Category Archives: Global warming lawsuits

Watch this space: “Michigan v. BP PLC”

Posted on by

2 items of business before I get to this latest climate lawfare development. First, for any of my climate friends/reporters/investigators who’ve sent me emails to my G mail address version in the last week which has my initial / last name / string of 5 numbers – please swap out the end after the “@” with “proton.me” and resend it, and then please change your contact email for me to that new version. Second, for whoever it is who’s decided to use my other G mail address that’s partly encrypted within my blog here (folks have to put out some effort to find it and de-encrypt it) and seen online elsewhere in only one other place on the internet:   I only use that address to contact people directly for answers to my research inquiries, and it may be used to send me alerts about typos in this blog and/or to alert me to info I need, or to hit me directly with criticism. Your use of it as part of your identity to sign up for conservative sites/events notifications (which I have zero interest in) can be considered a form of identity theft, at a Federal level. In case you haven’t noticed, Merrick Garland is no longer the head of the DoJ. You’ve been flagged at one if not two of the sites where you’ve put in my address without my permission; consider yourself warned. Cease and desist – go get a real job.

Now, for the latest readers arriving to this blog, I periodically have short descriptions of upcoming material under the “Watch this space” title. Up next, It took a while, but as I predicted back in May 2024 and updated 4½ months later, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has finally made her massively unwise decision official, but in her office’s effort (official filing here) to perhaps put more of a disguise on this particular Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit version, they’re practically begging the defendants to hit it with a Motion to Dismiss over a specific unprovable accusation, while (if my educated guess holds out) the inclusion of a needlessly extra ‘assistant laws firm’ quite likely inadvertently torpedoes the UK Casquejo v Shell lawsuit.

Meanwhile, please do scroll down this blog post space to see my completed posts, including the one from just last week (its ‘Part 2 will have to wait until after my MI v. BP dissection), and please return soon to see how the next blog post coming up will fill in this space.

Casquejo et al. v Shell PLC Part 1 – Potential problems in the [M.I.A.] lawsuit document

Posted on by

My list of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits I’ve dissected mentions at the top how it excludes American filings which never bring up the accusation about ‘liars-for-hire scientists on the payroll of Big Oil.’ Same actually applies to lawsuits filed outside of the U.S., such as the Peruvian Farmer’s one against a German energy company and Greenpeace’s one against an Italian energy company. Regarding this one filed in the UK on Dec 9th, a.k.a. “Casquejo and others v Shell plc” I cannot yet find the actual document that was filed. When I do, I will either amend this post to say there’s no “crooked skeptic scientists” accusation within it … or else I’ll dissect it as Part 2. What I have spotted – almost immediately in news reports after being alerted to it – are tell-tale indicators which prompts me to wager it will mimic the U.S. ones. Observe the following: Continue reading →

Kennedy et al. v. ExxonMobil Corporation et al.

Posted on by

This one, filed on November 25, 2025, should be quite easy to dissect, like I do with any other Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit; compare their latest to one of the prior filings, with a checklist run-through of the key accusation narratives which repeat like clockwork from one filing to the next.

But we have a problem here, maybe a particularly huge one. While the key accusation narratives do indeed repeat like clockwork … this is not a Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit. It’s a Hagens-Berman filing. They’re based in Seattle. But watch what happens when you compare this filing to the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm’s filing they did for the state of Hawaii in May 2025, plus one of their others filed in late 2023. I’ll start with Sher Edling’s trademark four accusation elements first, color coding my screencaptures below from each filing to show the shared words. Continue reading →

So Close, Yet So Far – Charleston v Brabham Oil dismissal’s lost opportunity

Posted on by

While it was great news from the Energy in Depth website on August 7th that South Carolina circuit court Judge Roger Young dismissed Charleston v Brabham Oil on jurisdictional / statute of limitations / and other angles, the opportunity to knock this one down on its core – and very false – central 4-element accusation which is present in all such Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits was missed again. Allow me to show two instances within the judge’s court ruling where he figuratively sideswiped gently against them, unaware how he could have sent then crashing into the ditch, and thus turn onto the path for that version of ‘failure to state a claim‘ dismissal. Continue reading →

Oreskes’ Embrace of the “Victory Will Be Achieved” Memos, Redux, in Honolulu v Sunoco – Big, big mistake.

Posted on by

The widely shared Associated Press news on July 28th was that a hearing in Hawaii was scheduled to take place the next day on whether the Honolulu v Sunoco global warming damages lawsuit should be tossed out because the ‘statute of limitations’ on the case had somehow run out. The defendants’ law firms legal technicality minutiae maneuvers from all their prior 8+ months of effort to get it out of state court and into Federal court didn’t work, so it appears they are trying a different maneuver … but in ABC News’ July 28 regurgitation of the AP story, which I fortuitously screencaptured on July 29th, showed how Naomi Oreskes’ name just could not stay out of the overall situation. I say “fortuitous” because one day later when I reopened both the ABC “Honolulu’s lawsuit against fossil fuel companies leads climate change legal fight” story and the AP original version to copy words out of them – poof – Oreskes has vanished from both. But what’s seen in the internet cannot be unseen. What’s going on right there with that erasure? Luckily, someone smarter than me preserved an Internet Archive version of the original AP story, with the two Oreskes paragraphs intact.

Not an especially bright idea for the AP to say Oreskes had submitted an Opposition filing against the defendants’ ‘statute of limitations’ maneuver; dumber yet is to bury that fact like it never happened. However, that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this particular new situation. Continue reading →

Estate of Juliana Leon v Exxon Mobil Corporation

Posted on by

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 →

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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 →