I don’t merely write about the fatal faults within the accusations about ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns employing liars-for-hire scientists,’ I try to alert influential people who have the capacity to get to the bottom of whether the accusations have any merit. The key promulgators of the accusations can be placed under oath either within some upcoming court action in the ExxonKnew lawsuits, or they (and their weak-links-in-the-association-chain) can be put under oath in U.S. House or Senate hearings. One such opportunity for the latter is possible on May 1, 2024, in a Senate Hearing titled “Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change” Who’s one of the hearing witnesses which was probably a bad idea for the Democrat majority to invite? Geoffrey Supran.
Before midday yesterday, I’d already sent three emails (verbatim below with spelled-out web links) to the Chiefs of staff for three prominent GOP Senators for that committee hearing, one of whom is famous for making mincemeat out of witnesses who don’t actually know what they are talking about. And I forwarded one those yesterday afternoon to the minority chairman, Senator Grassley, for additional measure. If anyone reading this has influential contacts who can help with alerting the staffers on the minority side of the committee on how this is a can’t-miss opportunity to take advantage of Geoffrey Supran being under oath and with the spotlight of truth aimed at him, I’d be indebted to you for the favor:
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Subject: “Denial, Disinfo & Doublespeak” May 1 Sen hearing guest Geoffrey Supran HUGELY vulnerable to questions Re old “Chicken Little” fossil fuel ‘advertorial’
Mr Stokes, (variants of the email below sent to Chief of staffs Riley / Wait / Kelley for Senators Ron Johnson / Mike Lee / Mike Braun)
I was just alerted to the hearing scheduled for May 1st by Sen Whitehouse that includes guest Geoffrey Supran of the U of Miami “Climate Accountability Lab.” I have little doubt that Sen Whitehouse is assuming Mr Supran will be met with no hard hitting questions and will thus be free to spew his unsupportable assertions about fossil fuel industry ‘disinformation campaigns.’ It would not surprise me if he freely mentions what I detail below, hoping that nobody will know enough about it to rebut it:
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- In Nov 2021, Supran co-authored an article with his ‘boss’ ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/02/ Supran-Oreskes-amicus.jpg ) Naomi Oreskes about ‘forgotten oil ads’ ( https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2021/nov/18/the- forgotten-oil-ads-that-told- us-climate-change-was-nothing ), and included horribly degraded photocopy images of so-called industry advertorials headlined with “Who told you the earth is warming, Chicken Little” and “Doomsday is Canceled.” Supran and Oreskes claimed these advertorials were part of a disinformation campaign run by a group called the “Informed Citizens for the Environment” which sought to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact). Screencapture here for an all-in-one view of that ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp- content/uploads/2021/11/ Supran-Oreskes-experts- reposit.jpg ). - In a series of Tweets on April 22, 2019 about alleged fossil fuel industry disinformation, Mr Supran tweeted ( https://twitter.com/
GeoffreySupran/status/ 1120317994545053696 ), “Here’s a 1991 internal strategy memo from the coal and utility industries explicitly planning to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact)’.”
- In Nov 2021, Supran co-authored an article with his ‘boss’ ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-
Regarding those two instances:
1) Both the “Chicken Little” and “Doomsday is Canceled” were never published anywhere, and thus cannot serve as evidence in the current collection of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits or anywhere else that industry-led disinformation campaigns occurred to dupe the public into thinking there is no harm from global warming. I detailed that massive fault concerning the viral spread of the accusation with those advertorials in my days-old April 25 guest post at the WattsUpWithThat site — please see “The Be-All / End-All “Chicken Little” Advertorial: When It’s All You Got, You. Still. Have. Nothing.” https://wattsupwiththat.com/
2) Supran’s April 2019 Tweet about the “reposition global warming” memo sources from a very old Greenpeace Investigations (now offline) website 50-page PDF file. I downloaded that PDF ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-
3) A June 1991 New York Times article about the leak of those memos ( https://www.nytimes.com/1991/
4) The late Ron Arnold, article author at the “Left Exposed” website detailed a series of basic falsehoods from Supran’s boss Naomi Oreskes ( https://web.archive.org/web/
5) The “reposition global warming” memos and the the “Chicken Little” and “Doomsday is Canceled” advertorials ultimately trace all the way back to the old Ozone Action group circa the late 1990s ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-
6) Both Ozone Action and Greenpeace USA circa 2000-2008 where headed by John Passacantando and Kert Davies ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-
7) Passacantando left Greenpeace in 2008 to form an LLC company which has no internet presence, and which has amassed a minimum of $20 million from 2009 onward ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=
8) Supran’s April 2019 Tweet cited Davies’s ClimateFiles site as the source of the “reposition global warming” memos.
9) The San Francisco law firm Sher Edling cites Davies’s ClimateFiles site as the source of the “Chicken Little” advertorial ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-
10) Naomi Oreskes – as minority chairman Sen Chuck Grassley noted in the June 21, 2023 Senate Budget Hearing where Naomi Oreskes was a witness ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?
11) Sen Whitehouse cited the “reposition global warming” memos in a March 2019 Senate floor speech, with an accompanying big placard ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-
This is only the tip of the iceberg concerning massive disinformation being put out by a core clique of enviro-activists who’ve long promulgated the accusation about industry-led disinformation campaigns. I’ve written in detail about Geoffrey Supran’s huge vulnerability problem ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=
– Russell Cook
GelbspanFiles.com
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