What I missed doesn’t help the folks pushing these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits right now at all. I did not miss this same detail in my Nov 2024 dissection of Maine v BP. The problem in D.C. v Exxon compounds the apparent law firm ‘plagiarizing’ situation I detailed in that dissection.
I don’t simply write blog posts about the fatal faults in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, I also go out of my way to alert influential people about these faults. While preparing one of those email alerts mentioning the apparent plagiarism happening in these filings by law firms / state AG offices, I re-read my June 2020 D.C. v Exxon dissection. In that blog post, I opened by noting that the filing chose to only use the less convincing of the two big ‘leaked memo’ sets to support its claim that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. Namely, the never implemented (never implemented!) “victory will be achieved” memos, which look hardly more than being just a collection of statements of what happens when the general public becomes more informed about all sides of the climate issue. Skeptic climate scientists exist, they say there is no climate crisis, and the folks feel compelled to bury that by steering the public away from such declarations by smearing the skeptics as industry-paid “liars for hire.” That’s exactly what the lawsuit’s accusation implied in their accusation about ‘achieving a victory.’
… In other words, the plan was part of Defendants’ goal to use disinformation to plant doubt about the reality of climate change in an effort to maintain consumer demand for their fossil fuel products and their large profits.
The accusation is ludicrous on its face, there’s no acknowledgement of using disinformation anywhere in the memo set. You can read the whole for yourselves, it appears here under the double-lined “Memos Follow” heading. Psychological projection being one hallmark of the far-left, the actual reality here was that enviro-activists have every appearance of having the goal to use disinformation to plant doubt in the public’s mind about the credibility of skeptic climate scientists in an effort to maintain their own lavish lifestyles. They’d have to go out and get real jobs if the climate issue collapsed.
Here’s where my “oops” comes in. I didn’t recognize the accusation which immediately followed D.C. v Exxon‘s bit about the “victory” memo set, where it launched into accusations about the late Dr S Fred Singer and his Science and Energy Policy Project (SEPP) organization. I’d actually seen it before because I mentioned briefly in my October 2017 dissection of State of California v. BP using a screencapture image link . I even mentioned the accusation paragraph further in my March 2018 “SEPP is exploring if, as a party possibly slandered in the City of Oakland complaint” blog post. Then I forgot all about it.
In that 2017 dissection, I simply took the accusation apart in 10 points. It was my first mention of the specific “bankroll scientists” accusation, but I wasn’t fully aware at the time how that particular line was a one of several repetition patterns in Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit filings. I initially presumed D.C. v Exxon was an ‘independently filed’ lawsuit since it didn’t resemble the nine prior Sher Edling boilerplate copies, and the only indication of an association was their law firm name at the end of the filing. Months later I added a short note to the bottom of my post on how Sher Edling ultimately declared it as one of their own. I did, however, describe the “bankroll” line pattern in my dissection later in 2020 of Delaware v BP and I have it in my checklists for showing how the Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits are what they are.
But I should have spotted how the accusation bit against Dr Singer and his SEPP organization presented a deeper problem.
Here’s what I didn’t catch back in 2020 — observe CA v BP compared to D.C. v Exxon:
Remarkably similar – and blatantly false – wording there, yes? Now watch this, D.C. v Exxon circa mid-2020 compared to the 17 weeks-old Maine v BP:
See that? Far too similar to be just a coincidence. Meanwhile – as I detailed in my dissection Maine – the accusation is still totally false, and yes, the specific accusation lines were lifted straight out of Matt Pawa’s 2017 filing. But if you want to call it an error, I said in my Maine dissection that this basic Sher Edling boilerplate had stepped outside of its standard “bankroll” accusation against solely Dr Willie Soon and had inexplicably inserted an accusation paragraph from Matt “the brains behind this lawfare” Pawa’s 2017 CA v BP lawsuit. But technically, Sher Edling didn’t have to reach that far back, when their own D.C. v Exxon–assisted filing was sorta already using that same accusation.
My mistake …. of not spotting this D.C. plagiarizing CA situation four years ago. What Sher Edling inadvertently did with their filing of Maine v BP was to point out that their accusation their D.C. v Exxon about API funding was lacking the footnote citation against Dr Willie Soon – this then qualifies D.C. as an addition to my list of lawsuits falsely accusing Dr Soon. What Sher Edling inadvertently did with their D.C. filing was demonstrate rather early on how some kind of plagiarism from other lawyers’ filings can happen in this climate lawfare litigation effort.
But considering the ever-growing amount of shared accusation material in all of these lawsuits across the board written by supposedly unrelated attorney offices, has it really been Sher Edling writing their own lawsuits, or is somebody deep behind the scenes doing all that work for them?
Just askin’. It’s one more troubling element that investigators may soon be asking who have much more influence and subpoena power than I do, and it’s a great example of how there are no neat, tidy claims in any one of these lawsuits, deeper examination of any of of the faults only leads to more problems.