While it was great news from the Energy in Depth website on August 7th that South Carolina circuit court Judge Roger Young dismissed Charleston v Brabham Oil on jurisdictional / statute of limitations / and other angles, the opportunity to knock this one down on its core – and very false – central 4-element accusation which is present in all such Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits was missed again. Allow me to show two instances within the judge’s court ruling where he figuratively sideswiped gently against them, unaware how he could have sent then crashing into the ditch, and thus turn onto the path for that version of ‘failure to state a claim‘ dismissal. Continue reading
Author Archives: Russell Cook
Oreskes’ Embrace of the “Victory Will Be Achieved” Memos, Redux, in Honolulu v Sunoco – Big, big mistake.
The widely shared Associated Press news on July 28th was that a hearing in Hawaii was scheduled to take place the next day on whether the Honolulu v Sunoco global warming damages lawsuit should be tossed out because the ‘statute of limitations’ on the case had somehow run out. The defendants’ law firms legal technicality minutiae maneuvers from all their prior 8+ months of effort to get it out of state court and into Federal court didn’t work, so it appears they are trying a different maneuver … but in ABC News’ July 28 regurgitation of the AP story, which I fortuitously screencaptured on July 29th, showed how Naomi Oreskes’ name just could not stay out of the overall situation. I say “fortuitous” because one day later when I reopened both the ABC “Honolulu’s lawsuit against fossil fuel companies leads climate change legal fight” story and the AP original version to copy words out of them – poof – Oreskes has vanished from both. But what’s seen in the internet cannot be unseen. What’s going on right there with that erasure? Luckily, someone smarter than me preserved an Internet Archive version of the original AP story, with the two Oreskes paragraphs intact.
Not an especially bright idea for the AP to say Oreskes had submitted an Opposition filing against the defendants’ ‘statute of limitations’ maneuver; dumber yet is to bury that fact like it never happened. However, that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this particular new situation. Continue reading
BBC Buries a False 2020 Climate Issue Report Title, Part 2 – my new complaint file
8/15/25 update added, see near the end of this post, BBC responds.
At my little GelbspanFiles blog here, I have limited reach to reading audiences, not many people across the United States and around the world are aware of my efforts showing how the ‘industry-corrupted, liars-for-hire skeptic climate scientists‘ accusation falls apart around the core clique of enviro-activists promulgating it. Thus, I’m always indebted to any outlet that can reproduce my blog posts or mention my work in some way to much wider audiences. In this situation, I’m indebted to Roger “Tallbloke” Tattersall – most famous for being one of a few recipients of the notorious second batch of “ClimateGate emails” – for reproducing my July 14 blog post about the BBC for his UK readers. As I wrote in my piece, it’s suspect that the BBC removed the specific phrase which was the central focus of my 2020-2021 official complaint 2+ years after my complaint was deemed to have no grounds to support it.
But I don’t just write about these things, I try to get something done. I refiled my complaint with the BBC. Continue reading
Inconvenient Truth: The BBC Buries a False 2020 Climate Issue Report Title
Chris Morrison’s July 2 blog post at The Daily Sceptic, “BBC Complaints Director Takes Six-Month Sabbatical to Learn How to Promote ‘Climate Crisis’,” was reproduced at Anthony Watts’ WUWT site as a guest post the next day. After reading it at WUWT, I simply wanted to put in a comment reply saying I’d had my own encounter with that BBC Complaints Director, Colin Tregear, back in 2021, after I filed a complaint about BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast titled, “‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact.” My BBC complaint detailed how there was no truth to that memo directive was evidence of the fossil fuel industry operating disinformation campaigns, so for my July 3 WUWT comment, I wanted to link straight to the BBC’s page with that false accusation phrase as its title of the broadcast episode within their series of “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” reports, and then mention how BBC concluded that my complaint was meritless . . . . but that title wasn’t there at the BBC’s otherwise unchanged program page.
It’s possible – just potentially possible – that as the result of my complaint, I managed to live rent-free long enough in someone’s mind at the BBC that they ultimately felt compelled to bury their fatal mistake of failing to check the veracity of the accusations supplied to them (plural!) by their guest in that episode, ex-Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davies. Continue reading
The ‘Climate Crisis’ vs the REAL Crisis Facing Americans: News Media Journalism Malfeasance
From all the news of ‘raging wildfires’ / ‘melting glaciers / ‘increasingly extreme weather’ / ‘hottest month ever recorded,’ it’s no surprise how that morphs into news of ‘climate anxiety’ affecting youths ranging from children to young college students. Supposedly well-intentioned journalists then add articles to their repertoire about ‘coping with the climate crisis.’ On top of that, the Christian community is implored to act on the ‘religious moral imperative to save the planet’ from an evil, profit-seeking. planet-destroying fossil fuel industry.
Legacy news media reporters never question any of this, including clarion calls from environmentalists that the public must be educated about fossil fuel usage perilously heating the planet. That call is in the demands of the latest “ExxonKnew” lawsuit, where Big Oil is being sued for causing the heat wave which supposedly killed a woman. The woman’s daughter not only demands a damages award, but also for “a public education campaign to rectify Defendants’ decades of misinformation.”
Regarding the need for public education, I agree completely . . . but entirely in the opposite direction. Continue reading at –> https://cornwallalliance.org/the-climate-crisis-vs-the-real-crisis-facing-americans-news-media-journalism-malfeasance/
(Also subsequently reproduced at WattsUpWithThat on July 5th, for which I am grateful on reaching an even larger reading audience)
“We Decry Disinfo!!” sez International Group citing Disinfo
Hat tip to Marc Morano’s ClimateDepot website for news of the otherwise ridiculous International Panel on the Information Environment’s (IPIE)’s June 2025 report “Information Integrity about Climate Science.” The report itself is 120+ pages long, but let’s cut to the chase to show how this one, like so many others which accuse the fossil fuel industry of spewing disinformation, are instead psychologically projecting how they are the ones spewing disinformation. Just like the others, this report and its key players are separated by three degrees or less from Ross Gelbspan’s utterly false “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” accusation about supposedly ‘leaked industry documents.’ Just like the others, all it takes is one errant citation in this report to shoot itself in the foot with a cannon about the whole idea of ‘industry-orchestrated’ disinformation. Just like the majority of the ExxonKnew” lawsuits, pin your collective premise on material that turns out to be disinformation promulgated by disinformers, and your credibility is out the window no matter what else you say. Continue reading
Enter the Predictable Dragon—the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy
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
Naomi Oreskes’ Tale of Meeting Dr S Fred Singer, Part 1
As I’ve detailed at my “Summary for Policymakers” about Oreskes, she – at minimum – appears to have a credibility problem; the assortment of narratives she offers about her own role in the climate issue all have inconsistencies.
One I haven’t covered before is her tale of the late Dr S Fred Singer supposedly confronting her in 2005 back when he was still very much alive. I don’t have all the answers to this particular situation yet, but since she is on retainer with the law firm putting out the most “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, and since these lawsuits are now coming under review by judges as to whether they should proceed to trial (e.g. currently Charleston v Brabham Oil), it would be best to have the basic backstory on hand here, in case the scene in fictional courtroom TV dramas ends up to be a real-life situation:
Energy company defendant attorney: “… then we have the contradiction between evidence-provider Naomi Oreskes’ statements where ….”
Plaintiffs’ attorney: “Objection! Relevance?”
Energy company defendant attorney, to the Judge: “Goes to credibility.”
Continue reading
Estate of Juliana Leon v Exxon Mobil Corporation
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
How a Propagandist’s Dream Narrative Could be Repositioned into a Nightmare
Imagine floating a false accusation with awkward wording so uniquely memorable that it might be repeated nationwide as an authoritative quote from a person having a usable degree of national prominence . . . . who literally says he doesn’t remember where he heard the quote. What if the person genuinely believed the veracity of the accusation, only to discover that it is totally without merit, and that the central promulgators of the accusation who claim it is evidence of a massive disinformation effort are themselves using the accusation as the basis of their own disinformation campaign? What if that person was to discover how others like him aren’t actually the ‘good guys’ in the climate issue? What if legions more just like this person became fully aware of this problem? Continue reading