One of the more unnerving hallmarks of the zealot enviro-left (besides their basic trait of intellectual dishonesty – lying both to the public and themselves), is the manner in which they accuse others of actions they themselves do – a.k.a. psychological projection. The title of this blog post is a play on exactly that situation, surrounding a huge fault arising out of the otherwise pointless 30th UN climate conference that took place in November 2025 in Brazil. AmericanThinker author Susan Quinn’s 1/19/26 article title deftly points out what the fault was: “Climate change advocates at the UN launch new organized assault against free speech and information.” She’s referring to its misnamed “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change.” Charles Rotter at WUWT covered the Declaration’s ‘assault’ one day before the end of the conference, succinctly describing it as “something George Orwell would have rejected for being too on-the-nose,” and he skewered even further with his concluding statement, “They call it “information integrity.” Let’s call it what it is: climate totalitarianism with a smile.”
An angle not covered by the above two analysis articles is how the irony of the construct underlying this Declaration sails right over the head of any zealot enviro-leftist who endorses it – they either don’t recognize it from elsewhere, or else they are oblivious to the way it is worded is just like the weapon they’ve used against the fossil fuel industry since 1998.
The declaration follows the ‘playbook of Big Oil’ – notice how I put that in within single quotation marks – in an eerie manner, a ‘playbook’ which zealot enviro-leftists would have you believe is absolute proof of the industry using ‘disinformation’ to deceive the public about the climate issue. Allow me to explain:
First of all, examine the overall backdrop of the ‘industry disinfo accusation’ – the zealot enviro-left has only ever had two items of ‘smoking gun evidence’ in their arsenal to back up the claim that the fossil fuel industry employed skeptic climate scientists to deceive the public, namely the notorious [but never actually implemented] “reposition global warming” memo set and the notorious “victory will be achieved” set, both repeated so predictably and nauseatingly often over the years that I took to adding the belittling label “ye olde” to them whenever I referred them. The enviros don’t have anything better, their false accusation about skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon being bribed by Exxon comes in a distant third (even enviro-zealots scoff at its paper-thin ‘evidence’), while their even more paper-thin ‘fourth best evidence’ turns out to be a trio of lousy cropped advertorial scans (cropped!), two of which were never published anywhere (never published!), and the other one contains no actual disinformation in its [ missing from the lawsuits offerings! ] text.
One would have thought the enviros would be content to just push the combo of the ‘reposition global warming memos / industry disinformation advertorials / gullible PR audience targets’ after that collective accusation began to get its major increasing media traction back in the mid 1990s.
But for some reason, somebody in their midst decided in the spring of 1998 that their cause needed more than one accusation narrative to keep the public distracted from taking the science-based climate assessments seriously from skeptic climate scientists. Hence, the narrative that evil energy company executives ‘knew how burning fossil fuel leads to catastrophic heating of the planet – just like tobacco execs knew cigarette smoking causes cancer – and would declare victory if they succeeded in deceiving the public about the harm’ (the enviros’ love affair with the tobacco industry comparison is baffling; a member of the public would have to be hopelessly stupid to believe no harm results from inhaling chemical-laced burning particulates large enough for the naked eye to see).
What’s a bit entertaining about the then-new oil industry ‘victory’ accusation narrative in 1998 is how the huge New York Times media splash about the ‘leaked memos’ – “Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty” – never repeated the key phrase “victory will be achieved” at all.
In my tag category of assorted blog posts on how the narratives about the ‘1998 API victory will be achieved memo set’ fall apart, one of my posts showed how readers of the NYT media splash were obligated to go over to the same-day-published easy-to-read copy of the memo within the pages of the (now disappeared) National Environmental Trust (NET) pages, if they wanted to see what the memo said in full context. Using an archived page of that NET memo version (instead of horrid, hard-to-read photocopies of it), let’s now compare the barely 10 weeks-old UN Declaration to the main part of the 27¾ year-old memo API memo:
- Citizens / businesses / the media recognizing the certainty of man-caused catastrophic global warming and access to information confirming this certainty … vs citizens / the media / businesses recognizing the uncertainty about climate science, arising out of accurate, balanced information which includes opposition challenging the ‘certainty’ of catastrophic global warming.
- The need for national / local media to promote integrity of information [which, by default, excludes the skeptic side] … vs the need for national / local media to promote integrity of information, which includes the skeptic side, enabling the public to ask if policymakers understand how there is a science-based skeptic side.
Sheer coincidence about the similarities there? Maybe. But from what I’ve seen on how enslaved the collective enviro-left is to the [never implemented – never implemented!] “victory will be achieved” memo as evidence that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns, it looks to me like some author/contributor to the UN Declaration wrote it that way just so some of the older, better-educated enviro-activists would get the inside joke about this similarity situation.
The difference between these two, however, could not be more clear, as both Charles Rotter and Susan Quinn pointed out in their articles about the sinister intent of the UN Declaration alone – the Declaration all but declares the science as settled, and if any media coverage says it is not, then that coverage has no information integrity. The coverage is disinformation, in other words. A threat ….
… which must be crushed in order for the “climate action” to survive. Stand in the way of ‘societal stability,’ / fail to participate in climate action . . . . then you are a society killer who must be dealt with. Obey. Or else!
The API “victory” memo said people should raise questions about what was behind the Kyoto Treaty; it was hardly more than a set of truisms about how not merely the fossil fuel industry could declare a victory, but actually everyone across the nation could claim a victory when all are fully informed about the climate issue. Questions answered, in other words. There’s nothing actually sinister about that effort.
Those climate questions are not permitted in the legacy news media.
As ever, when the enviro-side claims there is disinformation being orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry, they are pointing an arrow right back at what their side is doing. Who is the actual threat to a stable society, a side open to public debate, or one which quashes debate by any means possible?
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But if the UN’s Declaration looks just plain ill-advised, wait ’til you see the new-to-me item I spotted when I got the particular screencapture of assorted websites regurgitating the horrid, degraded photocopies of the “victory” memo. A person could hardly make a dumber maneuver.
Coming up in Part 2: “The ‘Victory Memo’ Is the ‘Ugliest’ Document in Climate Denial History” – Hint. –