Author Archives: Russell Cook

About Russell Cook

Russell Cook is a semi-retired graphic artist. His collection of articles and blogs about the Gelbspan/Gore/Ozone Action/Greenpeace accusation can be seen here: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?page_id=86

Estate of Juliana Leon v Exxon Mobil Corporation

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Borrowing a line from the day-later UK Guardian news flash about this May 28, 2025-filed lawsuit – and by default, all the prior “ExxonKnew” lawsuits I’ve dissected – “Previous suits accused companies of breaching product liability and consumer protection laws and engaging in fraud and racketeering. But [Leon v Exxon Mobil Corp] is the first attempt to hold oil companies responsible for an individual climate-related death.” Yes, first-ever lawsuit using that lawfare tactic, but not the first time I’ve seen it pushed. I first wrote about this ridiculous personal injury angle, from David Arkush of the “Public Citizen” group, back in March 2023. He’d submitted his ‘scholarly paper’ draft version to the Harvard Law Environmental Review (HELR) on the notion of ‘climate homicide,’ which inadvertently showed his nearly complete enslavement to the same meritless ‘evidence’ which most the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits claim is proof that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientist ‘shills.’ When his paper was finally published in May 2024, I firmly suggested to HELR that his paper needed to be retracted. HELR did not do so, which thus only gave Arkush and Public Citizen the green light to proceed full steam ahead on the idiotic idea. Upon seeing Arkush and Public Citizen putting out a proposal to Arizona prosecutors just two months later on how to charge for ‘climate homicide,’ my blog post title for my dissection of his proposal posed the question of whether he was doing nothing more than trying to – ineptly – muscle his way into the lawfare territory already staked out in 2017 by the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm. I say “ineptly” because he ultimately used all of the four core accusation elements seen in their multiple filings.

No public prosecutors took the bait. But an apparently not-especially-bright law firm did. The questions now concern how directly Arkush / Public Citizen are involved in the case, and whether this new angle case is actually an outgrowth of a common shared template which all the other law firms / law offices seem to be using, where they choose elements of it as they see fit. In this dissection, I’ll show possible tell-tale ‘lawsuit template’ connections, including this case’s enslavement to two of the four worthless accusation elements. There’s three other utterly fatal overarching problems to this newest lawsuit effort, of course. Continue reading →

How a Propagandist’s Dream Narrative Could be Repositioned into a Nightmare

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Imagine floating a false accusation with awkward wording so uniquely memorable that it might be repeated nationwide as an authoritative quote from a person having a usable degree of national prominence . . . . who literally says he doesn’t remember where he heard the quote. What if the person genuinely believed the veracity of the accusation, only to discover that it is totally without merit, and that the central promulgators of the accusation who claim it is evidence of a massive disinformation effort are themselves using the accusation as the basis of their own disinformation campaign? What if that person was to discover how others like him aren’t actually the ‘good guys’ in the climate issue? What if legions more just like this person became fully aware of this problem? Continue reading →

State of Hawai`i v. BP P.L.C.

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In the wake of the Department of Justice filing a lawsuit on May 1, 2025 against the State of Hawaii (and others) over the dubious act of announcing plans for filing future climate lawfare/regulation actions, it would appear that Governor Josh Green of Hawaii retaliated right back at the Trump Administration – on the very same day – by filing this Hawaii v BP lawsuit. Big mistake, because Governor Green’s ineptly thought-out decisions will only likely eventually give the DoJ and/or other Federal investigators an excuse to hit harder against not only this lawsuit, but all of the other “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. This filing was actually not remotely spontaneous, it arguably was at least eight years in the making, if not longer. It’s nothing more than the very latest in the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling’s series of “boilerplate copy filings.” How do I know that? Let me count the ways via the same checklist I’ve used on their prior copy ’n paste efforts, plus let me point out where Sher Edling is now digging an even deeper holes for themselves on at least two false accusations of theirs. Technically this filing wouldn’t go into my list of lawsuits plagiarizing other law firms’ / law offices’ “homework,” since Sher Edling is more or less entitled to re-use their own material wherever they take this traveling circus act, but what they repeated out of their just-prior Maine v BP filing over at the other far end of the country inadvertently draws attention to speculation that attorneys aren’t just lazily copying other material as though it was their own, they instead may be operating on a central template supplied to them. Continue reading →

The ‘Reposition Global Warming’ / ‘Victory’ Memos, ‘Chicken Little’ & Willie Soon go to the Supreme Court

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As I noted in my April 2nd & 3rd 2025 Tweets/Xs, I had only just learned about the 45 page Aug 21, 2024 “Brief in Opposition” (BiO) that NJ AG Matt Platkin, CA AG Rob Bonta, MN AG Keith Ellison, Connecticut AG William Tong, and Rhode Island AG Peter Neronha had filed against Alabama et al. v California et al — Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and four other state AGs complaint arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court should prevent states from filing such global warming damages lawsuits. My intention was to dissect the massive accusation faults in the “Appendix Volume One” attached to the Platkin et al. BiO, while mistakenly thinking that the Appendix itself was newly written in August 2024 especially for SCOTUS review. I was technically headed down an incorrect path – sorta – and was nearly done with my intended blog post before spotting my small error of assumption. The bulk of what I’d written still serves the purpose I’d intended, which is to point out the incalculably huge error these five Platkin et al. Attorneys General made in following the path that ‘Exxon knew about their products causing global warming, but chose instead to deceive the public through disinformation campaigns where they paid and directed skeptic climate scientist shills to repostition global warming as theory rather than fact.’

Allow me to explain my small error first.  Continue reading →

Oops, a detail I missed in my 2020 dissection of D.C. v ExxonMobil

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What I missed doesn’t help the folks pushing these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits right now at all. I did not miss this same detail in my Nov 2024 dissection of Maine v BP. The problem in D.C. v Exxon compounds the apparent law firm ‘plagiarizing’ situation I detailed in that dissection. Continue reading →

Naomi Oreskes has a Socci Problem

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The public loves a tale of personal heroism. What kills a person’s hero story is when someone interrupts the tale and asks a point-blank question, “How is it possible that the thing you just described happened the way it did? It doesn’t seem to be readily obvious.” The storyteller can either dig their way out of the hole they just opened up, or not, and if that killer problem is left dangling in mid air for everyone to see, it’s an open invite to see what else in the tale falls apart.

Naomi Oreskes’ tale of personal heroism is not a tightly-knit fabric, it has loose ends everywhere. It’s hard to tell what level of intellect she has, but if she has any smarts at all, she should be petrified that if various major Federal / legal system investigators pull on any one of her loose threads, they’ll end up pointing a virtual gun in her face to explain her collective role in the climate issue. One way for it to all unravel is for an investigator to ask – who’d already know the answer – “Who is Anthony Socci?” Continue reading →

Investigate the Origins of the “reposition global warming” Memos Disinformation; It Can Likely Kill the “ExxonKnew” Lawsuits

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It’s a propagandist’s dream when an utterly false accusation dating back to mid 1991 is the mainstay evidence in the ongoing series of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, including the latest Nov 2024-filed Maine v BP one. How is the “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” memo set utterly false, with its otherwise sinister-sounding directive telling skeptic climate scientist ‘shills’ what to do in a public relations campaign targeting gullible “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women”? Easy. It was a rejected proposal, never implemented in any form, tossed into the trash by the people it was proposed to. Its ludicrous idea for the genuine PR campaign to aim messaging at particular people was not only debunked in a congressional hearing at the time when questions about that first erupted in 1991, the namesake of my GelbspanFiles blog strangely corroborated that in one of his last acts of fair and balanced journalism …. albeit with the spin that the person he quoted wasn’t being truthful. Why did he continue on that line? Because this accusation is literally the absolute best the enviro-activists have in their arsenal to indict the skeptic scientists who have the potential to convince the public that the ‘climate crisis’ is not a crisis at all.

But as the old saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Let me offer two examples of how this kind of propaganda works, and how an investigation of its origins can potentially torpedo the entire global warming issue. A very large part of the population has heard something to the effect that the fossil fuel industry ‘hid the truth about the harm of global warming.’ But the public is unaware of how that whole accusation implodes around the core clique of people who’ve promulgated it since the 1990s. Nobody, including the true believers in the environmentalist movement, likes being conned. Continue reading →

Has A.I. Gotten Smarter About the Namesake of my Blog?

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Short answer: no. Just short of a year ago, I described my experiment to see what Google’s new “Gemini.ai” system could put out on the man, having previously tried an experiment with the ChatGPT system. In those two experiments, give GeminiAI credit for not veering into the brick wall mistake that ChatGPT did, falsely attributing Ross Gelbspan with a Pulitzer Prize win that he never actually received in any form. As I showed in my just-prior blog post, there is a difference between dutifully regurgitating what people feed you, and doing the heavy lifting to find out if what they tell you is actually true.

There are new A.I. systems out there now that you can ask questions. So, let’s first see where GeminiAI is still not particularly bright, and then let’s see what two other systems can tell us about the late Ross Gelbspan, since his work and his words forms the basis of the accusations in the very current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Continue reading →