For those who haven’t caught it, please see my updated count of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Now, at least for today, there are 29 instead of 30. The ineptly done Carrboro v Duke Energy is gone, as of last week. It was nice how the judge issuing that order alluded to Duke Energy’s Motion to Dismiss gripe about a particular “Kentucky” disinformation ad accusation, but I submit the small exploration done by Duke Energy’s attorneys revealed only the proverbial ‘camel’s nose under the tent.’ When the fossil fuel industry folks with influence grow a spine and explore much deeper – or when somebody ends up doing their work for them – every one of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits can implode, enabling the public to see where the real disinformation has been in the climate issue this entire time.
Right at the outset of my Dec 2024 dissection of Carrboro, I said it was an outlier climate lawfare effort, and I detailed at length how the law firm representing the town very oddly decided to rely on the worthless evidence from an outfit called “Energy and Policy Institute,” for the accusations about Duke Energy running old disinformation campaigns which ‘attempted to reposition global warming as theory.’ Notice in the screencapture below, the lawsuit tried to tie Duke to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) via that worthless ‘leaked industry directive’, and then say Duke was responsible for the campaign effort in Kentucky.
As I showed in my dissection – which I advise new readers to go through to be up to speed on what I say here – that was weird for the law firm to do that at several levels.
Repeating what I noted above in my opening paragraph, Duke Energy’s Motion to Dismiss pointed out the North Carolina town of Carrboro was trying to an ad campaign that happened in Kentucky to Duke Energy. To his own credit, the judge granting the Motion pointed out just how “fatally imprecise and lacking in concreteness” the overall accusation was about Duke ‘deceiving the public,’ but he only glanced off of the ludicrous accusation about the Kentucky ‘deception’ campaign. The one with the horse ad, as I showed in my dissection post. My GelbspanFiles blog is the one and only place where readers can quickly zoom in on the ad text and see for themselves how there’s no actual deliberate deception going on by an energy company about climate science. And see how the Edison Electric Institute had no actual involvement in the genuine ad campaign seen by the public. None.
Too bad neither the judge nor Duke Energy pursued that fatal fault to any depth at all. The core claim that Duke is intimate with the internal workings of the Edison Electric Institute would be a stretch difficult to prove absolutely true; but the plaintiffs fail abysmally to present even the most basic of prima facie cases that EEI spearheaded a disinformation campaign – their ‘evidence’ implodes in their faces. Worse, as I noted in my dissection of Carrboro, the filing’s use of three newspaper advertorials which the Western Fuels Association’s “Information Council for the Environment” PR campaign published fatally undercuts all of the other lawsuits which rely on two never-published ads ( – never-published! – and another horribly degraded photocopy of one that was published) sourcing from Greenpeace USA neé Ozone Action.
Despite the assortment of ‘spin’ that this case was something unique, it was absolutely nothing more than another in a string of meritless lawsuits claiming an energy company ‘knew’ about the harm of global warming, but sought to hide that knowledge’ by deceptively ‘repositioning global warming’ in the eyes of the public.
Duke Energy dodged a bullet courtesy of the maladroit handling by Carrboro‘s chosen law firm, but this dismissal won’t prevent new versions of these from being regurgitated in some other ‘novel’ way. The January 23, 2026 Michigan v BP lawsuit was also described as ‘novel’ … but predictably, it was nothing more than the same old predictable regurgitation about crooked skeptic scientists employed in industry-orchestrated disinfo campaigns. It’s the literal best the enviro-activist climate lawfare mob has.
This will stop the moment someone with major influence and power shoves – to use the allegory I started with here – the Carrboro nose harder under the tent, then keeps on pushing and ultimately drives a dagger through the heart of the central accusations for all the world to see – Exxon et al. didn’t know, and they never 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.”