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A United Nation’s report issued last month calls for the criminalization of spreading “disinformation and misinformation” about global warming. Is it the desperate act of a dying crusade – or business as usual for the climate fanatics?

While our hope is the former, it’s more likely the latter.

According to Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on climate change, governments should “criminalize misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry” as well as “criminalize media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies.”

This is disturbing. Who gets to decide what is “disinformation and misinformation”? We’ve already seen, thanks to COVID-19, that the meaning of those words is determined exploitatively by the ruling class and the loudest voices, not by any objective means.

Just the News quotes experts who say the call for criminalization shows a growing desperation among the climate alarmists. Given that global warming has cooled off considerably as a pressing issue for the public, this rings true.

Yet demanding that skeptics be arrested and tried is not a fresh fantasy for the eco-fascists. They’ve been dreaming about a 21st-century inquisition of those who hold dissenting views (the Galileos of our time?) for more than a decade:

• Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island urged the Justice Department “to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change,” author Walter Olson noted in 2015.
• Twenty “scientists” wrote a letter to President Barack Obama to “strongly endorse” Whitehouse’s “call for a RICO investigation.”
• In 2016, a year after  17 attorneys general pursued fraud allegations against climate change skeptics, Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “the FBI was looking into information regarding climate change dissent and ‘whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on,'” the Washington Times reported.
• Even before that, a hack writing for Gawker claimed that “man-made climate change kills a lot of people,” that “it’s going to kill a lot more,” and insisted that “it’s time to punish the climate-change liars.”
• Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” who is actually an engineer, said “we’ll see what happens” when asked about Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2014 wish that there was a law to “punish” skeptics and “deniers.” Nye said he thought the “chilling effect” of punishment against “scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change” was “good.”
• Fifteen years ago, a “British lawyer-turned-campaigner” was agitating for “the United Nations to accept ‘ecocide’ as a fifth ‘crime against peace,’ which could be tried at the International Criminal Court,” the Guardian reported. Supporters wanted to use it “to prosecute ‘climate deniers’ who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.”
• A U.S. attorney subpoenaed the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s donor lists for the purpose of punishing “CEI by making people less willing to donate,” University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds and Instapundit founder wrote in USA Today.
• Earlier this year, a screed from a “climate justice” academic writing under the imprimatur of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, asked if “international criminal law” should “be used against those who promote this dangerous trend” of “climate denial.” She answered the question thusly: “Criminal sanctions are the most potent tools we have to mark out conduct that lies beyond all limits of toleration.” The time has arrived, she added, “to prosecute them.”
• Michael Mann of the hockey stick graph tried to put National Review out of business with a lawsuit.

Rather than debate the science and weigh the evidence, global warming zealots have long preferred shutting down those who don’t agree with them, those who dare say things they don’t like. They’d rather silence heterodoxy with jail time, prison sentences, and economic sanctions, which neatly sums up who they are and what their goals are.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board