Author Archives: Russell Cook

About Russell Cook

Russell Cook is a semi-retired graphic artist. His collection of articles and blogs about the Gelbspan/Gore/Ozone Action/Greenpeace accusation can be seen here: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?page_id=86

Why Would Naomi Oreskes Be On Retainer With Any Law Firm?

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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

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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.

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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

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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 →

Has the whole ‘crooked climate skeptics’ accusation strayed into criminal libel/slander territory?

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Just askin’, before the Big Tech effort to censor inconvenient questions spreads as far as into blogs like this. While the largest companies on the defendant side of all the “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits are still exploring legal technicalities paths concerning changes of venue, what happens if the smaller energy companies’ law firms start pulling all the loose threads in the accusation where it’s implied that a certain set of ‘leaked memos’ with the awkwardly worded strategy goal to “reposition global warming” is proof that Big Coal & Oil had a corrupt pay-for-performance arrangement with skeptic scientist ‘liars-for-hire’? That memo set is presented as ‘evidence’ in the majority of the current “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits, e.g. the most recent among them, Annapolis v BP’s paragraph 116. What will it indicate if efforts are made to quash those lawyers’ statements about the faults they find with that accusation? If legal analyst voices far bigger than mine start exploring whether that accusation is indeed a form of criminal libel/slander, what could the public interpret from an even more concerted censorship effort to silence those bigger voices? Continue reading →

“YPCCC Helps Facebook Debunk Climate Change Myths”

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The situation concerning the cavalry-style arrival of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) to save us all from global warming disinformation on Facebook begs for a comparison to a comical scene from a famous old movie, where the man held at gunpoint dejectedly notes the unexpected arrival of the totally corrupt police commissioner.

The highlights from the February 24, 2021 announcement are as follows ……………….. Continue reading →

“Al — I’m on first name basis with him”

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Regarding Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” co-author also being on a similar first-name, or any-name basis with Gore ….. not so much, it seems.

I pointed to Oreskes’ little name-drop in only fleeting fashion in my June 17, 2020 blog post. Time now to explore it further as yet another example of a widespread problem with the entire ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ accusation: pull on even the smallest of loose threads in that accusation, and the fabric of the overall accusation starts to unravel in multiple directions instead of cinch together more tightly. Continue reading →

City of Annapolis v. BP PLC, et al.

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Same old accusation — that energy companies willfully hid the ‘harm’ of their products from the public by colluding with skeptic climate scientist ‘shills’ in disinformation campaigns to undercut the “truth” about catastrophic man-caused global warming — different day. The mob of enviro-activists who place all their faith in this accusation never being questioned seem to be oblivious how the more often these Sher Edling law firm boilerplate filings are trumpeted as something new, exciting, and adding to a long list of “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits, the harder it will be to hide the fatal faults in them.

The only ‘new’ thing about this otherwise worn out state / county / city lawsuits traveling circus act is the amusing spin effort applied to the status of this latest Annapolis v. BP filing which previous ones didn’t get. Continue reading →

Part 2: “So … Mr Gore … why doesn’t your statement about Naomi Oreskes match what she said in 2015?”

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I began my February 17, 2021 blog post with the suggestion that the “industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists” accusation ‘fabric’ isn’t cinched up tight at all, it’s plagued with loose threads; pull on any number of them and the whole accusation can come apart. The Al Gore / Naomi “loose thread” Oreskes situation I detailed at the end of my previous Part 1 post is one more example of that — when she clearly said her survey that she undertook by herself was “no big deal / a kind of cross-check” to find out the extent of the consensus of a thousand science papers on the global warming topic, did Al Gore make a false, criminally punishable statement at a Senate hearing when he stated it was a University of California team effort she led?

No. He’s completely in the clear on that. Who would have said it that way for him to repeat? Oreskes, when she said it was she, in association with that university, and her assistants. Plural. Continue reading →

“So … Mr Gore … can you explain why your statement here doesn’t match the statement over there?”

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So far, ordinary citizens can get away with the response “just asking” when chastised for questioning the inconsistencies in narratives about man-caused global warming, but maybe not much longer if that starts falling into what ‘Big Tech’ vilifies as spreading misinformation. Regarding other controversial political issues in recent weeks, credit the collective far-left with cleverly concocting the propaganda notion that citizens questioning ‘established facts’ in the mainstream media about the U.S. presidential election or the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol might be dangerous radicals so hopelessly enslaved to conspiracy theories that they need to be re-educated. How long will it be until it’s insinuated that anyone who wonders why details in the global warming issue don’t line up right may be part of the unstable fanatic population posing a threat to democracy? Oh, wait, that’s already happened.

Maybe that kind of reasoning is meets with little opposition in the unreal world of news media / social media, but in the very real world of litigation (if the 20+ “Exxon Knew”-style global warming lawsuits resolve legal technicalities of whether they fall under Federal or state court jurisdiction), the law firms hired by energy company defendants will start questioning the often-repeated accusation from Al Gore that their clients colluded with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns designed to undercut the certainty of man-caused global warming. Perhaps enviro-activists may try to spin that as “Big Oil’s defense lawyers push right-wing conspiracy theories” for the biased news media to repeat, but that intimidation tactic to shut down questioning is not likely to work out well at all within the confines of any courtroom.

Continue reading →