Friend of the Court participant Geoffrey Supran trumpeted this Baltimore filing event last week as though it was some marvelous new development in the area of global warming lawsuits. It isn’t. It’s essentially a boilerplate regurgitation of the amici curiae Supran and his associates filed back in early January in California, all the way down to the conclusions which Supran quoted in his Tweet about this one. He inadvertently reinforces this copycat problem by noting how the file can be downloaded from the Sher Edling law firm — the same firm with 9 boilerplate global warming lawsuits against energy companies which I’ve detailed in my Sher Edling “boilerplate”-tagged posts as being enslaved to a solitary piece of worthless evidence used to indict skeptic climate scientists as peddlers of industry-orchestrated disinformation. What Supran does here is reinforce a particularly damaging fatal flaw within those lawsuits. Continue reading
Category Archives: Information Council for the Environment
Reposition Global Warming as Theory Rather than Fact Redux, 22 Apr 2019
A strange pair of same-day appearances barely over a month ago of that supposedly ‘leaked industry strategy memo phrase’ are an indicator of how people who can’t stop repeating it seem blissfully ignorant regarding the way its less-than-three-degree separation from Ross Gelbspan — and all the related fatal problems surrounding that — could potentially torpedo the legacies of the prominent people who’ve long promulgated it as evidence of the fossil fuel industry conspiring with skeptic climate scientists to undercut the alleged ‘certainty’ of man-caused global warming. Watch this. Continue reading
Amicus brief, Brule, CCI, Farrell, Franta, Lewandowsky, Oreskes, Supran
Here we go again. When I said in my December 14, 2018 blog post (and its Part 2), that enviro-activists only have a one-trick pony to use in their character assassination efforts against skeptic climate scientists, that’s no exaggeration. Their lack of diversity isn’t restricted to only minor league ‘reporters’ lately, it’s the only thing the most famous accusers have in their arsenal as evidence of a ‘skeptics / fossil fuel industry executives disinformation’ conspiracy. Look no farther for that than the 1/29/19 “Brief Of Amici Curiae, Robert Brule, Center For Climate Integrity, Justin Farrell, Benjamin Franta, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, and Geoffrey Supran“* for the San Mateo / Imperial Beach / Marin / Santa Cruz v Chevron, California global warming lawsuits. Instead of presenting a more convincing argument for repeated use of the same old ‘leaked memo evidence,’ this little amici curiae group only amplifies how much of a problem it creates. Continue reading
Put all your Eggs in the “Reposition Global Warming as Theory Rather than Fact” Memos Basket
Accusers who push the idea that fossil fuel industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists to spread lies undermining public belief in man-caused global warming repeatedly reveal they only have one bit of so-called ‘viable evidence’ in their arsenal — a particular set of supposedly leaked internal fossil fuel industry memos. Their latest effort to keep the accusation afloat contains an unforced error where they felt compelled to repeat a specific line about the ‘discovery’ of the memos which they haven’t spoken of since 1996.
“Inside Track: Sowing Seeds of Doubt in the Greenhouse”, Part 3: ‘Leaked by Industry Executives?’
In Parts 1 and 2 here and here, I detailed how the re-emergence of the old Greenwire news brief really doesn’t help the long-term talking point about ‘industry-paid skeptic climate scientists,’ despite being apparently the initial seed for that ongoing accusation which centers around a particular set of memos supposedly leaked out of the Western Fuels Association’s “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) campaign. Now, let’s briefly examine how its re-emergence undermines the credibility of one of the current figures who pushes that accusation. Continue reading
“Inside Track: Sowing Seeds of Doubt in the Greenhouse”, Part 2: troubling connections
Part 1 described how Phil Shabecoff’s June 1991 Greenwire electronic news brief was the first news item to directly quote a set of worthless ‘leaked memos’ which supposedly revealed how the fossil fuel industry aimed faulty climate science assessments at ignorant people in order to spread misinformation about the issue. The old Greenwire brief also quoted a spokesperson for an electric utility trade organization who categorically stated his organization was not participating in a public relations campaign of which those memos were supposedly guided by, which undercuts current accusations about that organization spearheading the PR campaign. But wait, there’s more. Continue reading
“Inside Track: Sowing Seeds of Doubt in the Greenhouse”, Part 1
Greenwire’s old dawn-of-the-internet age June 20, 1991 electronically shared news brief, which could not be easily found by the general public …. has been found. Now, let’s see what’s in it. Continue reading
FreeBeacon: “Calif. Cities Suing Exxon Forced to Walk Back Key Claim”
From Todd Shepherd’s April 5, 2018 Washington Free Beacon article:
California cities suing Exxon and four other oil companies have reworded a portion of their original complaint after being rebuked by the presiding judge. …
… The cities had initially pointed to a 1996 internal memo from an industry group, the Global Climate Coalition (funded by the America Petroleum Institute), which said that, “a doubling of carbon dioxide levels over pre-industrial concentrations would occur by 2100 and cause ‘an average rate of warming [that] would probably be greater than any seen in the past 10,000 years.'”
… However, the memo was referencing an assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and was not the independent findings of the GCC’s work.
The Free Beacon shows the backpedal rewording in their own photo link above, and I reproduce it here for good measure (click image to enlarge):
That specific paragraph section’s wording in its original form is what prompted the title of my prior March 30, 2018 blog post, “If California v. BP Implodes via Insufficient Evidence, so can New York City v. BP.” Read all the way through my blog post, and you’ll see how this ‘lack of evidence to prove a fossil fuel industry conspiracy’ problem with the twin California global warming lawsuits and the NYC one doesn’t end there, it ultimately points a giant red flashing arrow at the clique of people who have tried for 20+ years to say there is ‘a fossil fuel industry misinformation conspiracy to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.’
The California lawsuits’ reworded paragraph section loses all its teeth as “smoking gun” evidence proving oil companies knew man-caused global warming was settled science. It shouldn’t be reworded, it should be stripped entirely out of the lawsuits, and the main lawyer behind the use of it in both the California and New York lawsuits – Matt Pawa – should be compelled to explain why he didn’t know the evidence was totally worthless ….. or whether he knew it was worthless the entire time. But as I showed in my prior blog post, that same paragraph section appears in Matt Pawa’s 2008 Kivalina v. Exxon lawsuit, as does the supposedly leaked memo subset insinuating skeptic climate scientist shills were paid and instructed under an industry strategy directive to “reposition global warming” which targeted “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women.”
No such targets or strategy was ever used by anybody anywhere.
The effort to prove the fossil fuel industry conspired to misinform the public about the certainty of man-caused global warming is demonstrably beginning to fall apart. The focus on where the real conspiracy is to be found should be turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction, to a particular small group people who’ve apparently conspired for years to misinform the public about the certainty of corporate-corrupted skeptic climate scientists.
Corroborated vs. Uncorroborated Claims
Back in 2008-’09, I was perplexed that efforts to mitigate runaway global warming were occurring despite detailed opposition offered by skeptic climate scientists. Before my initial searches to find out why skeptic assessments were being ignored, I was unaware of how widespread the accusations were about skeptic scientists being paid industry money to lie to the public. Afterward, rather than finding multiple corroborations revealing massively damaging evidence of when, where and how the skeptics were paid to lie, all I found was one uncorroborated source for the accusation. Continue reading
An Accusation Built on a Foundation of Sand
The collective enviro-activist movement wants the public to believe global warming science is settled and that opponents may be dismissed out-of-hand due to ‘extensive documentation’ of skeptic climate scientists’ industry corruption. I’ve already pointed out, here and here, how there is no independent corroboration for the accusation. Worse, the so-called smoking gun core evidence for the accusation, leaked memos attributed to the obscure Western Fuels Association’s 1991 “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) public relations campaign are not what Naomi Oreskes, Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan and others say they are. Continue reading