11/20/25 update — see red double asterisk addition midway down, and at the bottom of this post.
Among all the tsunami of other controversial political news is the barely weeks-old scandal involving the BBC over revelations of their journalism malfeasance. Since I know a decent amount about another as-yet-unreported angle of BBC inaccuracies, I’ve emailed several UK reporters and others digging deeper into the overall situation to my coincidental 12 days-old filing of my complaint to the UK’s broadcast regulatory agency on this matter. What I briefly explained is that in 2020, the BBC relied on unverified ‘industry memos’ in a careless and illogical manner to claim the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns; their effort was hardly different than what happened a few years ago when the anti-Trump news media relied on the meritless “Steele Dossier” to accuse President Trump of engaging in despicable acts. I further pointed out how the accusation against the fossil fuel industry has every indication in the world of being traceable to a particular enviro-activist, Kert Davies, and how much of a one-trick pony the worthless memo phrase is for the anti-energy company activists.
What I should do is create another post in my “Background” series, to compile all of Kert Davies’ fatal credibility problems for ease of reference when corresponding with objective reporters. I plan to do that for my next post here. But in the meantime, let’s see where the man popped up just recently, and where that one-trick memo phrase popped up.
The barely half month-old recurrence of ye olde “reposition global warming” phrase was particularly lame, and ought to be an embarrassment to the writers who regurgitated it without question near the end of their long October 31, 2025 review of the documentary movie “The White House Effect,” which tries to portray President George HW Bush as being cognizant of the harms of global warming (more likely he was ignorant to what skeptic climate scientists had to say). According to these documentary movie reviewers, opposition to the certainty of man-caused global warming was …
… funded by the oil corporations, who gradually turned the narrative around in order to avert the crisis. Dr. Fred Singer, one of the leading scientists among the skeptics, had been paid consultation fees by Exxon, who had actually funded this research. Professor Michaels, another member, happened to be the editor of the World Climate Review, a journal funded by the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal companies. Internal documents of both Exxon and the Western Fuels Association reveal how they had actively run these campaigns, targeting print and radio media, to completely reposition global warming as a hoax and a false belief, just so that their bottom line would remain unharmed.
• any fees that Dr Singer received from the energy industry occurred literally years before the global warming issue’ erupted, I detailed that problem in depth here. Even the namesake of my blog, Ross Gelbspan mentioned that fatal angle of the accusation. But also in his 1997 hardcover book, Gelbspan nevertheless all but accused Dr Singer of being paid to “reposition global warming.” Evidently he was so ashamed of that false accusation, he swapped out Dr Singer’s name in his 1998 paperback version.
• As seen in the above screencaptures from Gelbspan’s 1997 / 1998 book versions, he hurled the same false accusation at Dr Michaels, who told me in 2014 how ridiculous Gelbspan looked after requesting his resumé back when they first met in 1995. The Western Fuels Association is indeed a consortium of coal companies, operating as a non-profit co-operative, thus there is no “bottom line” of profits that would be harmed.
• No actual “internal documents” exist proving Western Fuels or Exxon (contrary to what Al Gore said) sought to reposition anything. Period. The “reposition global warming” memos were rejected, and the copy of that memo set which Western Fuels had ended up in their trash. However, somebody else having access to those worthless memos leaked them to enviro-activists, who in turn leaked them to others, including to Al Gore’s then-1992 Senate office. Gore himself claimed they were leaked from the National Coal Association, but in 2006, he claimed Ross Gelbspan discovered the memo set. Gelbspan (who never won a Pulitzer) never said where he got the memo set, but a 1996-era Ozone Action archive page notes he and Ozone Action ‘obtained’ them.
If the ‘best-evidence-we-have-to-indict-Big-Oil’ “reposition global warming memos” accusation element is prominently featured** in the “The White House Effect” documentary movie itself (which may explain why the movie reviewers specifically brought it up; I haven’t viewed the movie yet), that’s a major problem – but hold that thought until the end of this blog post.
Meanwhile, where did Kert Davies’ name appear just recently? over at the UK Guardian newspaper’s November 3, 2025 “Exxon funded thinktanks to spread climate denial in Latin America, documents reveal” authored by Geoff Dembicki. Davies’ name is right about at the midway point in Dembicki’s piece about how the Atlas Network supposedly enabled Dr S Fred Singer to ‘spread disinformation,’ and how this sinister overall effort was revealed in emails between Atlas and Exxon which was …
… correspondence [that] took place during the late 1990s and early 2000s and was obtained by the climate investigations site DeSmog.
Stoking confusion and doubt about climate change among developing nations, as Exxon and Atlas Network sought to do during critical early moments of climate diplomacy, exacerbated geopolitical faultlines and economic fears that still persist to this day, according to Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity.
“That’s a pretty ugly history,” he said. …
• My June 2018 blog post covered how Ross Gelbspan’s long-ago “exposé” of Atlas’ corruption of Dr Singer fell apart.
• My blog post just over a month and a half ago detailed how Desmogblog is not even remotely a ‘climate investigations site,’ it was built on Ross Gelbspan’s worthless accusations and served as nothing more than a propaganda vehicle to impugn the integrity of skeptic climate scientists.
• Yes, Davies latest workplace, the Center for Climate Integrity, is a not-for-profit operation just like the Western Fuels Association, but Kert Davies (not identified as either an ex-Greenpeace operative or an ex-Ozone Action operative in Dembicki’s article) previously ran the Climate Investigations Center, which according to a 2019 Washington Free Beacon report, was a recipient of dark money from Davies’ former ex-Greenpeace boss / ex-Ozone Action boss John Passacantando. Passacantando being apparently a recipient himself of potentially upwards of $25 million in dark money.
• Is the author of the above Guardian article mentioning Kert Davies just some reporter? No, as I detailed starting at the 1/3rd point of my November 2022 blog post, Geoff Dembicki is enslaved to worthless accusation material which he sources to Kert Davies’ Climate Files site, and Davies’ source ultimately goes right back to his and Passacantando’s worthless Ozone Action-era documents scans.
• and speaking of the Guardian … they – courtesy of Naomi Oreskes – are also enslaved to the same worthless accusations. Over in BBC pages, she’s mentioned as a ‘researcher’ in the same sentence as Kert Davies.
One more thing – because there’s always more: back up in the third paragraph of this blog post, I mentioned the documentary movie review where the authors dutifully regurgitated a variant of the old “reposition global warming” memo phrase. Guess what name is listed as a consultant in the documentary movie’s “Additional Crew” section?
See how that works? No matter where you go to find the “crooked skeptics colluding with fossil fuel execs in disinfo campaigns,” there he is. And he would not be able to prove his ‘evidence’ supports that accusation if his reputation depended on it. If he believes he’s invisible on this, it’s simply because no one major has ever questioned him about it. His days of not having to face that kind of pressure may be coming to an end sometime soon.
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** [Author’s 11/20/25 addition: I don’t have a Netflix account, but it turns out one of my climate issue pals does have one. He did a quick scan of the movie and sent me three very brief clips I predicted would be in the film, the first one being a setup of Dr Singer saying there wasn’t solid scientific support for man-caused global warming, the second being an utterly out-of-context statement made against Dr Singer in the 1994 ABC News Nightlife program (still ironic that this program is used as a weapon against Dr Singer, when I detailed in June 2018 how it indicted anyone for the fault of trying to impugn a scientist’s credibility rather than dispute his science conclusions), and the third clip being – you guessed it – an artful animated zoom-in of the worthless “reposition global warming” memo where it was labeled as an “Internal Document” and its word “Strategies” was first emphasized hovering over the memo page, then the view focused in on the memo phrase itself. Then a clip of archive newspaper factory printing was briefly shown, followed by a zoom-in of a cropped image of the Information Council for the Environment campaign’s ear muffs-wearing horse advertorial appeared – the actual ad I featured in my January 2022 blog post. No doubt the film producers could never show the memo back before the “reposition global warming” phrase; it clearly has the unsolicited, never used “Informed Citizens” name variant for the Western Fuels ICE campaign And no doubt the film producers could never show the “Chicken Little” ad that’s beloved in the current “Exxon Knew” lawsuits and at Kert Davies’ Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files site because … it displays very inconvenient truths.]
