California Outlawing Dissent? The Galileo Precedent

The state of California has declared war on scientific and political dissent and the First Amendment.

Yes, you read that right.

The state of California is taking legal action to intimidate people who believe humankind has much to learn yet about climate.

California’s Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, joined by leftie environmental groups the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense, has asked a federal court to force the disclosure of all communications between certain automakers and an assortment of Ph.D. scientists, journalists and policy analysts who refuse to say it is an unrefutable fact that human beings are causing catastrophic global warming.

If the Galileo Precedent holds, several hundred years from now, a future California attorney general will apologize for this, and everyone will wonder how people in 2006 could have been so backward.

However, there is no reason for the Galileo Precedent to hold. Americans should make clear their revulsion against tactics like this.

Science — not just climate science, but all science — requires skeptics and skepticism to advance. Political dissent, meanwhile, is a necessary ingredient to government of and by the people.

It appears that if some governments and some environmental organizations can’t get people to go along with the human-caused global warming theory by insisting, they’ll try to use the power of government to force them to agree.

Shame on them all.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.