In the wake of the Department of Justice filing a lawsuit on May 1, 2025 against the State of Hawaii (and others) over the dubious act of announcing plans for filing future climate lawfare/regulation actions, it would appear that Governor Josh Green of Hawaii retaliated right back at the Trump Administration – on the very same day – by filing this Hawaii v BP lawsuit. Big mistake, because Governor Green’s ineptly thought-out decisions will only likely eventually give the DoJ and/or other Federal investigators an excuse to hit harder against not only this lawsuit, but all of the other “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. This filing was actually not remotely spontaneous, it arguably was at least eight years in the making, if not longer. It’s nothing more than the very latest in the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling’s series of “boilerplate copy filings.” How do I know that? Let me count the ways via the same checklist I’ve used on their prior copy ’n paste efforts, plus let me point out where Sher Edling is now digging an even deeper holes for themselves on at least two false accusations of theirs. Technically this filing wouldn’t go into my list of lawsuits plagiarizing other law firms’ / law offices’ “homework,” since Sher Edling is more or less entitled to re-use their own material wherever they take this traveling circus act, but what they repeated out of their just-prior Maine v BP filing over at the other far end of the country inadvertently draws attention to speculation that attorneys aren’t just lazily copying other material as though it was their own, they instead may be operating on a central template supplied to them. Continue reading
Author Archives: Russell Cook
To Be a Journalist or not To Be
With the far larger question of whether a genuine journalist’s own freedom of the press is in peril if he or she starts asking rough questions concerning any angle of the orthodoxy of “the science of man-caused global warming is settled” / “skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry to undercut the settled science.” Continue reading
The Plagiarism Problem Plaguing the “ExxonKnew” Lawfare Lawsuits — Summary for Policymakers
Nice that someone big finally noticed the plagiarism problem going on. It just was’t an individual I was expecting. Continue reading
The ‘Reposition Global Warming’ / ‘Victory’ Memos, ‘Chicken Little’ & Willie Soon go to the Supreme Court
As I noted in my April 2nd & 3rd 2025 Tweets/Xs, I had only just learned about the 45 page Aug 21, 2024 “Brief in Opposition” (BiO) that NJ AG Matt Platkin, CA AG Rob Bonta, MN AG Keith Ellison, Connecticut AG William Tong, and Rhode Island AG Peter Neronha had filed against Alabama et al. v California et al — Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and four other state AGs complaint arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court should prevent states from filing such global warming damages lawsuits. My intention was to dissect the massive accusation faults in the “Appendix Volume One” attached to the Platkin et al. BiO, while mistakenly thinking that the Appendix itself was newly written in August 2024 especially for SCOTUS review. I was technically headed down an incorrect path – sorta – and was nearly done with my intended blog post before spotting my small error of assumption. The bulk of what I’d written still serves the purpose I’d intended, which is to point out the incalculably huge error these five Platkin et al. Attorneys General made in following the path that ‘Exxon knew about their products causing global warming, but chose instead to deceive the public through disinformation campaigns where they paid and directed skeptic climate scientist shills to repostition global warming as theory rather than fact.’
Allow me to explain my small error first. Continue reading
Oops, a detail I missed in my 2020 dissection of D.C. v ExxonMobil
What I missed doesn’t help the folks pushing these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits right now at all. I did not miss this same detail in my Nov 2024 dissection of Maine v BP. The problem in D.C. v Exxon compounds the apparent law firm ‘plagiarizing’ situation I detailed in that dissection. Continue reading
Naomi Oreskes has a Socci Problem
The public loves a tale of personal heroism. What kills a person’s hero story is when someone interrupts the tale and asks a point-blank question, “How is it possible that the thing you just described happened the way it did? It doesn’t seem to be readily obvious.” The storyteller can either dig their way out of the hole they just opened up, or not, and if that killer problem is left dangling in mid air for everyone to see, it’s an open invite to see what else in the tale falls apart.
Naomi Oreskes’ tale of personal heroism is not a tightly-knit fabric, it has loose ends everywhere. It’s hard to tell what level of intellect she has, but if she has any smarts at all, she should be petrified that if various major Federal / legal system investigators pull on any one of her loose threads, they’ll end up pointing a virtual gun in her face to explain her collective role in the climate issue. One way for it to all unravel is for an investigator to ask – who’d already know the answer – “Who is Anthony Socci?” Continue reading
Investigate the Origins of the “reposition global warming” Memos Disinformation; It Can Likely Kill the “ExxonKnew” Lawsuits
It’s a propagandist’s dream when an utterly false accusation dating back to mid 1991 is the mainstay evidence in the ongoing series of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, including the latest Nov 2024-filed Maine v BP one. How is the “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” memo set utterly false, with its otherwise sinister-sounding directive telling skeptic climate scientist ‘shills’ what to do in a public relations campaign targeting gullible “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women”? Easy. It was a rejected proposal, never implemented in any form, tossed into the trash by the people it was proposed to. Its ludicrous idea for the genuine PR campaign to aim messaging at particular people was not only debunked in a congressional hearing at the time when questions about that first erupted in 1991, the namesake of my GelbspanFiles blog strangely corroborated that in one of his last acts of fair and balanced journalism …. albeit with the spin that the person he quoted wasn’t being truthful. Why did he continue on that line? Because this accusation is literally the absolute best the enviro-activists have in their arsenal to indict the skeptic scientists who have the potential to convince the public that the ‘climate crisis’ is not a crisis at all.
But as the old saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Let me offer two examples of how this kind of propaganda works, and how an investigation of its origins can potentially torpedo the entire global warming issue. A very large part of the population has heard something to the effect that the fossil fuel industry ‘hid the truth about the harm of global warming.’ But the public is unaware of how that whole accusation implodes around the core clique of people who’ve promulgated it since the 1990s. Nobody, including the true believers in the environmentalist movement, likes being conned. Continue reading
Has A.I. Gotten Smarter About the Namesake of my Blog?
Short answer: no. Just short of a year ago, I described my experiment to see what Google’s new “Gemini.ai” system could put out on the man, having previously tried an experiment with the ChatGPT system. In those two experiments, give GeminiAI credit for not veering into the brick wall mistake that ChatGPT did, falsely attributing Ross Gelbspan with a Pulitzer Prize win that he never actually received in any form. As I showed in my just-prior blog post, there is a difference between dutifully regurgitating what people feed you, and doing the heavy lifting to find out if what they tell you is actually true.
There are new A.I. systems out there now that you can ask questions. So, let’s first see where GeminiAI is still not particularly bright, and then let’s see what two other systems can tell us about the late Ross Gelbspan, since his work and his words forms the basis of the accusations in the very current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Continue reading
Committing Acts of Journalism
My transcriptions of several segments of a TV interview makes this blog post a long one. They’re necessary to drive home a critical point: The ‘climate crisis’ is not an existential threat to the well-being of the country; journalism malfeasance on the part of the legacy news media is the actual threat. Bits in the old interview are a driving force in the climate issue today. Continue reading
The Problems in the ExxonKnew Lawsuits Keep Getting Worse
This happens – I’m in the midst of compiling a blog post, I look up something I remember in connection with another accusation angle, then I spot something that doesn’t line up right in the whole narrative. What I’d planned to describe concerning “Committing Acts of Journalism” (or the lack thereof by the reporters over the last two+ decades on the climate issue) will have to wait until the next blog post, (is in my next post as of 2/24/25) because I just spotted a new problem with the basically still-current (originally Matt Pawa-led) pair of 2017 Alameda County / San Francisco County lawsuits. I dissected that pair jointly in my October 6, 2017 People(s) of California v. BP, while also bringing up those two again in my November 30, 2024 Maine v BP dissection, since the Sher Edling law firm inexplicably decided to apparently plagiarize Matt Pawa’s old 2017 accusation paragraph to use in their filing for Maine. What I did not catch in my latest dissection there was the basic fault with Matt Pawa’s citation source for the bit about Dr S Fred Singer’s “launch[ing] repeated attacks on mainstream climate science,” namely the 2007 UCS report. Those words are not in that report that way. I can show where they are seen that way, and where the actual source is . . . . . . which does not help the credibility of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits one bit. It reinforces the fatal fault in essentially every one of these. Continue reading