I don’t just write about these things, I try to get something done. Upon learning the news on Feb 23 that the Supreme Court will be adding the effort to hear the concerns about the Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County situation, I fired off the verbatim email below to the main lawyer representing the energy companies (I spelled out the individual web links instead of embedding each one as I’ve done below; the bold highlighted words below where highlighted the same way in my email). Continue reading
Category Archives: Global warming lawsuits
The Camel’s Nose (sorta) Under the Kentucky Tent
For those who haven’t caught it, please see my updated count of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Now, at least for today, there are 29 instead of 30. The ineptly done Carrboro v Duke Energy is gone, as of last week. It was nice how the judge issuing that order alluded to Duke Energy’s Motion to Dismiss gripe about a particular “Kentucky” disinformation ad accusation, but I submit the small exploration done by Duke Energy’s attorneys revealed only the proverbial ‘camel’s nose under the tent.’ When the fossil fuel industry folks with influence grow a spine and explore much deeper – or when somebody ends up doing their work for them – every one of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits can implode, enabling the public to see where the real disinformation has been in the climate issue this entire time. Continue reading
The People of the State of Michigan v BP P.L.C.
Readers who are aware of my collective dissections list know that I differentiate between ‘pure boilerplate copy’ filings by the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling and “Sher Edling Assistance,” where the latter lawsuits are a small handful seemingly appearing to be independently written in a manner suggesting Sher Edling had no hand in composing them, but then later became directly associated with that firm. My initial prediction back in May 2024 was that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel would be committing political suicide if she elected to bring that firm in as ‘assisting counsel,’ and my update 4½ months later detailed how she had indeed made that massively unwise decision official. Time would tell if the filing turned out to be just another filing that copied ’n pasted accusation content from prior Sher Edling filings. A good indicator it would was AG Nessel’s equally unwise choice of the secondary ‘assisting law firm’ of DiCello Levitt which – as I showed in my dissection of the Pennsylvania Bucks County v BP lawsuit – had essentially plagiarized its material straight out of Sher Edling’s Chicago v BP filing. Notwithstanding the presence of DiCello Levitt having ‘top billing’ as the assisting firm for Chicago, my dissection of that one showed how it was a typical Sher Edling boilerplate copy ’n paste effort, the latest in a long string of them at the time.
But while this new 1/23/26 Michigan v BP filing gives Sher Edling ‘top billing’ for its assistant firms, it doesn’t follow Sher Edling’s typical copy ’n paste template. Continue reading
Casquejo et al. v Shell PLC Part 1 – Potential problems in the [M.I.A.] lawsuit document
My list of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits I’ve dissected mentions at the top how it excludes American filings which never bring up the accusation about ‘liars-for-hire scientists on the payroll of Big Oil.’ Same actually applies to lawsuits filed outside of the U.S., such as the Peruvian Farmer’s one against a German energy company and Greenpeace’s one against an Italian energy company. Regarding this one filed in the UK on Dec 9th, a.k.a. “Casquejo and others v Shell plc” I cannot yet find the actual document that was filed. When I do, I will either amend this post to say there’s no “crooked skeptic scientists” accusation within it … or else I’ll dissect it as Part 2. What I have spotted – almost immediately in news reports after being alerted to it – are tell-tale indicators which prompts me to wager it will mimic the U.S. ones. Observe the following: Continue reading
Kennedy et al. v. ExxonMobil Corporation et al.
This one, filed on November 25, 2025, should be quite easy to dissect, like I do with any other Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit; compare their latest to one of the prior filings, with a checklist run-through of the key accusation narratives which repeat like clockwork from one filing to the next.
But we have a problem here, maybe a particularly huge one. While the key accusation narratives do indeed repeat like clockwork … this is not a Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit. It’s a Hagens-Berman filing. They’re based in Seattle. But watch what happens when you compare this filing to the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm’s filing they did for the state of Hawaii in May 2025, plus one of their others filed in late 2023. I’ll start with Sher Edling’s trademark four accusation elements first, color coding my screencaptures below from each filing to show the shared words. Continue reading
So Close, Yet So Far – Charleston v Brabham Oil dismissal’s lost opportunity
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
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
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
State of Hawai`i v. BP P.L.C.
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
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