His name is one I’ve mentioned frequently at this GelbspanFiles blog, I have a tag category just for him of blog posts pointing to him in a significant way, the first one being in my August 30, 2013 post. As I noted in my Nov 18, 2025 post, since his name may possibly contribute to the journalism scandal the BBC news outlet is facing, and since his name and his three decades of efforts are frequently tied in some way to ongoing false accusations about ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientists,’ objective news reporters / Federal investigators / energy company defendants’ law firms may appreciate a Background post dedicated just to him. For such people to hold him accountable as being one of the central-most promulgators of that accusation, they have know how he got to that position, and where his claims crumble to dust under hard scrutiny, and where questions need to be asked about strange circumstances surrounding him. Continue reading
Author Archives: Russell Cook
There’s That Name Again … And There’s That Accusation Again [11/20/25 Update]
11/20/25 update — see red double asterisk addition midway down, and at the bottom of this post.
Among all the tsunami of other controversial political news is the barely weeks-old scandal involving the BBC over revelations of their journalism malfeasance. Since I know a decent amount about another as-yet-unreported angle of BBC inaccuracies, I’ve emailed several UK reporters and others digging deeper into the overall situation to my coincidental 12 days-old filing of my complaint to the UK’s broadcast regulatory agency on this matter. What I briefly explained is that in 2020, the BBC relied on unverified ‘industry memos’ in a careless and illogical manner to claim the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns; their effort was hardly different than what happened a few years ago when the anti-Trump news media relied on the meritless “Steele Dossier” to accuse President Trump of engaging in despicable acts. I further pointed out how the accusation against the fossil fuel industry has every indication in the world of being traceable to a particular enviro-activist, Kert Davies, and how much of a one-trick pony the worthless memo phrase is for the anti-energy company activists.
What I should do is create another post in my “Background” series, to compile all of Kert Davies’ fatal credibility problems for ease of reference when corresponding with objective reporters. I plan to do that for my next post here. But in the meantime, let’s see where the man popped up just recently, and where that one-trick memo phrase popped up. Continue reading
Ofcom Complaint – [ the 2025 version ]
Relentless, I am. So here we go again with my continuing saga on imploring the mighty BBC news organization to do their core job. Call me “old school” on the matter, but news outlets are obligated – in my opinion – to report the news with no partisan slant, and to view information provided to them with a jaded eye, questioning any aspect of it where something just does not look right, and demanding not one but multiple rock-solid sources before publishing major accusations. In the case of the mid-summer 2020 report in which ex-Greenpeace operative Kert Davies brought the BBC ‘evidence’ which supposedly fit their program series titled “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” about the fossil fuel industry ‘ran disinformation campaigns to deceive the public’ … the BBC program producers should have first cast a basic ‘due diligence doubtful eye’ on whether Davies’ ‘evidence’ was verifiably true or not. They apparently did not, a basic violation of BBC’s own guidelines about gathering material. From that basic failure, they conveyed factual inaccuracies to their listening audience.
As I first detailed in my July blog post, when I spotted how the BBC strangely reworded their program title to eliminate the very phrase that was the core of my official complaint I filed, it was a ripe opportunity to refile my complaint. Now, here we go into the last available step in the complaint process. Continue reading
BBC [appears to] Bury a False 2020 Climate Issue Report Title, Pt 4 — BBC Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) responds
For new readers and for those following along in my little war with the mighty BBC, this particular situation (collected within my tag category name here) arose from the news that the BBC ECU director Colin Tregear planned back in late June 2025 to take a six month sabbatical in order to learn better how to convey the ‘climate crisis’ to the public. That news prompted me to search for the blatantly false BBC program title for which I’d originally filed a complaint back in 2020, because I wanted to succinctly show how Mr Tregear might be better advised to learn how objective, unbiased journalism was done in comparison to what outright journalism malfeasance looks like. But upon seeing the change to the program title that must have occurred minimally two years after my complaint was officially filed, I filed an all new complaint, and further followed up with a strong suggestion that the BBC / ECU / Colin Tregear revisit my original complaint — fundamentally that BBC conveyed false information to the public by saying a particular set of ‘industry memos’ were proof that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. The evidence behind that is literally worthless.
In an October 24, 2025 email signed by Tregear himself, he attached a PDF file single page response, which is verbatim as follows, where I highlight the critical point in red and in boldface. I’ll follow up with additional input about this overall situation after Tregear’s words. Continue reading
BBC [appears to] Bury a False 2020 Climate Issue Report Title – Part 3
BBC Complaints did actually reply to my protest, seen in the 8/15/25 Addendum section at the end of my July 25, 2025 Part 2 blog post, with an open invite to take my complaint to their next level-up “Stage 2” BBC Executive Complaints Unit (ECU). I’ve done so, as seen in what follows. At the rock-bottom level of explanation, the BBC system renamed their online podcast report for their August 2020 “How They Made Us Doubt Everything Episode 6 ‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact‘ ” with the shorter-worded title, “The Tobacco Playbook: 6. From Fact to Theory.” It sure looked like they were burying the core fault about how the “reposition global warming” memos were not actually viable evidence to prove the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. My complaint concerned that very ‘burial’ appearance. Their 8/12/25 reply was that the shorter title was for ‘saving text space,’ and my rebuttal to that said they needed to re-examine their 2021 final decision because the entire report – in original title form or retitled – was based totally on unsupportable evidence. Neither their ‘title piece’ smoking gun ‘evidence’ was ever implemented anywhere, nor was the secondary “victory will be achieved” memos ever implemented anywhere. Thus, their original ECU final decision must be revisited now, before their credibility implodes on this situation later. Continue reading
How Much Disinformation Can A Person Pack Into A Comment Condemning Disinformation?
No doubt about it, one of the hallmarks of far-left zealot politics is their projection of what their own faults are as accusations against their opponents, along with the way they censor any criticism which threatens their unsupportable assertions. In this blog post, I’ll show a weeks-old example of a person hurling an accusation about the fossil fuel industry running disinformation campaigns which itself contains an item of disinformation that could lead to the collapse of the entire ‘climate crisis’ issue. Key point is – once again – exposing how all the blather about the fossil fuel industry ‘colluding with corrupt skeptic climate scientists‘ always has been, and always will be a one-trick pony. Meritless 1990s-era accusations repeated right up to this present day. That side is not counting on their ‘science’ to save them, they are weak in that arena; they are instead putting all their hopes in what follows. Watch this, it’s just too predictable how it unfolds: Continue reading
Ben Franta All But Declares ‘Victory will be achieved,’ concerning Multnomah v Exxon
As I implied in my just-prior blog post here, the worthless, never-implemented “victory will be achieved” memos aren’t just an accusation used under basically false pretenses around a decade ago, they are very much an ongoing current bit of ‘evidence’ used to support the stupid idea that ‘Exxon and other energy companies deceived the public on how they knew their products caused harmful global warming.’ Ben Franta, as I’ve suggested before, is quite a weak link in that whole false accusation chain, and just over 90 days ago – at this time of writing – he reinforced how it shouldn’t be the energy companies in the crosshairs for spreading disinformation, it should instead be guys exactly like him. He gets away with what he does because nobody of major prominence has questioned him about his accusations. Continue reading
Tying Me to the “Victory will be achieved” memos – the irony of it all
My just-prior blog post basically concerned the problem when folks display little in any intellectual curiosity on whether material presented to them is above reproach. Place blind trust in some authoritative assertion about a controversial matter, and the path forward might go right off a cliff. Notice in that screencapture, the controversial matter was the accusation surrounding the notorious “victory will be achieved” fossil fuel industry memo (never implemented, by the way, but yet still beloved by political luminaries). While this post covers a nine year-old accusation about that memo set which actually names me while making an accusation about the memo, this situation is every bit relevant right now today. When hurling an accusation, as the folks did in 2016, it’s wise to first make sure the accusation is not fatally undercut in a manner that opponents can use against it. Continue reading
Google’s “Artificial Intelligence Overview” – on ‘Industry Disinfo Evidence,’ trust its info as far as you can throw it
Much ado these days with people thinking “A.I.” is some kind of all-encompassing savior to make life easier. Just do a generic Google search of “A.I. can help with” and watch the system fill in the last words with a whole range of situations … with Google A.I.’s own automatically generated input right at the very top, where its handy helpful little links in its “Show More” section to expand what it offers. All as though “A.I.” is benign, soulless and without political bias.
Speaking of Google searches, I’ve been using its basic system almost exclusively for over a decade, since that system clearly head & shoulders above any other search engine – you just have to know how to circumvent its biased results by doing boolean searches to prompt results it might not want the public to know about. It’s how I discovered exactly what the Ozone Action environmental group was, and who its staff were. But in May 2024, Google began adding its ‘AI option’ to its search methods menu. I’ve avoided it like the plague, knowing and proving already just months earlier that at least some forms of A.I. had no intelligence whatsoever. For this blog post, however, I’ll actually look into Google’s “A.I. Overview” for the very first time. Watch this —
“Who discovered the fossil fuel industry memos with the phrase Reposition Global Warming as Theory (Not Fact)? What is their importance?” Continue reading
The Racial Component of the Urban Heat Island Effect (good thing PBS was defunded)
This particular situation illustrates how the climate science issue is way bigger than the science. We do indeed have a crisis happening, but it doesn’t concern the climate. It’s a crisis involving the legacy news media’s journalism malfeasance, which includes the now defunded PBS NewsHour (… and there’s a rather direct tie-in to what I do right here at this GelbspanFiles blog). Continue reading