‘A lot of terrified, indoctrinated kids skipping school to serve as props in political, and legal, campaigns…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Few believed that the Sunrise Movement‘s use of children to aggressively lobby Congress on behalf of the Green New Deal was the youngsters’ own idea.
What may not have been apparent, though, was just how cynical a ploy it was to turn one type of green into another.
Climate Litigation Watch, a nonprofit watchdog dedicated to accountability and oversight in the realm of climate-change lawsuits, revealed Wednesday that the recent efforts—which spawned an eyebrow-raising viral video of Sen. Dianne Feinstein scolding the youths—were part of a larger, well-funded litigation campaign originally mapped out seven years ago.
The campaign also is linked with the International Youth Climate Strike, a school walkout planned for Friday that has been endorsed by a litany of radical leftist organizations, including former Vice President Al Gore‘s Climate Reality Project.
This Friday, thousands of students will walk out of school, calling for grown-ups to finally get serious about the climate crisis https://t.co/f8RKYZO1Ka #ClimateStrike #FridaysForFuture pic.twitter.com/S5jZdGgIVo
— Climate Reality (@ClimateReality) March 13, 2019
According to The Nation, Friday’s staged protest, which will incorporate Green New Deal advocacy, may involve tens of thousands of middle- and high-school students in 30-some countries, disrupting many a classroom in the process.
All of it, said Climate Litigation Watch, is linked back to a 2012 closed-door meeting in La Jolla, California, organized by a coalition of groups supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.
An Untrustworthy Trust
Ironically, the descendants of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller—one of the wealthiest people ever to walk the planet—now use their ill-gotten gains in a coordinated effort to bilk the fossil-fuels industry out of hundreds of billions of dollars to support green causes.
The La Jolla meeting, described as “infamous” by Climate Litigation Watch, was in response to the failures of cap-and-trade efforts to impose additional fines on carbon emissions, widely rejected by the energy consumers who would have borne the brunt of the costs.
The workshop instead produced a blueprint for a litigation campaign, using as its model the earlier effort to take down the tobacco industry.
“With the voters and their elected representatives repeatedly disappointing the activists, even in the face of the $-billion-plus-a-year climate industry’s media and pressure group campaigns, the lawyers had plans,” said Climate Litigation Watch. “These plans included sending children in waves to the streets.”
Very much on the activists’ minds was how to successfully deploy their litigation strategy while continuing to sway “the broad cultural shift in public perception,” and the necessity of choosing the right plaintiffs for the task.
Mary Christina Wood, a University of Oregon law professor, mentioned the nascent “atmospheric trust litigation” strategy that she had pioneered to demand government and third-party corporations foot the bill for massive reforestation and soil carbon sequestration initiatives.
“The beneficiaries in the case are citizens—both current and future—who claim that the defendants (the state or federal government or third-party corporations) have a duty to protect and not damage that resource, which they oversee or for which they bear some responsibility,” said the report from the Workshop on Climate Accountability, Public Opinion, and Legal Strategies.
The campaign ultimately produced the lawsuit Juliana vs. United States and several other spin-offs that used children as the plaintiffs.
Organizations such as Our Children’s Trust now provide teams of lawyers to help coach and direct the juveniles, doted upon by the liberal 9th Circuit court in San Francisco, to launch their attacks on energy producers.
However, the children’s lawsuits have met with mixed results elsewhere. In January, the Colorado Supreme Court shot down a bid by a group of Boulder teens to block future drilling permits in the state.
‘Dedicated to a Shakedown’
The shaky and uncertain legal foundation of the campaign means that the efforts now must branch out into other types of advocacy, such as legislation.
Whether or not the Green New Deal was part of the master plan, or if the proposal sponsored by socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y., was a happy coincidence, the existing infrastructure for exploiting youth activism was already in place.
The La Jolla strategy “turned out to mean a climate litigation industry, dedicated to a shakedown,” said Climate Litigation Watch. “And a lot of terrified, indoctrinated kids skipping school to serve as props in political, and legal, campaigns.”
In a rare break from attacking Israel with anti-Semitic stereotypes, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was among those who tweeted in support of Friday’s walkout, saying her own 16-year-old daughter, Isra Hisri, was one of the movement’s co-leaders.
Proud mom here! 🤗I hope other Members of Congress will join me in this strike.
We need to listen to the wisdom of our kids! https://t.co/sIYW6p7S3U
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) March 13, 2019
But according to Climate Litigation Watch, the children’s activism campaign was not the only shady strategy to emerge from the La Jolla blueprint.
To support the litigation agenda, it said, “State attorneys general can also subpoena documents, raising the possibility that a single sympathetic state attorney general might have substantial success in bringing key internal documents.”
A shocking investigative report from Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently revealed that liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg had helped spearhead and fund the effort to embed climate activists within the offices of state attorneys general.
Since the revelations became public last November, one state legislature, the Virginia General Assembly, has passed new legislation to restrict its AG from employing non-government employees to do the bidding of special-interest activists.
“We applaud this vote while wondering, what’s wrong with the rest of these legislatures?” Horner said.