In the wake of the Department of Justice filing a lawsuit on May 1, 2025 against the State of Hawaii (and others) over the dubious act of announcing plans for filing future climate lawfare/regulation actions, it would appear that Governor Josh Green of Hawaii retaliated right back at the Trump Administration – on the very same day – by filing this Hawaii v BP lawsuit. Big mistake, because Governor Green’s ineptly thought-out decisions will only likely eventually give the DoJ and/or other Federal investigators an excuse to hit harder against not only this lawsuit, but all of the other “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. This filing was actually not remotely spontaneous, it arguably was at least eight years in the making, if not longer. It’s nothing more than the very latest in the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling’s series of “boilerplate copy filings.” How do I know that? Let me count the ways via the same checklist I’ve used on their prior copy ’n paste efforts, plus let me point out where Sher Edling is now digging an even deeper holes for themselves on at least two false accusations of theirs. Technically this filing wouldn’t go into my list of lawsuits plagiarizing other law firms’ / law offices’ “homework,” since Sher Edling is more or less entitled to re-use their own material wherever they take this traveling circus act, but what they repeated out of their just-prior Maine v BP filing over at the other far end of the country inadvertently draws attention to speculation that attorneys aren’t just lazily copying other material as though it was their own, they instead may be operating on a central template supplied to them.

For any readers who may be arriving at this blog post without seeing what I’ve written before, let me first summarize by saying these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits – multiple 10s when not 100-200 pages in length – boil down to just two claims: Exxon, et al. knew the science of catastrophic man-caused global warming was settled as far back as the 1970s, but deceived the public in disinformation campaigns designed to undercut that ‘settled science.’ Proof of that deception effort is supposedly revealed by ‘evidence’ cited in these that industry officials declared “Victory will be achieved when we pay Dr Wei-Hock Soon $1.2 million to reposition global warming as theory (not fact) via deceptive newspaper advertorials.” While I facetiously and somewhat jokingly assemble the second claim in these lawsuits together into a single sentence, it’s no joke that all four of those individual accusation elements appear in every one of Sher Edling’s boilerplate copy filings — are all blatantly false. Governor Green probably was dazzled by this “shiny object” of a lawsuit dangled in front of him, thus he did nothing to see if any part of it actually had any merit.

The “Exxon knew as far back as the ’70s” doesn’t. Those were the halcyon days of global cooling. The cutesy animals of the day were armadillos moving south for more warmth. “ExxonKnew’ – meet brick wall. The brick wall of “you cannot bury historic facts.”

Meanwhile, regarding Sher Edling’s other ‘wash-rinse-repeat’ pile of claims, let me do a bit of repeating from my Nov 2024 dissection of Maine, but rearranged the order from ‘most effective evidence’ to ‘less effective memos’ evidence, and then the advertorials ‘evidence’ that’s bound to get Sher Edling in trouble, and wrapping up with their pseudo new-ish ‘plagiarism’ mistake:

✓ PDF file page 89, paragraph 120, the “reposition global warming” memos. Worthless to prove any industry disinformation campaign ever happened because it was a rejected proposal to a public relations campaign and its directives and suggestions were never implemented anywhere, including its unsolicited “Informed Citizens” alternative for the actual “Information Council” PR campaign name, and its unsolicited and quite odd suggestion to narrowly target* “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women.” As I detailed in my Dec 2024 blog post, that latter false accusation was disproved in congressional testimony all the way back in 1991. But again, as I’ve said many times before here at GelbspanFiles, the “reposition global warming memos” accusation is the literal best that enviro-activists have in their arsenal to use against the fossil fuel industry. Witness how hardly over three weeks ago, it was regurgitated within a religious-orientated article against current Trump Administration EPA Director Lee Zeldin, and published again mere days after that no farther than five pages into a 90 page ‘scholarly paper,’ as though the memo strategy was some kind of established fact totally above reproach. It isn’t. Not in the least. It’s one of the main faults that could lead to Motions to Dismiss every one of these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits – ‘evidence’ that is insufficient to support a claim. Not provided in good faith, either, a Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 11(b) violation.

*There a new twist here in this Hawaii filing: Sher Edling’s first trio of lawsuits in 2017 regurgitated that exact “older, less-educated men” / “young, low-income women” accusation, e.g. as seen in San Mateo v Chevron. Their second trio, and every boilerplate copy afterward, dropped the ‘poor females’ part and only stuck with the ‘stupid old men’ part, as in their just-prior Maine filing. What did they switch to here in Hawaii? People “who were ‘not typically active information-seekers’”… Is that an indicator that Sher Edling knows the specific folks mentioned all the way back in Al Gore’s 1992 book are now a bit of a roadblock in 2025 for winning a lawsuit?

✓ PDF file page 90, paragraph 122 (always hand-in-glove with the above “reposition global warming memos” accusation), Sher Edling’s horribly degraded “Chicken Little” / “Doomsday” / “Most Serious Problem” ‘advertorials’ trio photocopy images. The first two were never published anywhere, while Sher Edling crops off the ad text of the last one – note where the missing blurry text is seen in old “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” scans images – the identical horribly degraded photocopy images, actually. There’s no real disinformation in the ad text, zoom in here, and no particular reason why the law firm couldn’t show clear text of the actual ICE ads the way I did … unless what’s in the ICE ad text doesn’t qualify in court hearings as ‘disinformation.’ Kert Davies, by the way, worked at both Ozone Action and Greenpeace, and Sher Edling credits his Climate Files website as the source of their — not that they directly describe it as such — cropped “Chicken Little” advertorial copy.

✓ PDF file page 94, paragraph 131, the “victory will be achieved” memos. It’s the second-best bit of ‘industry memos evidence’ enviro-activists have in their arsenal, it always has been, they read like a bunch of truisms on how the industry – and the public overall – would benefit if more people knew all of the details of the issue, not just half of them. This memo set was also never implemented (never-implemented!) anywhere, but in these boilerplate copy filings (and again like what’s in Sher Edling’s Maine v BP, buried one layer deeper behind the “perma.cc” link variant), all versions of this accusation are plagued by the ultimate source being Kert Davies – there’s that name again – when he worked at Greenpeace.

✓ PDF file page 95, paragraphs 133 and 134, “Bankroll scientists” – a.k.a., the false accusation about former Harvard Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr Willie Soon being bribed by Exxon to the tune of $1.2 million.* Compare the screencapture I have there to this one for Sher Edling’s Maine v BP filing. Identical. They even have the identical “perma.cc” links for the citations in the footnote references. The only thing that changes is the footnote numbers. Even the paragraph wording arrangement is identical. Technically, since the Maine filing at the other end of the country was still Sher Edling’s own work, repeating it here is not plagiarism. But as I detailed in my dissection of Maine, the manner in which Sher Edling strayed from their pure repetition of the accusation directed solely at Dr Soon, the apparent plagiarism they committed in their Maine filing was to drop an accusation directed at the late Dr S Fred Singer into the middle of the standard accusation against Dr Soon. The accusation against Dr Singer was word-for-word identical to the one in attorney Matt Pawa’s 2017 California v BP filing. Not a word of that accusation is true, as I showed in my February 17, 2025 follow-up blog post which focused on the specific Maine filing’s accusation against Dr Singer.

*As Dr Soon has already described in detail, no such million dollar payment from Exxon came to him. And as was revealed within New York state Freedom of Information – Law (FOIL) documents the Energy Policy Advocates watchdog site received in 2023, the New York AG office attorneys (headed at that time in 2015 by Eric Schneiderman) had an upcoming meeting with a pair of ex-Greenpeace operatives who were teased to the office attorneys as being just about to break the news of Dr Willie Soon receiving huge industry payments. Oh, there’s that name again in my FOIL 2015 email screencapture: Kert Davies. Who was his boss back in the day when the “reposition global warming” memos and supposedly directly related newspaper advertorials starting gathering big news media traction at the Ozone Action organization? The other guy in that 2015 NY AG office meeting.

The new problematic wrinkle for the Sher Edling law firm in this latest Hawaii filing is how their County of Maui v Sunoco didn’t have the accusation against Dr Singer. Neither did their Honolulu filing. Thus this ‘new’ addition does not further build the “growing mountain of evidence” about ‘shill scientists paid to spread industry disinformation’ it’s a regurgitated old – and demonstrably false – copycat accusation which can inadvertently lead investigators behind the scenes of how these lawsuits are assembled.

Sher Edling’s State of Hawaii v. BP was filed on May 1, 2025. The other climate lawfare news one day later was Sher Edling voluntarily dismissing their Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico v Exxon lawsuit. Notice who the recipient of that self-dismissal notice was sent to: U.S. District Court Judge Aida M. Delgado-Colon — the same judge who admonished the Efron PC law firm for plagiarizing San Juan v Exxon almost in its entirety from the supposedly unrelated law firm Milberg Coleman’s Municipalities of Puerto Rico v Exxon. My educated guess for Sher Edlings’s self-dismissal is that … well, best not to risk Judge Delgado-Colon looking into their own lawsuit to see if there was even the slightest tiny little indication of any kind of copycat items seen in other lawsuits. Perhaps even copycat items from their own lawsuits nearly 6,000 miles away.