His name is one I’ve mentioned frequently at this GelbspanFiles blog, I have a tag category just for him of blog posts pointing to him in a significant way, the first one being in my August 30, 2013 post. As I noted in my Nov 18, 2025 post, since his name may possibly contribute to the journalism scandal the BBC news outlet is facing, and since his name and his three decades of efforts are frequently tied in some way to ongoing false accusations about ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientists,’ objective news reporters / Federal investigators / energy company defendants’ law firms may appreciate a Background post dedicated just to him. For such people to hold him accountable as being one of the central-most promulgators of that accusation, they have know how he got to that position, and where his claims crumble to dust under hard scrutiny, and where questions need to be asked about strange circumstances surrounding him.

• His name is actually Roland C. Davies III. Do internet searches of “Roland Davies” and you’ll turn up an unrelated person. As Rockefeller Family Fund Director Lee Wasserman said in an email (released out of many 2015-era documents via FOIA requests to the New York Attorney General’s office by the “Government Accountability & Oversight” watchdog group), “Kert” is his nickname. Thus for finding additional info, the search must be specifically for “Kert Davies,” with his name between quotation marks to force the searches to only show results for his ‘preferred’ name.

• His online LinkedIn resumé lists his workplaces from after college graduation to the present year as follows:

1. Environmental Working Group (“EWG,” an advocacy group co-founded by Richard Wiles).
2. Ozone Action (the group which was the first to provide lasting, ongoing media traction to what is in reality the worthless “reposition global warming” memos, which were never actually implemented anywhere by any fossil fuel company (full context of what’s seen in that last screencapture here). To this day, that memo set is one of the central accusations seen in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits and other climate lawfare efforts.
3. Greenpeace (where Davies ran the “Exxon Secrets” wing of that organization), the same workplace where he uploaded the [never implemented] “victory will be achieved” memos, which are also a core element in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits and other climate lawfare efforts.
4. Climate Investigations Center (with its “Climate Files” platform that’s often cited in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits).
5. “Brilliant Light Power, Inc” — this one appears to be an outfit wanting to unleash energy from hydrogen, but it’s never come up in a prominent public way regarding Davies’ work toward accusing the fossil fuel industry and skeptic climate scientists of corruption; the question remains, then, why he deems it important to put into his resumé. Minimally, he did put together a 28-slide presentation back in 2016 about this company’s “value in a carbon constrained world,” but that’s about it; the question remains, then, why he deems it important to put into his resumé and whether this ‘research lab’currently has any actual importance whatsoever in the green energy industry. Do they actually produce anything, or only believe they can? His alleged 2½ year+ stint with them makes no sense because he has exactly zero expertise in anything relating to the actual physical science of alternative energy power generation.
6. The Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), whose president is Richard Wiles, and who claimed in 2023 that he’s “worked with Davies for 30 years,” which somewhat contradicts Davies 1994 start date at EWG by one year. This also makes little sense; while CCI focuses solely on climate issue lawfare efforts, they need have only referred to the massive pile of documents he’s amassed at CIC / Climate Files rather than hire the guy. The question here is what necessity there is for him to be the “director of investigations” at CCI rather than do the same at his own CIC / Climate Files ‘business.’

One of the key details about Kert Davies is who his boss was at two of his prior jobs, namely John Passacantando at Greenpeace USA, and at Ozone Action. It’s not actually clear in what capacity Passacantando initially became involved with Ozone Action, but he definitely merged it into Greenpeace USA in 2000 and took over as Executive Director. Both subsequently left Greenpeace, with Davies then starting up CIC in 2014 (or 2013 … 2013 or 2014), and Passacantando starting up a pointless blog at a site labeled “Our Next Economy” in 2009. That same 2009 year, however, nearly $200,000 poured into Passacantando’s Our Next Economy LLC company, which to this day has zero internet presence. The dark money going into his company is now (from publicly available IRS 990 forms) at least up to almost $25 million.

• in a 2015 email revealed by the Government Accountability & Oversight watchdog group from their FOIA requests at the NY state Attorney General’s office, Rockefeller Family Fund Director Lee Wasserman had arranged a meeting with AG Eric Schneiderman’s assistants and Passacantando and Davies, who were described as being ready to break the ‘news’ of skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon receiving huge industry payments. That accusation is just one of the four main accusation elements seen in the bulk of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Just like the other false accusations, there is no truth to Dr Soon being paid/instructed to do anything under fossil fuel industry direction.

• in a 2016 email revealed by the Washington Free Beacon showed that Rockefeller Family Fund Director Lee Wasserman had subsequently arranged a meeting session among several people, including Passacantando and Davies, where the group was strategizing how to “delegitimize” Exxon in the eyes of the public.

– Wasserman’s Associate Director at the Rockefeller Family Fund is Lisa Guide, who is married to John Passacantando, and has been ever since he headed Greenpeace USA.

• a 2019 Washington Free Beacon report revealed Passacantando was apparently a dark money funnel to Kert Davies’ efforts at his Climate Investigations Center.

• a screencapture of an information timeline at the Sher Edling law firm site shows that the firm credited an image from Davies’ Climate Files. Sher Edling regularly offers that particular image as ‘evidence’ in their lawsuits to support their accusation about fossil fuel industry running disinformation campaigns. That image is of a newspaper advertorial that was never published anywhere, and it specifically sources from late 1990s images collected at Ozone Action.

– Sher Edling’s lawsuits cite the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) “Deception Dossier” as the source for that never-published newspaper advertorial. UCS, in turn, cites the old Greenpeace / Ozone Action scans as their source. There was no reason for Sher Edling to add in the ‘UCS middleman’ citation there when the Greenpeace citation source would suffice.

The Sher Edling law firm doesn’t simply have that one single above problem with citing Kert Davies for worthless material. Their lawsuits also hurl the unsupportable accusation that the notorious “victory will be achieved” memo is also evidence of ‘industry disinfo campaigns.’ As noted in my paragraph above about Davies’ tenure at Greenpeace, he uploaded the scans of that memo set when he worked there. However, Sher Edling does not link straight to that file where Davies is readily identifiable in connection to Greenpeace circa 2013. Instead, there are slight changes to the website address (seen in red here) where Sher Edling’s link within its lawsuits (e.g. as seen in Makah v Exxon) goes instead to an innocuous-looking file version of that otherwise identical set of pages which — after an automatic url address default maneuver — has no mention of Davies at all. Their strange citation diversion trick continues right up to the most recent May 2025 filing of Hawaii v BP (albeit first passing through a “perma.cc” link where readers must then click on the “View the live page button”) . . . . . when Sher Edling could just as easily directly cite Davies’ Climate Files upload variant instead.

– Kert Davies’ Climate Files website upload file is identical to his Greenpeace 2013-era upload
– Other sites, such as the Inside Climate News organization’s upload are identical to Davies’ Climate Files upload
– Despite the “victory will be achieved” memos having never been implemented anywhere (never implemented!), Kert Davies’ “Climate Watchdog” Twitter / X page for his Climate Investigations Center still features that memo set as its headline piece of ‘evidence’ to prove industry-led disinfo campaigns happened.

• The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) site lists Kert Davies in just four documentary video instances, and as I detailed in the addendum at the end of my Nov 18, 2025 blog post, a friend with Netflix movie access provided me with brief clips showing the worthless “reposition global warming” memos as ‘evidence’ in the latest documentary where Davies is listed as a consultant. Not seen in the above IMDB list search results for Davies is the 2022 Paramount Plus TV documentary series “Black Gold,” in which he is listed as one of its stars.

– I have limited means and a limited budget that prevents me from seeing pay-per-view videos. It would be wise for investigators to see if the same unsupportable accusations made by Davies elsewhere about the never-implemented “reposition” and “victory” memos are seen in any form in videos in which he appears.
– Despite being prominently featured in the 2021 public access PBS Frontline program “The Power of Big Oil” (along with his former boss – never ID’d as such – John Passacantando). That TV series, which I detailed in my 4-part blog post series, beginning here, is not listed at the above IMDB search results page. Davies read on-camera straight from the “victory will be achieved” memos, but the Frontline producers never checked the veracity of his accusations about them.
– Also not mentioned in the IMDB search results is Davies’ uncredited image appearances (within seconds of his former boss John Passacantando) in Naomi Oreskes 2015 documentary movie “Merchants of Doubt.” I detailed that particular fault in my Part 3 dissection of her movie here, in which a rather suspect animated image of a card was seen with “Citizens for the Environment” on one side and “Oil Industry” on the other. The unsolicited (and thus never used) “Informed Citizens for the Environment” name has long been falsely attributed to the “reposition global warming” memos; Oreskes repeated that very accusation later in a 2021 UK Guardian article.

Kert Davies has one other highly suspect public appearance, as I described near the end of my May 2020 blog post – namely, his odd appearance in the doorway of a U.S. House Congressional Progressive Caucus “practice run” hearing . . . . featuring Naomi Oreskes.

Bottom line to all of this: Kert Davies has long been a go-to source for the accusation that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientist ‘shill experts,’ where his one-two knockout punches to back up his accusation are the literally worthless “reposition global warming” / “victory will be achieved” memo sets. It’s the best he has ever had, all other so-called ‘supporting’ industry documents he has are ancillary while indicating no sinister intent on the part of industry executives.

Rather than him being able to offer any viable evidence of an industry conspiracy to deceive the public about the harm of man-caused global warming, it appears he should be deeply investigated over having the appearance of conspiring (with a quite small group of others) to deceive the public about the credibility of skeptic climate scientists.

I’ve never attempted to contact the man and confront him on these faults; that would be the job of objective, unbiased news reporters plus court- and Federal-associated investigators. Considering how that other side of the environmental issue live in tiny echo chambers and never go looking for material that contradicts their agendas, the man may not have any clue that my material here exists. Once he does become the focus of deep investigation by influential people who might refer to my work, he may then view me as his worst enemy. He has no quarrel with me, though, because the reality is that if we’d had a responsible news media back in the day when the accusation effort against skeptic climate scientists started getting lasting media traction, that accusation would have never made it any farther out than the old Ozone Action group, which would have been exposed for the libel/slander material it was trying to put out. Kert Davies might have had to face civil or criminal penalties for either his deliberate or negligent actions, then afterward he’d have to go out and somehow get a real job while under that cloud of misconduct.