When a group of attorneys general announced that they’d be ramping up efforts to determine what #ExxonKnew, the Virgin Islands attorney general didn’t actually say he would be investigating Exxon itself. Now we know why.
On Thursday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) declared that they would be fighting a subpoena from Virgin Island Attorney General Claude Walker, who is asking for emails, statements, drafts and documents concerning CEI’s climate work between 1997 and 2007. As InsideClimate News points out, the decision to investigate that time period may be looking at CEI’s actions during the period of Bush-Cheney administration and concurrent anti-climate campaigns, like the Cooler Heads Coalition. But its history of industry funding, from Koch and Texaco to Philip Morris, make it clear that its anti-regulation ideology serves a very specific purpose: to protect the profits of its funders. These days, CEI has a lower profile, with its biggest claim to fame being the fact that it owns prime online real estate, globalwarming.org.
That said, their pockets must still be plenty deep, as their legal representation is being provided by Grossman and Rivkin, the top-tier legal duo representing the states suing the EPA over the Clean Air Act. They are also the pair behind the Orwellian-named “Free Speech in Science Project” that debuted just a couple weeks ago.
CEI is claiming that this subpoena is violating their free speech—sort of ironic, considering Chris Horner, CEI’s coal-funded senior fellow, is leading an effort to get his hands on climate scientists' emails.
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