A Wall Street Journal columnist had strong words for the NY attorney general’s fight against ExxonMobil.
“Their whole schtick now is to find enemies, and attack the enemies,” Journal columnist Holman Jenkins said of the climate change movement on Squawk Box Aug. 31.
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Jenkins criticized New York AG Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of ExxonMobil and for accusing the company of misleading the public and its investors on climate change. The investigation was announced in November 2015.
“Find a criminal first, and then find a crime,” Jenkins said of the way government investigates businesses. Co-anchor Becky Quick’s had said there was “not a lot” companies could do when the government chooses to investigate them.
Both Jenkins and fill-in co-anchor Brian Sullivan suggested the NY attorney general’s legal inquiries were driven by the climate movement’s frustrated ambitions.
“This was all motivated by a climate movement that is getting nowhere in Congress, nowhere in legislation, not very far in regulation,” Jenkins said.
Sullivan asked why Schneiderman investigated Exxon’s assets after his first inquiry failed and noted it was odd for the lawyer to “go after the same company for something else.”
“You wonder how much is the issue and how much is the company," Sullivan remarked.
Jenkins claimed that because the environmentalist movement failed to satisfy its political agenda, its “schtick” was to “find enemies and attack the enemies.”
Schneiderman led a group of several attorneys general calling itself the Green 20, trying to rally them to all investigate ExxonMobil. The group claimed Exxon committed fraud by misleading the public on climate change.
The effort failed as other state AGs chose not to go after the oil giant. Schneiderman revealed in an Aug. 19, New York Times interview that he shifted his own investigation’s focus away from climate change to Exxon’s financial forecasts.
“Schneiderman’s investigation of Exxon Mobil for climate sins has collapsed due to its own willful dishonesty” Jenkins declared in an Aug. 30, column for the Journal.
Fill-in anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera also jabbed Schneiderman, saying that he went to the “Rudy Giuliani or the Eliot Spitzer school of advancement.” Caruso-Cabrera said that she sent Schneiderman’s press releases to junk mail “because so much stuff comes from this guy.”
According to Jenkins’ column, Schneiderman’s press releases weren’t the only PR the investigation got. The media helped, too.
Jenkins singled out The Los Angeles Times and InsideClimateNews (ICN) for pushing a claim that “Exxon Knew” about climate change in the 1970s. He attacked both outlets, arguing they pushed a narrative about Exxon that didn’t follow the facts.
Columbia University’s school of journalism announced on Aug. 24, that ICN won the John B. Oakes award for “distinguished environmental journalism.” The journalism school and ICN have a lot in common, such as their liberal donors. Both received funding from the liberal Rockefeller Family Fund.
After Schneiderman announced the investigation, outlets like The New York Times ran op-eds openly applauding it. And for six months, the liberal media barely mentioned the investigation’s troubling implications for free speech.
