Makah Indian Tribe v. Exxon / Shoalwater Indian Tribe v. Exxon

No rest for the weary. Back on December 21st, I thought the little-publicized news of the fisherman’s trade association plaintiffs’ self-withdrawal of their PCFFA v Chevron global warming lawsuit was a Christmas gift to the skeptic side of the climate issue. Maybe the plaintiffs fully comprehended the futility of their lawsuit while also finding out how their choice of lawsuit handlers, the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm, was perhaps not qualified to handle the case. However, the situation is instead one step forward and two steps back when, it comes to being done with this climate lawfare litigation war. It turns out Sher Edling had filed a pair of brand-new lawsuits on Dec 20 for two Native American communities in Washington state, Makah Tribe v. Exxon and Shoalwater Tribe v. Exxon.

The news of this latest pair of filings was also oddly little-publicized in minor news outlets, compared to widespread news of the prior-most-recent one, the ‘watershed momentCalifornia v Exxon sensation ( ahem – keep an eye on the apparent grand unifying theme). But these two lawsuits might be also be considered a ‘Christmas gift’ that’ll keep on giving, not only to the defendants’ law firms, but also to objective journalists and potentially GOP House investigators. Continue reading

Background: Key Word / Names Checklist – what to look when prominent accusers yell “Big Oil disinformation” / “crooked skeptic scientists

[Updated 5/22/23] What follows in this post is a sort of work-in-progress, the “Background info” collection I referred to in my March 31, 2023 post. If I may suggest it for those who might end up investigating the clique of enviro-activists who’ve long accused skeptic climate scientists of industry corruption, bookmark it as a growing reference to utilize when the prosecution direction does eventually turn 180° against these accusers. Like I’ve implied more than once here at GelbspanFiles, the central promulgators of the false accusation about the fossil fuel industry employing shill scientists have been extraordinarily lucky so far, but what they recklessly push is simply unsustainable. It will sink. It is a mathematical certainty. Continue reading

“Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths” (a.k.a. “we still only have worthless evidence and suspect sources backing this.”)

The breaking ‘political climate news’ last week concerned the Harvard Law Review’s draft version of a scholarly paper (not due to be actually published until 2024) posing the idea that oil companies could be criminally charged with committing ‘climate homicide resulting from deceiving the public about the harm of burning fossil fuels.’ Particularly ludicrous to me was the statement in one of those news reports by one of the paper’s authors concerning the pitch of this idea to plaintiffs:

We have some indication they’re at least listening and curious,” said David Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s climate program and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. “To someone who knows the criminal law, there’s a moment of ‘What!?’ and then, ‘It’s OK. It’s not crazy.’

Not only is this notion crazy, it would be an act of political suicide. Continue reading

Covering Climate Now, 3/2/23: ‘Fox News Lies About Elections & Repositions Global Warming as Theory (Not Fact).

For any of the folks at last week’s Heartland Institute climate conference (and any others I’ve contacted recently) who heard me say the worthless “reposition global warming” ‘leaked industry memos’ is the literal best ammunition that enviro-activist accusers have in their arsenal as evidence that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns, that was no exaggeration. And as we all know, the primary hallmark of far leftists is the way they project their mindset onto the people they accuse of treachery, so when we see the Covering Climate Now group, a supplier of biased, one-sided climate info to 500+ news media outlets, publish a March 2 “FOX Doesn’t Just Lie About Elections” hit piece castigating the Fox News network with a subheadline that reads ….

The network is part of a climate disinformation ecosystem that journalism has to confront.

…. it is an arrow the size of Texas pointing to who it actually is who spews disinformation and who should be exposed for exactly what they are doing. Especially when Covering Climate Now feels totally compelled to support their accusation with ye olde “reposition global warming” memos that date all the way back to when the co-founder of CCNow first used them in a pure disinformation effort back in 1997. That’s how old this pathetic effort is, and why I put the comical “ye olde” modifying noun in front of those memos’ notorious name.

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The Be-All / End-All “reposition global warming” & “victory will be achieved” Memos: Told ya so …

Call this post a follow-up to both my similarly-titled November 16, 2022 post and a sort of “corroborating new information addition” to my Sept 2021 post about the Democrat House Oversight Committee’s political suicide. It’s a point I cannot emphasize enough, as it relates to enviro-activists promulgating the idea that there’s a fossil fuel industry conspiracy to mislead the public – via industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns – about the certainty of man-caused global warming. Always keep these two bits in mind when considering any prominent hurl of their accusation: first, a primary hallmark of enviro-activists his their psychological projection of their mindset as accusations aimed at others; and second; the very best evidence in their arsenal for their accusation about deceptive industry campaigns consists the above-noted memo sets. As I’ve detailed here at GelbspanFiles, both sets are literally worthless, neither were ever implemented anywhere, thus rendering them useless as evidence to prove deception efforts are rooted in the directives of those memos. Obviously.

So when these same two sets are put out front & center in one way or another by enviro-activists again and again and again, it is a valid concern to determine whether this is a conspiracy on their part to deceive the public about the legitimacy of the science-based disputes offered by skeptic climate scientists to counter the IPCC / Al Gore side of the issue.

Allow me to illustrate this troublesome situation once again, where what I found a couple of months ago, combined with the latest available info about those enviro-activists’ efforts (hold that thought until near the end of this post), reinforces the appearance of their apparent conspiracy efforts. Continue reading

Belief in The Supran Being (Big Mistake if He Believes in His Own Publicity)

I was alerted by a prominent climate scientist to an embargoed “New Harvard study puts a number on what ‘Exxon knew’ decades ago about climate science” news release out of Harvard University the day before it was released on January 12th, concerning Geoffrey Supran’s then-upcoming January 13 Science magazine publication of his “Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections” paper. The news release mentioned Geoffrey Supran’s name but not Naomi Oreskes – she, of worldwide “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star fame. That struck me as being a bit odd since Supran owes his rising fame entirely to Oreskes, he’s not the least bit subtle about pointing his inclusion within her aura. So, I added the words “Supran’s mistake is believing in his own publicity!” to the email subject line of my reply back to the person and others included regarding the embargoed news release.

I underestimated just how much bigger his ego might be inflated. However, the more a person believes in their own publicity, the more susceptible they are to crippling deflation of their ego. For those unaware of it, Geoffrey Supran is a very weak link among the accusers who are desperately trying to keep the “industry-paid skeptic climate scientists liars-for-hire” accusation alive. Continue reading

The Real ICE ads, Part 2

I could have just as easily titled this post “The First, the Last, and the Only Accusation Against Global Warming Skeptics, redux” or “Put all your Eggs in the ‘Reposition Global Warming as Theory’ Memos Basket, redux,” since what’s going on lately is pretty much exactly that. Give Naomi Oreskes credit for her most recent co-authored effort at the UK Guardian to infuse the ‘fossil fuel industry-led disinformation campaigns’ accusation with a new shot of ye olde “reposition global warming” memos, complete with a pair of never-used ads with the unsolicited, never-used “Informed Citizens for the Environment” labels. Her credibility suffers just that much more every time she attempts to incorrectly glue that name over the actual “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) public relations campaign. Incrementally worse now, her Guardian article’s citation of Kert Davies’ Climate Files website as her source for the two never-used ads only ends up digging a deeper hole for herself and Davies, along with any others who keep making the mistake of drawing attention to those alleged ‘disinformation’ ICE ads as smoking gun evidence of fossil fuel deception efforts.

My latest screencapture links illustrate how these folks don’t provide tidy answer on whether the fossil fuel industry deceived the public about the ‘harm’ of man-caused global warming; their clumsy inconsistent narratives seem to point a giant arrow in the other direction on where all the disinformation is in the political accusation side of the issue.

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Headline: “U.S. House Panel Commits Political Suicide; Expands Inquiry into Climate Disinformation by ‘Big Oil’”

That was the widespread news headline, in one form or another (minus the ‘political suicide’ bit, of course) on Thursday, September 16th, 2021. The main news item was that Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, and sophomore-term House member Ro Khanna, D-Ca, sent letters hours earlier to four major fossil fuel companies and two lobbying groups, demanding that they appear in front of the Oversight Committee on October 28, and that they bring documents with them showing how they were engaged in — no joke! — “in a long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.” Those were the actual words in the nearly identical letters, which can be viewed in their entirety at the links within the Oversight Committees website page’s press release.

How could this House Oversight Committee stunt be revealed to be act of political suicide? If the ‘defense witnesses’ at the October 28 hearing decide to seize the leadership opportunity on this, they could show how the ‘industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns‘ accusation only points a huge arrow at where the real disinformation efforts are apparently seen in this issue, a core clique of enviro-activists who’ve pushed a pair of never-implemented, ‘leaked industry memo sets’ that are worthless to prove any “industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation” exists anywhere. Plus, the sheer lack of viable evidence behind the accusation points an even bigger arrow at the basic journalistic malfeasance on the part of mainstream media news reporters, when it comes to their decades-long failure to ask probing questions about the basic accusation, which dates back to the 1990s. Continue reading

Naomi Oreskes – the gift that keeps on giving, Pt 1

Harvard science history professor Naomi Oreskes was one of the witnesses appearing under oath at the 10/23/19 House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s “Examining the Oil Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change” hearing. A pair of missteps while responding to questions didn’t bolster her appearance as a detached, objective, expert witness on the complicated topic of alleged fossil fuel industry disinformation efforts. She also offered written testimony, … and in doing so about a couple of details, she once again reinforced how she’s not particularly adept about keeping her mouth shut on items that have the potential of opening up a Pandora’s Box about the history of the tactics used by enviro-activists to accuse skeptic climate scientists of being ‘industry-paid shills spreading disinformation.’ Continue reading

Brief Of Amici Curiae, Robert Brulle .. Oreskes .. & Geoffrey Supran” Redux — the Baltimore version

Friend of the Court participant Geoffrey Supran trumpeted this Baltimore filing event last week as though it was some marvelous new development in the area of global warming lawsuits. It isn’t. It’s essentially a boilerplate regurgitation of the amici curiae Supran and his associates filed back in early January in California, all the way down to the conclusions which Supran quoted in his Tweet about this one. He inadvertently reinforces this copycat problem by noting how the file can be downloaded from the Sher Edling law firm — the same firm with 9 boilerplate global warming lawsuits against energy companies which I’ve detailed in my Sher Edling “boilerplate”-tagged posts as being enslaved to a solitary piece of worthless evidence used to indict skeptic climate scientists as peddlers of industry-orchestrated disinformation. What Supran does here is reinforce a particularly damaging fatal flaw within those lawsuits. Continue reading