What I need is an Exxon Brothers-funded staff to help me stay ahead on these things. In my series of Naomi Oreskes et al. Friends of the Court dissections, I literally did not know about their two briefs filed on 3/20/19 and 4/21/2022, respectively, thus my consolidated dissections of them here in this post, out of sequence on order of appearance. As I minimally noted in my in my just-prior blog post dissection of her most recent court brief she filed to the Supreme Court, her Oakland & San Francisco & Delaware briefs compound the problems with her Supreme Court brief.

While I’m not holding my breath on my efforts resulting in a noticeable outcome, I’ve done all I can, aided with very helpful guest post outlets, to alert influential people on how it would be best for everyone to set aside considerations of court jurisdiction / legislative policy passed in state houses over climate policy, and instead focus on whether Boulder v Suncor – and by default the rest of the “ExxonKnew” cases, should be in courts at all when their accusations about ‘industry-orchestrated disinfo campaigns employing skeptic climate scientists‘ are provably without merit, promulgated by a highly suspect little clique of enviro-activists.

For the ‘influential people’ I speak of to finally put a stop to all the pointless, political agenda-driven climate litigation lawfare efforts, those people need bulletproof evidence, and plenty of it. What I will show in this blog post demonstrates just how dubious the latest Naomi Oreskes et al. outlier’ brief to SCOTUS is.  

By February 2019, it was already corroborated that Naomi Oreskes ‘had myriad fatal problems’ with all of her narratives surrounding her accusations about the notorious “reposition global warming as theory” ‘leaked industry memo’ which she and others falsely attributed to the Western Fuels Association’s “Information Council for the Environment” short-lived public relations campaign. So, I was amazed at Oreskes’ apparent recklessness on repeating her false narratives in her first amici curiae filed on 1/29/19 for the plaintiffs in the first batch of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling filed in California. I implied how apparently reckless her efforts were, right at the top of my dissection of that court brief. I again expressed my amazement by labeling her September 2019 court brief for the plaintiffs of Baltimore v BP as a lame ‘redux effort’ because it was so much of a copy of her California brief, that it was easier to refer my readers back to my dissection of that brief.

What I was not aware of in Sept 2019 what that she and her friends had already done a redux effort months earlier with their March 20, 2019 Brief of Amici Curiae Robert Brulle, Center for Climate integrity, Justin Farrell, Benjamin Franta, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, Geoffrey Supran, and The Union of Concerned Scientists for City of Oakland City and County Of San Francisco.

So, I needed to label their March 2019 ‘redux before their redux’ as “#0.5,” a half increment before what I thought was their first lame repeat effort. I only became aware of this while looking into Oreskes’ fellow briefs participant Ben Franta’s LinkedIn online resumé for other items, and found this instead.

…. Along with his further mention of his participation in Brief Of Amici Curiae Robert Brulle, Center For Climate Integrity, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Justin Farrell, Benjamin Franta, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, Geoffrey Supran, And The Union Of Concerned Scientists for State Of Delaware.

The Oreskes et al. brief on behalf of plaintiffs in Delaware v BP was filed on the same day as their Hawaii version, which I have as ‘Redux #3 in my number series, and I have this group’s August 2023 Washington DC version as #4. Thus, “Redux 3.5” for their Delaware brief.

Now, much like my checklists format in my dissections of this group’s court briefs prior to the one they filed at the Supreme Court – to see what matches within this pair to the others click on my PDF / print page image screencaptures:

✓ Ye olde supposedly ‘smoking gun’ industry “reposition global warming” memo – where in regard to this never-implemented memo set, Oreskes et al. gets part of the name wrong (I.C. for E.); sources the Union of Concerned Scientists for the memo set; and incorrectly attributes the memo phrase as being within “Letter from Dr. Patrick Michaels” which contains no such wording. I covered those clumsy faults in my dissection of this group’s very first brief – they even typo’d the name of their own participant, which is now a permanent part of the U.S. Congressional Record.

 – Oakland City / San Francisco, PDF file page 38, print page 25
– Delaware, PDF file page 37 onto 38, print page 23 onto 24

✓ Ye olde American Petroleum Institute “victory will be achieved” memos – the never-implemented memo set where in this brief, readers need to jump through a few prior-page footnote hoops to ultimately land at this brief’s source for the memos, Kert Davies’ Climate Files website (whose name comes up again in the next checkmark item).

 – Oakland City / San Francisco, PDF file page 40 onto 41, print page 27 onto 28
– Delaware, PDF file page 38 onto 39, print page 24 onto 25

✓ Accusation of skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon taking $1.2 million from ‘Big Oil’ – which Dr Soon himself will be glad to explain is totally false, and was apparently a fabricated accusation concocted by two former Greenpeace USA administrators, John Passacantando and – here’s that name again – Kert Davies,  during their time at Greenpeace, who both later tried to float it to people at the New York state Attorney General’s office circa 2015 as something the NY AG office could use in an “ExxonKnew” lawsuit. As I detailed in my Background post on Davies, both had direct associations on pushing the above accusations as well, dating back to the late 1990s.

 – Oakland City / San Francisco, PDF file page 43, print page 30
– Delaware, PDF file page 40 onto 41, print page 26 onto 27

Both of these briefs check off three of the four main accusation elements which are the core ‘evidence’ the Sher Edling law firm relies for its claims that the fossil fuel industry orchestrated public efforts to deceive the public about the ‘harm’ of man-caused global warming. Inexplicably missing from these and the other Oreskes et al. briefs prior to her brief submitted to the Supreme Court is the fourth accusation element, namely the ‘newspaper advertorials’ Oreskes and the Sher Edling law firm say are proof of the industry’s disinformation efforts – Sher Edling being the handler of Delaware v BP. All of which source from old Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action degraded photocopy scans collection, one of which Sher Edling routinely chops out all of its main text (likely because there is no actual disinformation in it – zoom in here and see for yourselves in this genuinely published copy), while the other two were never published anywhere. Lest anyone forget, Passacantando and Davies were the two top administrators of Ozone Action before that group merged into Greenpeace USA. That Ozone Action and that Greenpeace.

But wait, there’s more – a new wrinkle to the connection to the Sher Edling law firm, handler of the majority of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, current and dismissed.

The new wrinkle comes courtesy of Ben Franta, a co-participant in Oreskes’ amici briefs, concerning the situation surrounding the March 20, 2019 Oreskes et al. brief for Oakland / San Francisco.

That pair of lawsuits, which I dissected in October 2017, were not handled at all by Sher Edling, they were a Hagens-Berman-Pawa pair of filings. As I showed in my dissection of the Sher Edling-handled Maine v BP lawsuit, it sure looked like Sher Edling had plagiarized – with just the smallest changes of wording – part of its accusation against skeptic climate scientists Dr S Fred Singer and Dr Frederick Seitz straight out of Matt Pawa’s 2017 California lawsuits. Except, not quite in that case, because in late November 2018, Sher Edling was given control of the Oakland / San Francisco pair of lawsuits.

Waddayaknow about that? The Oreskes et al. court brief for Oakland / San Francisco was filed just 3 months, 22 days later, on March 20,2019, which was just two months and a day after their brief for Sher Edling’s first batch of California lawsuits.

Simple question: Did Sher Edling direct Oreskes and Ben Franta to file their brief for Oakland / San Francisco?

Perhaps a hint about that possibility for investigators to explore is seen in Ben Franta’s LinkedIn resumé regarding his trumpeting of his participation in filing the amici curiae on behalf of the Delaware plaintiffs. Who’s his PDF file link source for that brief? Sher Edling.

Simple question: How did Ben Franta know the Sher Edling website had a PDF file copy link for his and Oreskes’ brief for the Delaware plaintiffs?

I knew that firm had PDF file links for its cases it was handling (they’ve since disappeared from its website; they remain preserved here), but during all the times I rummaged through their website, I never saw a reference to any PDF file links they had for Friends of the Court briefs. Do a site search within their website for such links, and only one result turns up. It goes to Sher Edling’s August 4, 2026 announcement of their filing of a Supreme Court amicus brief against Suncor Energy v County Commissioners of Boulder County, filed just one day after the Naomi Oreskes et al. brief submitted to the Supreme Court.

In my dissections of the Naomi Oreskes et al. court briefs which are specifically labeled as amici curiae briefs – prior to this one in this post – I saw that they were all made on behalf of plaintiffs in the Sher Edling-handled lawsuits. Even regarding her and her pals’ brief for Boulder, since Sher Edling came on as an assisting firm at least as far back as June 2019. Oreskes is on retainer with Sher Edling, the news of that situation was a bombshell item back in May 2021. When she appeared as a witness at a June 2023 U.S. Senate hearing, Senator Chuck Grassley asked her about that ‘on retainer’ situation. Her reply was,

The case that I consulted on San Mateo versus Chevron where the people of San Mateo County have sued for redress because of the damages that that County and the state of California is experiencing from sea level rise caused by climate change …

Simple question: Was that a less-than-full-disclosure act on her part, by not mentioning Sher Edling’s other California cases or her brief offered for the Oakland City / San Francisco, which all repeat her same basic accusations about ‘industry disinfo campaigns’?

I put the Sher Edling law firm into my ‘List of Weak Links’ people who might be forced to disclose damaging information if placed under oath, because what their fellow ‘weak link’ Ben Franta inadvertently revealed at his LinkedIn resumé prompts a very basic question: What does Sher Edling know about know about the meritless accusation ‘evidence’ they rely on to prop up accusations about ‘industry-paid skeptic climate scientists participating in disinfo campaigns,’ and what do they know about the core little clique of envfro-activists who’ve been promulgating those unsupportable accusations since the late 1990s?