Blowback Against Democrats’ McCarthyite Investigation Continues

We have written here, here and here about House Democrats’ purported investigation of seven climate realists. Steven Hayward is proud to be one of the Magnificent Seven, and I interviewed him on the Laura Ingraham show this morning about the investigation. Pushback against the Democrats’ witch hunt is taking place on a variety of fronts.

Yesterday a reporter from Politico, Alex Guillen, contacted Scott and me via email. Guillen said that he was working on a story about reaction to the Democrats’ investigation. He questioned whether our condemnation of the Democrats’ letters to seven academic institutions was inconsistent with my endorsement of a CID served by Ken Cuccinelli, who was then the Attorney General of Virginia, in May 2010.

I answered Guillen’s question. To Politico’s credit, while they did accuse us of inconsistency (“But Power Line had a different take on Cuccinelli’s climate probe five years ago…”), they also included my response:

Much like Markey’s spokesman, Hinderaker said Thursday that the Cuccinelli and Grijalva probes are “completely different.”

“The Cuccinelli [document demand] related to the substance of work done by Michael Mann,” Hinderaker wrote in an email to POLITICO. He added: “The Grijalva ‘investigation’ is merely an attempt to smear scientists and others by claiming that they received funding from various private sources; it does not relate to the substance of anything they have written … As you know if you have read my posts, I believe that it is government money, not private money, that is corrupt, because government is the main party in interest in the global warming controversy.”

This last point is the important one: governments, ours and many others, pay billions of dollars every year to climate scientists who come up with alarmist predictions. Why? Because the main point of global warming alarmism is to frighten voters in the U.S. and other Western countries into turning over more power to government. This is why no one makes any serious effort to address emissions from China and India, which together dwarf ours; moreover, theirs are increasing rapidly while ours are diminishing. It’s not about the climate, on which CO2 has, in any event, little influence. It is about government control over the economy.

But I asked one question that the Politico reporter declined to answer: do you really read Power Line so carefully that you recalled a post from nearly five years ago, or did someone feed you the Cuccinelli bit? Crickets. My guess is that it was Kert Davies, former research director for Greenpeace. But, in any event, I am confident that Politico was doing the bidding of some left-wing environmental activist when it accused us and others of inconsistency with regard to the Cuccinelli CID.

STEVE adds: I’m still just starting to lace up my boxing gloves on this one.  But right now I’m lacing up my ski gloves, because I decided to go skiing today at an undisclosed location (I did once have lunch with Dick Cheney not from from here many years ago) before global warming melts all the snow!  Actually not much risk of that today: high temp might make it to 10 degrees F, with another big storm on the way.  But never fear, Week in Pictures, #FreeTheGrijalva7! Edition is on the way.

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