Passacantando’s Millions [UPDATED 9/28/24]

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[See update addition in red, below] John Passacantando, that is, the ex-Greenpeace USA Executive Director who had merged his former Ozone Action group into it in 2000. I term him and his cohorts “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” because of that merger situation, with regard to its central role in finally prompting the first useful major ongoing media traction to the “reposition global warming” ‘leaked memos’ accusation that supposedly is proof that fossil fuel executives skeptic colluded with climate scientists to create disinformation which would cause the public to doubt the ‘settled science’ of man-caused catastrophic global warming. This is the same John Passacantando who was seen much more recently with former Ozone Action / Greenpeace USA-ExxonSecrets staffer Kert Davies in an apparent effort to portray Exxon as corrupt in the eyes of the public, the same Passacantando / Davies duo that seems to be swimming in dark money – nearly $5 million not so long ago – to do … what, exactly?

Fair’s fair — when the collective pro-global warming side of the issue claims the mere appearance of possibly illicit funding is enough to indict skeptic climate scientists of spending disinformation, then by default, the notion is not off limits to explore when it comes to the motivations and efforts of those who are the core people hurling the ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation.

I explored that in my “Joke: ‘Why did the Greenpeace USA Executive Director cross the Road?’” blog post, but also noted my long-term disdain about “funding automatically = corruption.” I also added two addendums to the bottom of that post to first note that the IRS form 990s that I was aware of at that time ended at 2017, and that I had found one new large dollar infusion into his mystery “Our Next Economy LLC” business. Additional infusions are likely to be found, and rather than amend my prior blog posts in the future, I’ve instead created this post to refer to later, where I can add the dollar amounts here as they are found.

So, let’s start the count, beginning after the time of his officially reported January 1, 2009 departure from Greenpeace, when he inexplicably switched to running a seemingly 1-person blogger operation, and then run the count forward, adding entries as needed in the same red-highlighted manner as seen in my ongoing counts of the rising number of global warming lawsuits and the instances of bias in the PBS NewsHour’s global warming reporting. This count does not include the fiscal year 2009 $130,000+ that he received from Greenpeace for “zero hours worked” – that may have been some kind of parting gift, or seed money for whatever the “consultancy” company he claimed he was planning to create next. The dollar figure links are screencapture composites from the official forms or pages:

$245,033 short of $20 million, in other words. There might be more from January 2009 to the present time from other entities. All for an LLC company that initially looked like little more than an inconsequential 1-person blogger operation, which is more recently labeled as a 17-person one at the same residential house location.

What does all that mean? If Passacantando has always believed his accusation that skeptic climate scientists were paid fossil fuel money to knowingly spread doubt that undercut the IPCC / Al Gore side of the global warming issue, then more power to him for raising that kind of cash. But if he knew his core accusation about the “reposition global warming” ‘leaked memos’ accusation was either worthless from the start, or learned that afterward, or simply was negligent enough to never check the veracity of it this entire time, then that is potentially a crippling problem for him.