Naomi Oreskes’ Embracing of the “Victory Will Be Achieved” memos

Like I said at the top of my prior blog post, it doesn’t matter where you drop into the accusation about fossil fuel industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns, nothing lines up right. The inspiration for this blog post comes from a result (utterly typical of many) in my daily email alert from Google of search results for articles containing the words “global warming” — a Jan 22, 2025 anti-President Trump piece at “The Conversation” website by Wrigley Institute Director for Environment and Sustainability Joe Árvai titled “How the oil industry and growing political divides turned climate change into a partisan issue.” The author is a psychology professor with exactly zero expertise in climate science who’d likely accuse me of being unqualified to speak on the issue … because I have exactly zero expertise in climate science. Psychological projection being a major hallmark of extremist enviro-activists, the title of his article needs to aim its accusation at enviro-activists for turning climate science into a partisan issue. When he speaks of ‘oil industry disinformation tactics,’ he needs to aim that 180° back at people on his own side. I could devote an entire blog post to all the elements of mis- disinformation in his piece. However, I’ll instead focus on a gem citation within his piece that’s something congressional investigators / law firms representing defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / genuinely objective journalists might want to look into:

Naomi Oreskes’ embracing of ye olde “victory will be achieved” memos. What does she know about them, and when did she know it?

I ask this question because when I first began looking in earnest back in 2010 to find the full context of ye olde (never-implemented, it turned out) “reposition global warming” memos, Oreskes was a major promulgator of them at the time, but she made the monster mistake of claiming the memos were archived in a place which they were not. What I also discovered in 2010 was that while the “reposition global warming” memos were the best the enviro-activists had in their arsenal to indict skeptic climate scientists of being paid fossil fuel industry money to spew ‘disinformation,’ the 1998 American Petroleum Institute (API) “victory will be achieved” memo set was merely the second-best ‘evidence.’ At least the API memos were easy to find on the internet in their full context, unlike the ‘state secret’ “reposition” memos. Upon reading the “victory” memos, my immediate impression was that there was nothing damaging in them. They were ripe to illustrate how a mirror-flip of them would turn them into memos Greenpeace would gladly operate under. They were clearly worthless on their face to use as evidence that the industry ran disinformation campaigns. Embarrassingly so.

Naomi Oreskes – to the best of my ability to discern at that time – never spoke of them at all, despite them being a major accusation item for enviro-activists for the prior dozen years. Her focus was entirely on the “reposition global warming” memos during her 2007-2008 traveling lecture series about them (much more on that here). When she published her 2010 “Merchants of Doubt” book, which contained no mention of either memo set and only contained two tangential mentions of “American Petroleum Institute,” she seemed perturbed enough about the “reposition” memos omission to bring it up while promoting her “Merchants” book. Her particular note about “bad facts” in that instance was quite likely a nod to her same-year book chapter contribution to a multi-authored book in which her own chapter was sarcastically titled “My Facts Are Better Than Your Facts,” a swipe at the Western Fuels Association’s efforts (a false implication on her part) to “reposition global warming as theory” via disinformation rather than stating facts. Their clearly stated goal was to get all of the facts out to the public.

If I remember correctly, the first time I saw Oreskes even mention the “victory will be achieved” memos as ‘evidence’ of sinister fossil fuel industry efforts, it was in her first Friend of the Court brief she filed on behalf of four California lawsuits suing Chevron – I dissected that amicus brief here in 2019, and noted her utterly predictable (albeit ineptly handled in the brief) enslavement to the”reposition” memos … but I also mentioned her seemingly out-of-the-blue decision to finally say something about the “victory” memos.

But there might be more to dig into concerning the 2019 date there, courtesy of the above-noted psychology prof’s screed about President Trump.

Prof Joe Árvai needed links in his piece to support his assertion about an ‘oil industry disinformation campaign.’ The third link is the major problem link for Oreskes.

But did the Oreskes et al. “America Misled” report lead with the accusation about the “reposition global warming” memos? It did not. It didn’t even bring them up via purely indirect references in their citation source links.

That’s weird.

What they did do in connection with the never-implemented (never implemented!) “victory” memos, where they highlighted two key phrases?

Victory Will Be Achieved When … Average citizens “understand” (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”.

  Make the public think scientists don’t know anything for sure.

That API memo’s “smoking gun” phrase is absolutely nothing more than an outright truism. There’s nothing sinister about it. It would be a victory for any person embracing common sense rationale to achieve if they can convince an audience of people that they’ve been misled about the unquestionable ‘certainty’ of any given topic. The Earth’s climate has never remained the same for millennia – the concern that led to what should be done to counteract enviro-activists’ claims about settled science was that the public needed to be better informed. Al Gore and other activists surrounding him were making too much headway with claims about the ‘settled science’ of man-caused global warming, but were only doing so because a complicit news media was excluding the vehement science-based protests from skeptic climate scientists. You don’t make the public think something, you present them with the full amount of information available so that they can make fully informed decisions on their own. A jury will convict a guy of murder if his ironclad alibi is withheld from their decision-making. The news of skeptic climate scientists has been withheld from the public since the 1990s.

Victory Will Be Achieved When … Media coverage reflects balance on climate science

  Manipulate the media to give attention to “both sides”

Again, a memo statement that’s an absolute truism. Journalists report one side of a controversial story, and then give the opposition equal time to rebut what was said. It is a core tenet of journalism to report fairly, which means not giving biased advantage to one side of any given controversial issue. The polar opposite of that is the very definition of propaganda. Enviro-activists have yelled about that latter “problem” concerning giving equal time to skeptic scientists who don’t deserve it (because … settled science! Liars-for-hire!) since the 1990s, but their claims about giving equal time to skeptics are flat out false. Those who make those claims could not point to a single instance within the last two decades of unbiased equal time being given to skeptic climate scientists, much less torrents of undeserved time, which caused huge swaths of the public to doubt the certainty of man-caused global warming. As I detailed almost a decade ago, we have every appearance of effort being made to manipulate the media into giving attention to only one side of the issue. It was the founding principle of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Again, psychological projection being a major hallmark of extremist enviro-activists, it wasn’t the participants in this one-day American Petroleum Institute workshop who sought to mislead the public, it’s Naomi Oreskes and her report associates here who are doing that with those two blatantly false spin efforts. In a report ironically titled “America Misled.”

Who knows what was going on there with Naomi Oreskes and her associates straying off two decades’ worth of tactics by leaving out the much more viable-sounding “reposition global warming” memos accusation. Independently in their year-earlier 2018 “Consensus Handbook,” her associates led with it, but followed up with a reference to “victory” memos so vague that it was utterly ineffective. They did not even cite the API memo directly, but their reference to “recruit a handful of scientistsis in that API memo. The intriguing angle right there is how Naomi Oreskes mentioned that same vague thing seven years earlier in her 2011 Seattle KXEP public radio interview – ‘new faces’ such as Dr Willie Soon. As I detailed in my prior 1/20/25 blog post, Kert Davies did the same basic, similarly accusing Dr Soon of taking Exxon bribes, but with a tangential nod to the 1998 API memo accusation.

The tactic about using both memo sets still otherwise holds firm today, as seen in this two weeks-old answer to the question “What are the most successful climate change misinformation campaigns and how did they work?” Whoever this guy is, with his 2 million+ career of ‘answer views,’ he showed how it is done: you lead with the “reposition global warming” memos accusation and the hand-in-glove ‘advertorials’ (falsely attributed to those memos), you follow afterward with the #2 hit of the “victory will be achieved” memos, then add a distant #3 of whatever ancillary ‘evidence’ you can dredge up about ‘disinformation campaigns.’

Not withstanding that the “best you have” memo set and the much less effective #2 set were both never implemented anywhere and thus by default could not have been ‘the most successful climate change misinformation campaigns.’

Congressional investigators / law firms representing defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / genuinely objective journalists could ask the above hapless ‘2 million+ career answer guy’ where he got his worthless answers about “the most successful climate change misinformation campaigns,” but all he’d do is point to people like Naomi Oreskes. If she was put under oath and asked where she got her info, that might just open up a Pandora’s Box on how the actual “most successful misinformation campaign” – the smear of skeptic climate scientists – first got under way and who has kept it alive this whole time.