If you are a reader returning after a long absence, please allow me to suggest that you reacquaint yourself with my work by reading my “Background” posts. If you are entirely new here …. Continue reading
Ask One Tough Question, and Particular Accusation-pushers Flee in Terror ….
… which is a hint for energy company defendant lawyers and objective news reporters to deeply consider. If “li’l ol’ private citizen me” can apparently prompt such a response, imagine what official investigators with far more influence or subpoena power can accomplish. Continue reading
When you display no intellectual curiosity about glitches in the items you report about …..
…. you end up mindlessly regurgitating propaganda talking points about long-dead false news items while claiming it is “original reporting + analysis on the climate crisis.”
And, I should add, astute observers could use that wipeout to illustrate what is entirely wrong with the notion of ‘industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns,’ where the ultimate result is that it appears to be the enviro-activists who’ve been spoon-feeding disinformation on the global warming issue to gullible ‘reporters’ and others who also never questioned it for them to regurgitate at a later date. Continue reading
Status Update: my complaint to BBC, re Radio 4’s “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” Ep. 6: ‘Reposition Global Warming’
Within my “Part 1” July 31, 2020 blog post / Aug 1 2020 WUWT guest post — just short of one year ago — I noted how I had made a formal complaint to the BBC about four egregious errors within Radio 4’s Episode 6 podcast report, where my complaint challenged the report’s insinuations that a pair of ‘leaked industry memo sets’ proved the fossil fuel industry deceived the public about the harm of global warming. It took two months for the BBC to at least partially admit that the guest featured within the podcast, ex-Greenpeace staffer / ex-Ozone Action staffer (the group that first gave the “reposition global warming” memo set its first major media traction in the late 1990s) Kert Davies, had inserted a racially-charged label into one of the supposedly ‘leaked memo sets’ that is demonstratively not anywhere in the set. I detailed that angle in my “Part 3” October 6, 2020 blog post, and further noted within it that my three other complaint points had not been addressed by the BBC at all, and I also directly alerted the BBC about that problem.
The BBC is a giant bureaucratic operation, it takes a while for complaints to get to the proper people. In October and November 2020, I received auto-replies from the BBC saying they would consider my other complaint points when they had time. Having not heard a word after that all the way up to May 22nd this year, I again reminded them at that time how my complaints remain largely unaddressed. I got yet another “we are currently dealing with a higher than normal volume of cases” auto-reply June 1st ………… and then received what your see verbatim below on July 7th, in the italicized, indented paragraphs. Continue reading
The Day when Naomi Oreskes’ Luck Ultimately Runs Out
At the end of my June 10, 2021 blog post, I noted how there were more faults with a claim that science historian Naomi “Merchants of Doubt” Oreskes made within a February 10 interview published at Paul Thacker’s* ironically named “Disinformation Chronicle” website (*who is arguably not the standard journalist the public might expect him regarding particular people in global warming issue, but that’s a whole separate story).
Here’s part of what I can detail based on readily available online facts, Continue reading
What’s old is not new again, no matter what direction you try to spin it
Another way of putting today’s blog post topic is to say that if global warming believers demonstrate how they only have one or two sets of leaked industry memos from the 1990s to support their assertions about the ‘inherent racism of the fossil fuel industry‘ or that ‘the industry’s publicity is a complete lie’ …. well, then that’s all they got. One of these days their enslavement to those memo sets — the “reposition global warming” set and the “victory will be achieved” set — will experience a ‘jumped the shark’ event that will be reported by more prominent people than me, but in the meantime, this blog will have to suffice for reporting on such things.
No joke, two separate spin efforts just within the last 35 days: the underlying racism of the fossil fuel industry, and the effort to smear that industry as complete liars. Continue reading
Naomi Oreskes – the gift that keeps on giving, redux
When historians specialize in researching and reporting about a particular range of history events, they are universally expected, as a basic tenet of their profession, to always be able to place specific events with considerable accuracy on a timeline. If they are praised as heroes from their reporting of otherwise ‘hidden’ situations, they should never put themselves in the awkward position of appearing to embellish their ‘heroic status’ via superficial, self-serving analysis of criticism of their work, and they should certainly never display hypocritical positions about their analysis of criticisms, relative to their own personal actions. Continue reading
Why Would Naomi Oreskes Be On Retainer With Any Law Firm?
Just askin’, another in my series of posts asking questions that not only the inquisitive public and unbiased reporters should be asking, but also the law firms working for the defendant energy companies in the current 25 “Exxon Knew”-style global warming damages cost recovery lawsuits. Hat tip to Charles Rotter at WUWT for alerting me to Energy in Depth’s 5/13/21 report, “Bombshell: Naomi Oreskes On Retainer With Plaintiffs’ Law Firm.” Charles further points out that a same-day paper authored by Oreskes and co-researcher Geoffrey Supran (that Supran) had the note at the bottom, “The authors have no other relevant financial ties and declare no competing interests.”
Being on retainer with a law firm handling no less than 15 major global warming lawsuits is not a relevant financial tie, or at least minimally a competing interest, a.k.a. a conflict of interest??
But the problems and the questions don’t end there for Oreskes, Continue reading
Oops (sorta): CORRECTION clarification regarding the “Victory will be achieved” memo set
As I implied at this blog way back in 2013, I will never bury any of my errors or pretend they never happened. (Not so for the New York Times lately, but that’s a whole other matter)
In light of a particular revelation out of the very recent interview I conducted with former American Petroleum Institute VP / COO William O’Keefe, I need to basically correct what I’ve long said about the 1998 “victory will be achieved” memo set being unsolicited by API. Continue reading
Anne Arundel County v BP P.L.C. et al.
When the day arrives where enviro-activist media writers attempt to dissuade the public from reading any of my analysis of the “Exxon Knew”-style global warming lawsuits, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they descended to hurling superficial accusations such as saying my label of “Sher Edling boilerplate lawsuit filings” doesn’t fit the definition of “boilerplate.”
The Sher Edling’s law firm’s Maui v Sunoco filing is 139 pages long while their Annapolis v BP is 171 pages, which is so much of a huge length difference that these cannot be literal copies from one courthouse filing to the next. If Mr Cook is wrong on that claim right from the start, it stands to reason that none of his blog posts are worth reading.
Uh, huh. That would be a pure “nothing to see here, move along” Streisand Effect tactic, potentially prompting people to ask instead what it is, specifically, that I detail in these lawsuit filings. In my dissection of Annapolis v BP, my comparison of it to Maui v Sunoco detailed how both, along the prior thirteen Sher Edling boilerplate filings, contain largely the same blocks of text, and I illustrated specific faults with those blocks via a checklist of the repetitions and their ties to dicey sources, along with an additional note about a particular omission problem. I went so far as to speculate that the strange omission might be repeated in a future Arundel County lawsuit filing.
That omission is indeed repeated now in Arundel County v. BP. But on top of that, this latest boilerplate filing is actually as close to a literal copy ’n paste from one courthouse to the next as it could be. Continue reading
Interview with William O’Keefe, former American Petroleum Institute executive
That’s the same William O’Keefe who’s been despised by enviro-activists ever since 1998 as one of the main ‘culprits’ behind what they claim was Exxon’s alleged disinformation efforts to deceive the public that burning of fossil fuels wasn’t causing global warming when industry leaders actually “knew” what the harm was. Why is he vilified? Because in April 1998, Exxon’s CEO was the top member of the American Petroleum Institute (API) trade group, O’Keefe was its Executive VP and COO, and anti-oil activists have repeatedly said, from that year to the current time, in news reports, in various enviro-activist webpages, and even within many of the current 20+ “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits such as Hoboken v Exxon, that API was engaged in a blatant disinformation campaign which was exposed by leaked memos known as the “victory will be achieved” set, a.k.a. the Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan (GCSCAP). O’Keefe is often misidentified as API’s CEO in places ranging from letters-to-editors and websites, to CSPAN and U.S. House Hearings, and in yet another example of how enslaved enviro-activists are to this memo set, it was featured just days ago in Al Jazeera’s full video post of an October 2020 documentary video which essentially was based on a notion that the memo set is still a driving force behind fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns.
They consider this set to be “smoking gun” evidence comparable to the sinister efforts of the tobacco industry disinformation campaigns, in no less of a similar way they view the “reposition global warming” leaked memos — also seen in Hoboken v Exxon and nearly all the other current global warming lawsuits, notorious from the 1991-era to the present time. Al Gore very famously compared the “reposition global warming” set to sinister tobacco industry disinformation campaigns.
However, both memo sets are worthless as evidence of ongoing disinformation campaigns. Regarding the “reposition global warming” memo set falsely attributed to the Western Fuels Association (WFA), I’ve had firsthand confirmation for several years now from the top two people at the WFA and the people at their ad agency, along with independent confirmation that the “reposition global warming” proposal’s strategy and goals were rejected outright and the entire set was never even solicited by WFA.
Until just the recent few weeks, though, I could only refer to secondhand reports about the status of the so-called API memo set. Now, let’s hear directly from William O’Keefe about that entire situation: Continue reading