Just like that, a huge number of posts by the late Ross Gelbspan at his longtime Facebook page, gone. Vanished overnight quite recently, because a Google search for the account url still generated results as though the account existed on July 21 when I got this screencapture. A week later … Google says the account is definitely MIA. For congressional investigators / attorneys defending energy companies in “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, the account is gone, but potentially not forgotten. As I’ve said before, to fully understand where we are in the climate issue – particularly lately with the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits ‘climate lawfare’ angle – it’s best if everyone understands how we got to where we are right now. The man may have become less useful in his advanced age in the past few years, but his Facebook page did minimally have one particular use, and investigators would be wise to recover it when the need arises.
Certainly of course, family members of any deceased person would be perfectly within their rights to take down a loved one’s Facebook account, or reset it so that only a select few people can see it. But if the person was a prominent figure, revered for a particular body of work, why not leave the account online as a legacy one, where no further comments are permitted to be posted? The late climate issue columnist Alan Caruba died in 2015, but his Facebook account is still online nine years later. Why not? There’s nothing to hide there. The Facebook system even recently auto-generated a Friend Request out of his account to me at my year-old ‘mark 2’ account since he had been Friends with many that I had re-acquired after the FB system wiped out my prior account (with only a cryptic excuse).
When Facebook accounts contain something that needs to be hidden from public view – manifestos from mass killers – they disappear within an hour or so of such big horrible news events. Ross Gelbspan was not such a person, he simply died because of health problems brought on by old age. He himself even wrote, back in August 2021, that he viewed his account as a form of archive. Speaking personally if I was to get run over by a bus tomorrow, I’d hope not only my current FB account would stay online as an archive of my work, but also that my prior Dec 2012 to August 2023 account could be revived. There is / was a lot of really good material in my accounts, and I have absolutely nothing to hide, including my own Friends lists, past and present.
So why disappear Ross Gelbspan’s account, if he was so dearly loved for being essentially the “Daniel Ellsberg” of fossil fuel industry documents?
I’d suggest that it is because his account actually contains self-damaging items. To a lesser extent, it had things like what I detailed in my November 30, 2022 blog post concerning Gelbspan’s strange posting of a ‘legacy video’ which contained serious inconsistencies that undercut his earlier narratives about himself. But the key thing seen in his account was his Facebook Friends list. He was amazingly careless about publicizing it.
Let me offer just one potentially dicey example. Notice the names I have circled in the screencapture below — I captured this image on April 26, 2016.
Want to those same four names elsewhere, just 113 days prior to my screencapture?
I couldn’t circle the name “John Passacantando” — the famous ex-head of Greenpeace USA — in that first screencapture because he had vanished not only from Ross Gelbspan’s FB Friends list, but from everybody’s Friends list. 1200+ people, when he apparently took his own account offline, as I detailed back in my August 8, 2014 blog post. Gelbspan and Passacantando were definitely FB Friends as seen in this screencapture I got on Sept 19, 2013.
For those unaware of it, that second screencapture of the Jan 5 2016 email about an effort to portray Exxon as corrupt comes from this Alana Goodman Washington Free Beacon report about it, “Memo Shows Secret Coordination Effort Against ExxonMobil by Climate Activists, Rockefeller Fund.” That particular email happens to be separated by only 10½ months from a February 2015 email sent by – here’s the other name again, Lee Wasserman – describing how Passacantando and Davies were about to appear in front of April 2015-era attorneys in the then-current Eric Schneiderman’s New York Attorney General’s office to possibly persuade Schneiderman to file an “ExxonKnew” lawsuit. Given that Passacantando and Davies date from Ozone Action at the time when both that group and Ross Gelbspan ‘obtained’ the notorious “reposition global warming” memos, it’s pretty much a sure bet that those memos also came up in the discussion with the Schneiderman office attorneys.
The elemental question there about those three – Gelbspan, Passacantando and Davies – was what did each know about the worthlessness of those unsolicited, never-implemented memos, and when did they know it? Tragically, as I suggested in my obituary writeup for Gelbspan, the man no longer has the opportunity to come clean about the situation.
Many, if not most, of Gelbspan’s 760+ FB Friends were ‘fair weather friends,’ people he didn’t actually know personally who simply glommed onto a celebrity book author. As I noted within my analysis of the faults in the New York Times / Washington Post obituaries for Gelbspan, it was sad that almost nobody of major significance posted comments at his Facebook death announcement. Worse, before his account disappeared, I was able to see that the latest three commenters at his account’s death announcement post were from fake bimbo accounts asking him to accept a Friend Request from them. Sadder yet, on his June 1st birthday, a few of his fair weather friends posted birthday greetings and wishes for him to keep up the good work … oblivious to how that was no longer possible.
But it was the other prominent FB Friends who were important, the list routinely confirmed for me how there was inevitably just three degrees of separation or less between any given prominent person pushing the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation and Ross Gelbspan. Directly, in the instances where those prominent people were FB Friends with him.
So, did the family disappear Gelbspan’s account because of the rising number of idiot commenters appearing at his posts … or were they pressured to make it go away because of the damaging Friends connections within it?
Maybe that list is gone offline, but what has been seen on the internet cannot be unseen. However, Facebook is not like other websites that easily allows archive pages to be created. If I remember from quite a while back, I attempted to make an archive page for Ross Gelbspan’s account, and ended up with this odd result.
But investigators with subpoena power could force the Facebook organization to give up what is kept on computer servers of Gelbspan’s account.
When this whole effort, “ExxonKnew” lawsuits and all, begins to sink — and it will, it is a mathematical certainty — one of the ways congressional investigators / attorneys defending energy companies can send this Titanic-sized accusation hoax to the bottom is to obtain that list of Gelbspan’s Facebook Friends, find out which of them are weaker than the others when it comes to being open to turning state’s evidence to save their own skins, and use that to see what kept this whole “crooked skeptics” accusation afloat for so long.