Not only is Naomi Oreskes the author of the 2010 “Merchants of Doubt” book / star of the 2015 same-name documentary movie, she is also now apparently trying to make some kind of inroads into influencing SCOTUS clerks, if this August 15, 2024 “Interview: Science historian Naomi Oreskes schools the Supreme Court on climate change” article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is to be believed. There’s no indication in the article that she’s ‘schooled’ anybody there yet, but she evidently has ‘schooled’ global warming lawfare lawyers – she’s on retainer with the law firm directly handling / assisting with 22 (at the time of this blog publication) of the current U.S. “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits. She has apparently also had some kind of influence with no less than Pope Francis.
She’s been skating on thin ice ever since her foray into the issue, but via sheer blind luck of never facing anyone questioning a word she says, she hasn’t yet fallen right through. When major high-level discussions occur regarding how, where, and why the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits should proceed, her name as an ‘expert’ on the topic is certain to be mentioned in some form. This actually already happened once, where her “Merchants” movie was brought up within the 2015-era NY state Attorney General’s office. That’s why it’s crucial for any clerks for the ruling majority of the Supreme Court to be aware, along with any other people involved in the court system – law firms for the defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits especially – or people involved in the Republican side of the U.S. congress, of how massively vulnerable she is on her assertions about the climate issue and what she terms ‘industry-led disinformation campaigns.’
So, continuing from Part 1 / Part 2 on my ‘line-by-climate-issue-line’ analysis of her movie, I’ll again note that the time segment links below from a somewhat dicey Youtube video copy of “Merchants of Doubt” support the transcript text of it, but the timestamps may be slightly off from the official DVD because the person who uploaded it had its playback speed slightly increased, likely be skirt copyright laws.
I ended Part 2 at the 36:36 point. In Part 3 here, we can skip ahead to the 42:09 point, because once again, the film inexplicably wastes 6½ more minutes on the flame retardant industry. At the end, it segues from the claim that “Citizens for Fire Safety” was a front group for the flame retardant to show the image of “Citizens for the Environment” (“CFE”), which immediately flips around to signify it was a front group for the oil industry.
Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” book was solely focused on the climate issue, it never mentioned the flame retardant industry, thus the segments about that in her movie look like little more than irrelevant filler material. But her book never mentions CFE, either. Who are they? They’re certainly not the World Wildlife Fund’s CFE. It isn’t the one for the Arab community in Israel. So, who is she referring to?
Since she is supposedly the authority on the subject, it might follow that a specific internet (in quote marks to prompt only results of the words between them) of “Citizens for the Environment” and “Naomi Oreskes” ought to expedite results proving they were the front group this movie says they were. What’s seen in all the results? She’s left the word “Informed” off the front.
That “Informed Citizens for the Environment” which she brought up again in late 2021, the unsolicited alternative name presented to the Western Fuels Association for its public relations campaign which they never used.
In a movie purporting to expose industry-concocted disinformation, that tiny scene with a fake logo looks like outright disinformation on her part.
The movie moves on from that point for the next minute and a half with the return of NASA climate scientist James Hansen / news clips of extreme weather, to set up how ‘established facts’ prove the science is settled. But the movie first plows into its own self-created brick wall, and then reinforces one of the hallmarks of far-leftism, psychological projection:
43:28, Hansen: The scientific method is, you have to continually reassess your conclusions. As soon as there’s new data, you ask, “How does that affect my interpretation?” And you’re open-minded. What we’re up against is people who have a preferred answer, and so then they take the position of a lawyer. They’re going to defend their client, and they will only present you with the data that favors their client.
First — yes, a science conclusion stands on its own merits, and if new data fatally damages a previous interpretation, then the prior interpretation is thrown out the window to crash into the sidewalk in a million pieces. No prior 100% science consensus on the matter can save the now-splintered interpretation. Oreskes’ own belief that a “show of hands” validates a science conclusion now lays totally wrecked at the base of the virtual brick wall Dr Hansen just built.
Second, it is the enviro far-left that’s not open minded, they are the ones who have already have been operating under a preferred answer since the 1990s and they’ve been defending the ‘client’ of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) the whole time, clearly presenting the public with only the ‘data’ that favors this ‘client,’ while castigating the CAGW’s critics as … well, “doubt merchants” manufacturing what they say out of thin air. These skeptics never had to create any doubt from nothing, however, it was already pre-existing from the simple fact that nobody explained the disappearance of the global cooling craze when the Al Gore-era global warming craze first started getting some usable media attention.
In less than half a minute, with just five sentences, Dr Hansen inadvertently revealed the central fault with this movie. Nevertheless, his psychological projection angle is used as a segue into a 5½ minute segment featuring an ex-worker from the George C. Marshall Institute (GMI, dissolved in Oct 2015), tapped to basically trash the reputation of GMI’s CEO, William O’Keefe, without ever offering a word to dispute what the institute said about the global warming issue. (See O’Keefe’s devastating rebuttal co-authored with Jeff Kueter on Oreskes’ 2010 “Merchants of Doubt” book here)
Partway through the segment was this from the ex-institute employee, 47:00 point, featuring … wait for it … atmospheric physicist Dr S Fred Singer:
… a lot of people who get into that think tank world start out as intellectuals, but, you know, in the mixing pot of Washington, arguments become weapons. Part of this was gathering arguments that were already out there. They weren’t always compatible with one another. Sometimes the argument was that, “The Earth is not warming.”
[first of three clips of Dr Singer]
… At another time, the argument would be, “Well, yes, the Earth is warming, but it’s not due to human activities.”
As I detailed in my blog post over a decade ago, before this movie premiered, the talking point about inconsistent narratives from skeptic climate scientists is traceable straight to Ross Gelbspan. If there is one thing Dr Singer was consistent about, it was that the IPCC assessments had not made the case that what little global warming we’ve seen over the last 150 years results primarily from fossil fuel usage. True to form with any far-left accusation, the supposedly damaging elements of this accusation are simply taken disingenuously out of context.
The particular drama bit starting at the 48:00 point was …
… The occasion for me finally quitting was that I got a call from somebody who was updating a directory of lobbyists, and they wanted to know if Bill O’Keefe was indeed the president of the George C. Marshall Institute. I said, “Yeah, but why are you asking? Why –? Is he part of this directory?” And they said, “Yes.” I confronted O’Keefe and said, “Are you a registered lobbyist?” And he got extremely angry. I tried to get him to tell me, if he was, who his clients were. He wouldn’t tell me.
… during which one camera shot zoomed in on an uncomfortable-looking O’Keefe, and then switched to a hand dramatically un-redacting a lobbyist form showing his name and Exxon Mobil as his client. This predictably sets up a segue in which “Merchants of Doubt” film producer Robert Kenner asks Bill O’Keefe directly,
… when you went to [the George C. Marshall Institute], were you still connected in any way to the petroleum business?
O’Keefe: Um, I think I had — Yes, I had an oil company as a client.
[4 final sentences from the ex-Marshall employee expressing outrage over a think tank president being a registered lobbyist]
Kenner: So were you a lobbyist when you went to work for Marshall? … If you were hired by a Greenpeace organization to figure out how to present climate as a problem, what would you suggest to them?
O’Keefe: They couldn’t afford me.
Critical thinkers would view that exchange and respond with, “And the problem here is… what exactly?” But for enviro-activists, the point is crystal clear: association with Big Oil in any manner = guilty of spreading disinformation. After Fred Palmer, President of the Western Fuels Association (long falsely charged with operating under the ‘leaked memo’ plan to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact”), the next worst demon for enviro-activists is Bill O’Keefe for his term at the American Petroleum Institute in which he was implied to endorse the statement in the notorious 1998 API memo that “victory will be achieved when average citizens and the media recognize uncertainties in climate science.” O’Keefe told me directly that the plan was never implemented.
Film producer Robert Kenner could have asked Bill O’Keefe what he would do if he was hire by the World Wildlife Fund, or the National Resources Defense Council or the Sierra Club. But he instead asked about Greenpeace. That was a deliberately direct segue for the following:
49:34, unidentified man pointing at a slide screen diagram, saying: At the same time, O’Keefe is a lobbyist for ExxonMobil …
John Passacantando, Former Director, Greenpeace USA: When I was at Greenpeace, we looked into who was funding these think tanks. And you started to find ExxonMobil, and the Koch brothers, and the Southern Company.
Naomi Oreskes: ExxonMobil has been a major funder of climate change disinformation. They funded over 30 different organizations that promoted disinformation, or misleading information, about climate change.
Oreskes likely thought this particular ‘smoking gun’ segment cemented her authority as an expert on disinformation campaigns. I suggest the exact presentation of it torpedoes her credibility. When I attended the 2015 theater showing of this movie, I didn’t spot who the unidentified man was, since the scene was only a couple seconds long. From watching this DVD copy, I now can’t miss what the potentially fatal problem is here for Oreskes.
Back-to-back, Kert Davies and John Passacantando, within just a second of each other, and featuring Greenpeace USA’s “ExxonSecrets” website on Davies’ screen slide.
What’s the incomplete or misleading information – arguably disinformation – right here? Let me count the ways, last-to-first:
• They funded over 30 different organizations … (overlaid with another brief clip of Kert Davies). I double-checked the audio, she definitely said 30. Back in 2005, Mother Jones magazine emphasized twice that it was 40 who sought to undermine the consensus show of hands. Off-camera at a 2008 Davos Conference Q&A session, Al Gore was even more specific about the objective of the 40: “Exxon Mobil has funded 40 different front groups that have all been a part of a strategic persuasion campaign to, in their own words ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.‘” By whose authority was Oreskes allowed to remove 10 names from that list? ExxonMobil funded this 30 or 40 … to do what exactly?
• … you started to find … the Southern Company.” Southern-who? They’re just an Atlanta based gas and electric utility holding company. The big villains are Exxon and the Kochs, so where does this obscure Southern accusation come from? It comes from the “No Sweat Newsletter” circa late 1996 by the old forgotten Ozone Action group, “… the former Information Council on the Environment (ICE), an organization whose goal was to ‘reposition global warming as theory, not fact.’ The Southern Company, Western Fuels Association and Edison Electric Company ran ICE specifically to target key congressional districts in the US with misinformation about climate change.” Edison Electric said they had nothing to do with running the “Information Council for the Environment.”
• “When I was at Greenpeace, we looked into who was funding …” Technically, he is telling the truth right there. Who’s “we”? Kert Davies should have been sitting right next to him to gesture toward, since Davies headed the “ExxonSecrets” website wing at Greenpeace USA. But the implication is that Passacantando started looking into “the funding” then. He did not. It began when he headed Ozone Action, with Davies as one of the other top administrators there.
• “O’Keefe is a lobbyist for ExxonMobil …” So what?! Among the multitude of ExxonSecrets webpages – which I used to rummage through but are now vanished off the internet along with the huge pile of document scans at Greenpeace investigations – they never once offered any proof that Exxon or anybody else paid skeptic scientists to spew disinformation.
Davies was seen one more fleeting time in this section.
I suggest this appearance needs deeper examination. Quite simply, when I first tried to find the “reposition global warming” memos in their full context in 2009-’10, it looked like there were two lines tracing back to the origin, one through Ross Gelbspan / Ozone Action (each never saying from whom they obtained the memos), and the other apparently totally separately through Naomi Oreskes, who seemed to imply they sourced from a Senate staffer associated with Al Gore. The question was, why would these two lines be separate?
To repeat what I said toward the end of Part 1, the only thing I’d found possibly connecting these lines was the strange circumstance in 2016 with Oreskes’ appearance at a U.S. house Congressional Progressive Caucus “practice run” hearing where Kert Davies was seen twice lurking in the distant doorway with smiling approval, along with what I could only recall as a fleeting appearance of Passacantando in this 2015 “Merchants” movie. But now add the appearance of Kert Davies in this movie. Pile on top of that my recent finding of Oreskes drawing direct attention to Passacantando within this 2016 lecture presentation about her movie … but notice how she does not name him specifically, while the clearer clip of his distinctly shows his Ozone Action job title.
Add to that: the back-to-back appearance of Passacantando & Davies in the April 2022 PBS Frontline “The Power of Big Oil” report series in which their longtime association was not disclosed, and which conspicuously teased about Oreskes’ upcoming appearance … but ultimately didn’t deliver. In her disappointment about the exclusion, as I showed in my 2022 blog post, she apparently could not keep her mouth shut about one more apparent direct tie to Kert Davies.
At what point does the Naomi Oreskes vs Davies-Passacantando-Gelbspan separate lines back to the origins of the worthless “reposition global warming” memos cease to be just a pure coincidence and instead indicate it is just one single line they all directly share back to Al Gore’s 1991-’92 Senate office?
For any lawyers presenting arguments in front of the Supreme Court or any other court, or for witnesses at congressional hearings presenting arguments concerning common sense energy policy who find themselves facing mentions of Naomi Oreskes implying her to be an authority above reproach . . . .
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In Part 4: the character assassination tactic / Marc Morano / the Rep Bob Inglis disinfo situation / Passacantando offers a spectacularly ironic psychological projection wrap-up