Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse wants to wage a RICO lawsuit against climate skeptics. This means YOU.

16In case you need a reason to vote next year: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse* wants to feature you in a RICO lawsuit. Yes, you.

The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line.

[snip]

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

…I mean, how do we know that you’re really a legitimate commenter who thinks all this stuff about global warming alarmism is simply quasi-religious hysteria that the Democrats have latched onto for profoundly cynical reasons?  Why, you could be some sort of paid spammer; shoot, you might not even be an American.  As for people like me… oh, trust me: I’d get subpoenaed at the very least, just like the rest of the right-blogosphere.  Mind you, we’d win that lawsuit, because there actually is not a corporate conspiracy to point out that the next accurate prediction of environmental DOOM will be the first.  More’s the pity, because I quite enjoy being paid large sums of money to tell people the truth.

Via @WalterOlson.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Also, to answer Senator Whitehouse’s rather clumsy attempt at insinuation… there’s a Michael Flynn quote that applies, here.  “Where there is smoke, there is smoke. It may be fire, or it may be dry ice, sublimating. Or only a cloud.” Which is not quite what Whitehouse was trying to say, because Whitehouse has been carefully primed to not even suggest that there may not be a problem in the first case.  Which is a remarkably uniform attitude among the climate alarmist crowd, and presumably will be still one forty more years from now, when environment DOOM still hasn’t shown up…

*He’s a Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, and pretty much doesn’t have a personality that deviates from that template in the slightest.