If you care about free speech, you should pay attention to the campaign now being waged against Exxon Mobil.
More than 50 environmental and civil rights groups have written Attorney General Loretta Lynch urging her to open a “federal probe” of the giant energy firm.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have also joined the chorus.
The charge is that Exxon Mobil “systematically misled the public” on climate change, even as its executives recognized the dangers.
What’s behind the latest assault are two recent pieces of investigative journalism that, based on company documents, concluded that Exxon Mobil played a double game.
In the 1970s, when global warming began attracting scientific attention, the firm “assembled a brain trust [that deepened] the company’s understanding” of climate change, reported InsideClimate News. But in the late 1980s, the company switched to “climate denial,” manufacturing “doubt about . . . global warming its own scientists” had confirmed.
Stories in the Los Angeles Times told a similar tale.
...The advocates of a probe into Exxon Mobil are essentially proposing that the company be punished for expressing its opinions.
These opinions may be smart or stupid, constructive or destructive, sensible or self-interested. Whatever, they deserve protection.
An investigation would, at the least, constitute a form of harassment that would warn other companies to be circumspect in airing their views.
Matters could be worse if the government somehow imposes monetary penalties or opens the floodgates to suits by plaintiffs’ attorneys, a la the tobacco industry.
Significantly, the letter to Attorney General Lynch does not allege any violation of law.
Exxon Mobil (2014 earnings: $32.5 billion) does not command our sympathy.
But free speech does not belong only to the sympathetic.
Casting Exxon Mobil as the scapegoat for global warming’s dilemmas is historically inaccurate and a political cheap shot with troubling constitutional implications.
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