In my (technically) Part 1 post about the United Nations seemingly channeling the worthless 1998 “victory will be achieved” memo set almost as though someone at the UN was making an inside joke about the memo, I emphasized at the outset how that memo was no more than the second-best ‘evidence’ the collective enviro-activists mob has ever for their accusations about the fossil fuel industry orchestrating efforts to deceive the public about the ‘harm’ of global warming. It’s amazing how that mob made a mountain out of a mole hill over what was nothing more than a single-day workshop effort to propose efforts on informing the public about faulty angles of the push to get the Kyoto Treaty ratified in the U.S. Senate. When the people behind the memo effort finally fully realized the Kyoto Treaty was never going to be ratified, it became a stillborn effort. Period, end of story. Nothing came of it.
Yet here we are today, approaching 28 years later after the ‘big media splash’ about the memo set, and particular people are promulgating that set like it is the #1 be-all, end-all smoking gun evidence to indict the industry of treacherous deception. As in, what I was hinting about at the end of my Part 1 post. The promulgator has once again offered up his head on a silver platter to the defendant law firms representing the energy companies named in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits across the U.S. – and potentially to the defendants in the (still M.I.A.) UK-filed Casquejo v Shell lawsuit.
The promulgator I’m speaking of is the face that practically jumped right off the internet image search results page I wanted to use to show the sheer repetition of the “victory” memo. The face of Kert Davies. That guy, the one I have in a Background post covering all of his associations with the four central – and utterly false – accusations about the fossil fuel industry employing skeptic scientist ‘shills’ in disinfo campaigns. That particular image / link result was for his 2 minute 14 second video with the title proclaiming “The ‘Victory Memo’ Is the ‘Ugliest’ Document in Climate Denial History.”
No, it isn’t. No need to trust me on this, for the easiest possible way for read the memo in unabridged form, I’ve uploaded the old (long ago missing from the internet) archive version of the transcribed 1998 text that the National Environmental Trust had online – it’s here in my PDF file copy. Skip past the Page 1 email intro by Joe Walker, the balance of it is the actual verbatim memo transcribed long ago from Greenpeace’s horrid degraded photocopy scans. Dullsville, it reads like a bunch of common sense truisms.
Using a free site service to get a transcription of Davies’ video, I was able to readily spot no less than twelve major problems in it. So, let’s go through that verbatim transcript, interjected with what those specific blunders of his are:
Victory will be achieved when average people understand the uncertainty of climate science. This right here is one of the most incriminating, ugliest documents in climate denial history.
#1 There’s nothing incriminating about it at all. Which is actually uglier, a proposal suggesting the public should hear balanced treatment of viewpoints about a topic – or one that Greenpeace would endorse which tells the pubic to block out opposing viewpoints? The news media was not balanced in the late 1990s and they are clearly not balanced at all today.
In 1998, a memo was leaked to the New York Times …
#2 No, Kert Davies can’t even get a quarter of a minute into his video without seriously undermining his own credibility. As I detailed near the bottom of my Feb 2020 post, the National Environmental Trust (NET) group said they outright gave – not leaked – their copy to the NYT. The NYT article itself, “Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty” said outright that the memo proposal was “obtained” by the president of the NET from an industry official. The word “leak” or “leaked” never appears once in the NYT article.
As I detailed in my Jan 2019 post, Desmogblog founder James Hoggan (self-admitted non-expert on climate science) said in his 2009 book that the memo was discovered by Greenpeace, and his blog said in 2013 that Greenpeace uncovered it. Greenpeace’s 2010 “Dealing in Doubt” report claimed the memo was leaked to them. Not to the NET. Greenpeace is not an industry official. Kert Davies worked at Greenpeace from 2000 to 2013. Put Davies under oath on a witness stand or at a congressional hearing, and the odds are much against him on getting any part of this situation straight. Not helping matters one additional bit, Greenpeace’s earliest August 1998 70 page ‘oil industry report’ said the memo was leaked to the NYT.
… that was authored by people at the American Petroleum Institute with help from Exxon, Chevron, other think tanks and it outlined a multi-million multi-year plan to spread disinformation around climate science to get average people to think climate change was not happening, was not urgent, and was not a big deal. …
#3 Despite widespread claims about the ‘help’ – all without any substantiation of what degree of influence they actually had – no part of the plan concerned disinformation. Again, readers can read the whole memo and try to find such ‘disinformation’ for themselves. Objective investigators can ask the people named in the API effort – including the group which the memo list and the NYT incorrectly said was a participant – what the effort was meant to accomplish, and the result will be potentially hours of science-based material the enviro-activists want kept hidden from the public.
…The actual conventional wisdom at that time was climate change is a big deal, and we have to stop it from getting worse. The Kyoto Protocol had been signed the December before, the first global plan to solve climate change altogether. The Kyoto Protocol would have meant cutting greenhouse gas emissions, which would have meant cutting the use of fossil fuels. …
#4 No, the news media at the time was conveying to the time that global warming – a distinction with a huge difference – was a big deal, while massively limiting viewpoints from skeptic climate scientists / expert speakers on the topic who were saying the Kyoto Protocol was a very ill-conceived effort and was ill-equipped to solve a literally non-existent problem. The irony at the time was how enviro-activists actually agreed with the “ill-equipped” bit.
Of course, that’s not what Exxon or Chevron wanted to have happen. They knew that the science certainty was what was making governments take action, basically. They talk about targeting the media, members of Congress, science teachers, to try to get them to think differently and speak differently about climate change, to express uncertainty rather than urgency or a crisis of any kind. …
#5 Again, not “climate change” but global warming. And there is no possible way Exxon or the rest of the energy companies knew with any certainty whatsoever – as far back as the 1970s and earlier – that their products caused global warming in the face of all the reports about imminent global cooling. This ‘Exxon knew’ accusation is one of the biggest items of disinformation in the whole climate issue, where the collective global cooling concern is buried out of sight. The plan behind the efforts of the “victory” memo was not to trick people into believing something that the industry knew was not true, it was instead to prompt critical thinking concerning information that was otherwise being withheld from the public by the news media – the plain fact that PhD-level climatologists / atmospheric physicists and experts in statistical data gathering/temperature trend analysis questioned the basis of the Kyoto Treaty at huge depth, namely the IPCC climate assessment reports.
I’ve witnessed firsthand what happens when a member of the public is shown for the first time what’s been withheld. It isn’t the energy company side trying to dupe the public, we have every appearance in the world that it’s the enviro-activist side who’s deceiving the public.
Whether or not we can prove that the exact plan in this memo took place ….
#6 There’s the money quote in this whole video – “Whether or not we can prove… the court precedent for the definition of defamation is that you may not make accusations with malice which you know are not true, or with reckless disregard to whether they are true or not.
… at least Exxon went ahead with this. We know that they funded these exact organizations that are named in the memo, …
#7 Put Kert Davies under oath on a witness stand or at a congressional hearing, and the odds are much against him that he has an iota of proof the top level executives at Exxon had any knowledge of a plan to deceive the public or even had any real awareness of what this single-day discussion involved. Put him under an oath to testify precisely what the ‘funding’ bought, and he would likely not be able to present a single item of proof that anything bought lies intended to deceive the public. Davies’ old Greenpeace-operated ExxonSecrets site (now offline) was filled with funding figures, and is still largely preserved at the Internet Archive, but the challenge would be for him to point to any specific item of evidence proving the funds bought material where all participants knew it was disinformation.
… and the effect is we have members of Congress who don’t believe climate change is a problem, who say it’s a hoax, and we have members of the media who are saying that. They have achieved that level of uncertainty, and that was the goal of this memo. …
#8 Kudos to the members of Congress who are well-informed about both sides of the climate issue. Davies might still have unused fingers on his two hands if the challenge to him is to name who the nationally recognized “members of the media” are who are able to convey to the greater public that the IPCC / Al Gore ‘science’ is not settled. I receive daily email alert results from Google for the words “global warming” and can say with certainty that I’d end up with unused fingers on my hands counting the number of times I’ve seen major news reports objectively mentioning the uncertainty about catastrophic man-caused global warming.
… This memo was leaked in 1998 to a journalist at the New York Times called John Cushman …
#9 No, as I showed in item #2 above. It was flat out given to the NYT by Pill Clapp at the National Environmental Trust. Or so John Cushman’s article said, and the NET said. “Leak” implies a secretive whistleblower who fears incrimination for putting out private documents. When Davies implies something else might have happened, he is either torpedoing his own credibility, or else he’s inadvertently giving a reason for John Cushman to be subpoenaed to get to the bottom of what really happened. Either way, that would probably not help Davies’ credibility.
… and he would go on a few years later to run an investigation at Inside Climate News of what Exxon knew …
#10 That alone is a major problem. The seemingly innocuously-named Inside Climate News (ICN) was formerly named with the far more biased name “Solve Climate News.” Upon seeing ICN’s big 2015 “Exxon Knew” report when it was published, it took me mere minutes of rummaging though the documents they linked to where I was able to spot one in which Exxon most certainly expressed uncertainty about the prospects of global warming. A person does not have to be a rocket scientist or a degreed journalism school graduate to find the documents which undermine the whole concept that ‘Exxon knew.’
… We had no idea in 1998 how much Exxon knew about climate …
#11 That’s also a standalone problem. Who’s “we”? Is that the ‘editorial we’? We – all of us out in the country? Or is Davies again inadvertently pointing investigators toward what might be a big problem if there is substance to be found concerning what looks like his association with Inside Climate News? As I pointed out in my examination of the April 2022 PBS Frontline “Power of Big Oil” program, I thought it looked quite suspect to see Davies self-describing as a ‘curator of documents’ within moments of input from an Inside Climate News person. Even more suspect is how sometime between 2015 and the recent few years – as I showed in my dissection of Michigan v BP – somebody decided to create an ICN-link PDF file for the horrid degraded photocopy scans of the “victory” memo which were identical to Davies’ awful photocopy scans. No need to create any new versions – ICN essentially confirmed that themselves in the months prior to their big “ExxonKnew” news splash; their February 2015 smear effort against skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon featured a link for the “victory” memos straight to Kert Davies 2013 Greenpeace upload of them. But in that article itself, not one of the six mentions of his name identifies him as an ex-Greenpeace operative.
… We knew they were a bully, but we had no idea what they knew internally.
#12 Conduct a nationwide poll of Americans who were driver-age adults in 1998 what their top one-word label choice for Exxon would be – “bully” likely would not be among their top 10 or 20. “Price-gougers” or “polluters” perhaps. So again, who’s “we? Could he be referring to a tiny clique of people apparently having a vendetta against Exxon that dates back to the late 1990s, who were seeking to vilify the fossil fuel industry overall?
Inquiring minds should ask, having much more investigative power than I do.
Oh, one more thing … Is it just a pure coincidence that Kert Davies’ little video here was uploaded on December 9th, the same day that the Casquejo v Shell was filed in the UK High Court – the lawsuit in which news reports about it attributed supposedly damaging industry docs to Kert Davies’ Climate Investigations Center?
Just askin’.