Comments on: Free Enterprise but not Free Speech

By: Mark Bahner

Mark Bahner — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:45:55 +0000

I think if I worked at the SEC, my first reaction would be, “Did you guys put this stuff together while you were billing the customers of your mutual fund as fund managers?”

If they were billing the customers of the mutual fund as fund managers when they were putting this stuff together, I don’t see the link.

By: Russell Seitz

Russell Seitz — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 05:29:25 +0000

How deeply shocking the management of the Free Enterprise Action Fund should make a false and misleading statement in a letter to the SEC!

Since when did any members of the NAS participate in the panel Wegman ran through the NRC’s contract admin shop,yet alone author its conclusions?

Widows and orphans deserve fiduciary due diligence , not junk science from Junk Science.

By: George Tobin

George Tobin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:27:08 +0000

A more interesting issue is whether there can be a derivative action if warming does not accrue as advertised, let’s say a 2-decade non-warming such that expected political, social and economic changes do not take place and thus cause a product line premised on such changes to fail.

Is it possible to be liable for inducing a greater state of certainty in catastrophic AGW than warranted in order to sell stock? Did the issuing company claim to have done research or otherwise obtain info that made them more certain? Did internal memos indicate the issuers had in fact read the works of one R. Pielke and still did not acknowledge the possibility of a more complex, lukewarmist climate outcome in their materials? Tech firms with volatile stock prices have had to pay out for weaker claims than that…

By: Jonathan Gilligan

Jonathan Gilligan — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:13:50 +0000

Milloy has tried this before, arguing that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was violating truth in advertising laws by proclaiming that the paper for their ice cream cartons was manufactured without the use of dioxins. Milloy’s argument was that to tout the dioxin-free paper process without mentioning that the ice-cream itself contained lots of dioxin (ingested by cows from the environment) was false advertising.

That suit went nowhere, just as Roger predicts this one will.

By: lucia

lucia — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:11:04 +0000

I fervently hope this action goes nowhere! I don’t like these attempts to stifle free speech on either side of the debate over climate policy or science.

By: Sylvain

Sylvain — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:36:09 +0000

I must admit that with this letter Steven Milloy is way off.

Even though I don’t agree with most of these statement, I could care less that these companies are making them.

Many of these statement are made to appeal to a growing number of people believing in GW, and thus saying if you are green so are we.

Which doesn’t prevent any of these companies to continue to manufacture product that are just as pollutant that they were before. They say a lot but actually do little, but for some people it makes them feel good to believe that they are serious about it.

It is sad that the natural reaction of people is to try to silence those that they don’t agree with instead of finding better argument to convince others.