Regretfully, I only became aware late yesterday (hat tip to Kyle Kohli at Energy in Depth for that news) of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing today about ‘dark money influence’ into the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. But I was able to fire off an immediate email to GOP witness Scott Walker at the Capital Research Center with tips about all my blog post references on the Democrat’s invited witness, Public Citizen’s David Arkush. Mr Walter replied early this morning thanking me for the tips. Perhaps he can relay my work to Committee majority Chairman Ted Cruz. The Committee’s link for the written testimony submitted by Arkush seems to be nonfunctional, but the copy uploaded by Climate Litigation Watch works fine … and proves once again that it is not the fossil fuel industry that should be investigated about pushing disinformation, it’s the enviro-activists who should be hit with that. Watch this: Continue reading
Author Archives: Russell Cook
Naomi Oreskes’ Tale of Meeting Dr S Fred Singer, Part 1
As I’ve detailed at my “Summary for Policymakers” about Oreskes, she – at minimum – appears to have a credibility problem; the assortment of narratives she offers about her own role in the climate issue all have inconsistencies.
One I haven’t covered before is her tale of the late Dr S Fred Singer supposedly confronting her in 2005 back when he was still very much alive. I don’t have all the answers to this particular situation yet, but since she is on retainer with the law firm putting out the most “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, and since these lawsuits are now coming under review by judges as to whether they should proceed to trial (e.g. currently Charleston v Brabham Oil), it would be best to have the basic backstory on hand here, in case the scene in fictional courtroom TV dramas ends up to be a real-life situation:
Energy company defendant attorney: “… then we have the contradiction between evidence-provider Naomi Oreskes’ statements where ….”
Plaintiffs’ attorney: “Objection! Relevance?”
Energy company defendant attorney, to the Judge: “Goes to credibility.”
Continue reading
Estate of Juliana Leon v Exxon Mobil Corporation
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
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.
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
To Be a Journalist or not To Be
With the far larger question of whether a genuine journalist’s own freedom of the press is in peril if he or she starts asking rough questions concerning any angle of the orthodoxy of “the science of man-caused global warming is settled” / “skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry to undercut the settled science.” Continue reading
The Plagiarism Problem Plaguing the “ExxonKnew” Lawfare Lawsuits — Summary for Policymakers
This list will need be an ongoing compilation. 4/20/26 UPDATE: Added Birmingham Retirement & Relief v Tillerson in the #2 spot and renumbered the entries after that one.
Nice that someone big finally noticed the plagiarism problem going on. It just was’t an individual I was expecting. Continue reading
The ‘Reposition Global Warming’ / ‘Victory’ Memos, ‘Chicken Little’ & Willie Soon go to the Supreme Court
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
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
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