Tag Archives: David Arkush

List of ‘Weak Links’ Accusers for the “Crooked Skeptic Climate Scientists” Accusation — Summary for Policymakers

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This list will be an ongoing compilation, with updates noted in red, similar to my list of global warming lawsuits. Additions to this list will be ref’d in this top paragraph.

These are the chain of people one increment back from the main promulgators who’ve pushed the false accusation about ‘shill skeptic scientist on Big Oil’s payroll who were directed to reposition global warming as theory‘ ever since the 1990s. I’ve mentioned their names on many occasions in prior blog posts on the way these individuals could fold like cheap suits while under oath at investigative hearings, when hit with any inquiries on how they support their accusations and who exactly their sources are for the specific accusations they were taught to dutifully regurgitate. I’ve even made a humorous meme image to convey how lame they are and how willing they might be to turn ‘states evidence’ under tough prosecutorial proceedings simply to reduce the jail time or civil court penalties they’d be facing.

It’s likely that U.S. Senate and House congressional investigators / Department of Justice investigators / energy company defendants’ law firms / objective news reporters may not recognize many of the names below and thus would not be aware of the benefits of hitting these weak links people with the toughest possible questions, in order to get to the absolute bottom of where the utterly false accusation originates about ‘skeptic climate scientists being paid to lie in disinformation campaigns.’ The whole accusation, 1991 to the present day, is a house of cards, a Jenga tower on the edge of total collapse. The top-most promulgators of the accusation may likely plead the 5th, and thus forestall the collapse. All it will take to bring it all down is for any one of the weak links to cave into pressure on what they actually know.  Continue reading →

“If your ironclad proof that Big Oil secretly knew their products cause global warming is a leaked industry memo … why would you alter it to make it look more plausible?”

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The pushers of climate litigation lawfare keep bizarrely paying out enough rope to hang themselves. The latest instance over the span of just the last eight weeks comes courtesy of the Public Citizen liberal climate policy advocacy group …. and they basically nail themselves to the wall along with every other major promulgator who is enslaved to the never-implemented “reposition global warming as theory” ‘leaked industry memo.’ Continue reading →

Enter the Predictable Dragon—the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy

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Regretfully, I only became aware late yesterday (hat tip to Kyle Kohli at Energy in Depth for that news) of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing today about ‘dark money influence’ into the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. But I was able to fire off an immediate email to GOP witness Scott Walker at the Capital Research Center with tips about all my blog post references on the Democrat’s invited witness, Public Citizen’s David Arkush. Mr Walter replied early this morning thanking me for the tips. Perhaps he can relay my work to Committee majority Chairman Ted Cruz. The Committee’s link for the written testimony submitted by Arkush seems to be nonfunctional, but the copy uploaded by Climate Litigation Watch works fine … and proves once again that it is not the fossil fuel industry that should be investigated about pushing disinformation, it’s the enviro-activists who should be hit with that. Watch this: Continue reading →

Estate of Juliana Leon v Exxon Mobil Corporation

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Borrowing a line from the day-later UK Guardian news flash about this May 28, 2025-filed lawsuit – and by default, all the prior “ExxonKnew” lawsuits I’ve dissected – “Previous suits accused companies of breaching product liability and consumer protection laws and engaging in fraud and racketeering. But Leon v Exxon Mobil Corp is the first attempt to hold oil companies responsible for an individual climate-related death.” Yes, first-ever lawsuit using that lawfare tactic, but not the first time I’ve seen it pushed. I first wrote about this ridiculous personal injury angle, from David Arkush of the “Public Citizen” group, back in March 2023. He’d submitted his ‘scholarly paper’ draft version to the Harvard Law Environmental Review (HELR) on the notion of ‘climate homicide,’ which inadvertently showed his nearly complete enslavement to the same meritless ‘evidence’ which most the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits claim is proof that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientist ‘shills.’ When his paper was finally published in May 2024, I firmly suggested to HELR that his paper needed to be retracted. HELR did not do so, which thus only gave Arkush and Public Citizen the green light to proceed full steam ahead on the idiotic idea. Upon seeing Arkush and Public Citizen putting out a proposal to Arizona prosecutors just two months later on how to charge for ‘climate homicide,’ my blog post title for my dissection of his proposal posed the question of whether he was doing nothing more than trying to – ineptly – muscle his way into the lawfare territory already staked out in 2017 by the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm. I say “ineptly” because he ultimately used all of the four core accusation elements seen in their multiple filings.

No public prosecutors took the bait. But an apparently not-especially-bright law firm did. The questions now concern how directly Arkush / Public Citizen are involved in the case, and whether this new angle case is actually an outgrowth of a common shared template which all the other law firms / law offices seem to be using, where they choose elements of it as they see fit. In this dissection, I’ll show possible tell-tale ‘lawsuit template’ connections, including this case’s enslavement to two of the four worthless accusation elements. There’s three other utterly fatal overarching problems to this newest lawsuit effort, of course. Continue reading →

The Political Suicide of Pushing “Reckless Climate Endangerment”

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It’s a 100% certain bet that none of the folks at the Public Citizen ‘consumer advocacy organization’ read my GelbspanFiles blog about the 100% certain inevitable crash of their prior ‘prosecute for Clima-Homicide™’ proposal (my post got even wider worldwide viewing as a guest post at WUWT, complete with a handy ‘you people that stupid?’ meme image at the top). Otherwise, they would not have come up with this announcement on October 15, (er … hold that thought until the very end of this post) October 17, 2024 regarding their latest proposal idea to prosecutors:

“We’re building the case for criminal prosecution of Big Oil brick by brick. Here is the first “prosecution memo” that lays out the case for filing, and winning, criminal charges for “reckless endangerment.” The law is clear. Barriers are only political.”

What the law is actually fundamentally clear about is that when presenting a case to a judge, the evidence you present must actually support your accusation. If it does not . . . the case is dismissed. If you’ve got no alternative evidence, that’s the end of the line on your effort.  Period.  What these people at the Public Citizen group are either oblivious to – or actually know but hope nobody notices – is that their ‘evidence’ for the claim that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns in collusion with skeptic scientist ‘shills’ is literally worthless.

Public Citizen is not building a case ‘brick-by-brick,’ either, they appear to be doing nothing more than copying line-by-line from what already serves as ‘cornerstone evidence’ in one form or another about ‘industry-led disinformation campaigns’ in basically all of the currently filed “ExxonKnew” U.S. lawsuits, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico and points in between. I’m not exaggerating. What Public Citizen is doing is committing political suicide by again emphasizing the fatal fault plaguing the collective effort to accuse Big Oil of running disinformation campaigns to deceive the public. Continue reading →

The Political Suicide of Pushing “Climate Homicide” … & muscling in on someone else’s “ExxonKnew” lawsuits territory?

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On June 26th just a little over a week ago, David “climate homicide” Arkush and co-authors at his Public Citizen group put out a press release titled “New Memo Details Legal Case for Prosecuting Big Oil for Extreme Heat Deaths,” containing a link to a 51 page proposal for prosecutors in the state of Arizona (Democrat ones, of course including the state’s Attorney General), specifically noting:

Though this memo asks a particular question — how officials in Maricopa County could pursue reckless manslaughter or second degree murder prosecutions for deaths caused by the July 2023 heat wave — its analysis is relevant in most jurisdictions where prosecutors might seek justice for climate victims.

I already had a tag category at GelbspanFiles dating back over a year concerning Arkush’s ludicrous ultra-lawfare fixation. He’s now taken that fixation likely beyond its breaking point. It’s one thing to push the bizarre “charge fossil fuel companies with climate homicide” idea in ‘scholarly papers,’ but it’s quite another to propose the idea straight to state prosecutors. That’s what he’s presenting in the above press release. Forgive the rather morbid visual analogy here – the man virtually points a loaded revolver at his head and the heads of his co-authors and practically asks law firms defending energy companies in “ExxonKnew” lawsuits to pull the triggers for him.

Continue reading →

Retract the “Climate Homicide” paper

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Did I mention that I don’t merely write about what’s wrong with the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation, I do something about it? Oh, yeah, in my previous blog post about the opportunity for congressional investigators to expose one of the ‘weak link’ people promulgating that accusation.

I haven’t stopped there – my latest concerns an action I initiated over a year ago, and updated just days ago. Continue reading →

The Be-All / End-All “Chicken Little” Advertorial: When It’s All You Got, You. Still. Have. Nothing.

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1) If you were going to adamantly suggest that ‘fossil fuel company executives and the shill experts they hired to spread disinformation’ should be charged with climate homicide; and/or 2) if you were going to advocate that regulatory bodies / organizations have the power to enforce laws against the spread of fossil fuel industry disinformation and persecute those who break them; and/or 3) if you tout yourself as an expert on such industry disinformation while making yourself available for law firms currently suing fossil fuel for global warming damages — it would be political suicide to put all your eggs in the one basket of a so-called newspaper disinformation advertorial titled “Who told you the earth was warming, Chicken Little?” if you never bothered to find out if the advertorial was ever published anywhere . . . . wouldn’t it? When it never was, you’d be in huge trouble if you recklessly continued to promulgate an accusation devoid of evidence to support it, wouldn’t you?

No joke, the collective enviro-activist lobby is completely enslaved to that “Chicken Little” ‘disinformation ad’ accusation as they try to dupe the public into believing an advertorial having that headline is smoking gun evidence of sinister fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns. There might just be a new development about this – the question is whether somebody within that mob has tipped their hand in the last few weeks to reveal they now know the “Chicken Little” ad is worthless.

Continue reading →

Reposition Graduate Degrees as Theory rather than Fact — the Climate Homicide Litigation version

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In David Arkush’s March 10, 2024 The New Republic article “The Case for Prosecuting Fossil Fuel Companies for Homicide,” he stated,

Fossil fuel companies have long understood—with shocking accuracy—that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate change. Instead of shifting their business model or at least alerting the public to this threat, the companies concealed what they knew and executed a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to spread doubt about climate science.

I’ve covered ‘scholarly homicide paper’ article author Arkush twice before, here and here, concerning his one-trick pony sources for his accusation. His paper should be yanked from publication due to being devoid of evidence proving fossil fuel company executives committed climate homicide by carrying out disinformation campaigns. No different – I suggested here – than how Masters / PhD degrees should be yanked when they are devoid of the same basic evidence for the same basic accusation. Arkush is back again, and this time he inadvertently handed one more major gift on a silver platter to congressional investigators and/or the law firms representing the defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Continue reading →

“Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths” Part 2

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I wrote about the main fault with the ludicrous draft paper submitted to the Harvard Environmental Law Review in Part 1, namely the paper authors’ enslavement to a particular set of literally worthless ‘leaked industry memos’, and the funding association of one of the authors, David Arkush. But as usual, there’s more. Arkush apparently has quite a basic problem with making authoritative statements — hold that thought for just a bit. First, let me say I don’t simply write about these collective situations, I try to get something done about them. Continue reading →