unstuck when it emerged that at least some of them had much more to hide than the guys they were trying to have prosecuted.

Finally, despite this setback, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch decided to stick her oar in.

And now — as with a game of chicken, where the stupidest, most reckless show-off kid in the gang is given the job of risking his neck before anyone else does — this A.G. from the U.S. Virgin Islands has issued this ludicrous subpoena against the CEI, a free market think tank which has done nothing wrong, unless perhaps you believe it is a crime to speak up for scientific truth and capitalism of the non-crony variety.

This is madness. It’s the kind of the thing you can imagine passing for justice without much comment in, say, Germany circa 1938. But in the USA in the early 21st century? Seriously?

Someone, somewhere, somehow needs to put a stop to this nonsense. Or the free world is in deep, deep trouble.