Call this post a follow-up to both my similarly-titled November 16, 2022 post and a sort of “corroborating new information addition” to my Sept 2021 post about the Democrat House Oversight Committee’s political suicide. It’s a point I cannot emphasize enough, as it relates to enviro-activists promulgating the idea that there’s a fossil fuel industry conspiracy to mislead the public – via industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns – about the certainty of man-caused global warming. Always keep these two bits in mind when considering any prominent hurl of their accusation: first, a primary hallmark of enviro-activists his their psychological projection of their mindset as accusations aimed at others; and second; the very best evidence in their arsenal for their accusation about deceptive industry campaigns consists the above-noted memo sets. As I’ve detailed here at GelbspanFiles, both sets are literally worthless, neither were ever implemented anywhere, thus rendering them useless as evidence to prove deception efforts are rooted in the directives of those memos. Obviously.
So when these same two sets are put out front & center in one way or another by enviro-activists again and again and again, it is a valid concern to determine whether this is a conspiracy on their part to deceive the public about the legitimacy of the science-based disputes offered by skeptic climate scientists to counter the IPCC / Al Gore side of the issue.
Allow me to illustrate this troublesome situation once again, where what I found a couple of months ago, combined with the latest available info about those enviro-activists’ efforts (hold that thought until near the end of this post), reinforces the appearance of their apparent conspiracy efforts.
On December 1, 2022, the Energy in Depth website featured an entertaining article, “Oversight Cmte. Democrat Admits Soon-to-be-Released Anti-Oil and Gas Research Won’t Have Much In It” about the bleak prospect faced by environmentalists as the House hearings aimed at persecuting the fossil fuel industry came to an end. Back in late September 2021 when the House Oversight Committee first announced its subpoena letters being sent to the heads of Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP and to the American Petroleum Institute (API) / US Chamber of Commerce, I did what I always do whenever I see a prominent accuser group make claims about ‘Big Oil’ deceiving the public: I looked to see if they were enslaved to what I routinely term ye olde worthless “reposition global warming” memos and ye olde worthless 1998 API “victory will be achieved” memos. Why do I put “ye olde” in front of those memo phrases? Because when anybody – anybody – does a deep enough dive into internet searches of where they appear, the sheer repetition of them over the last two decades as the central evidence to indict skeptic climate scientists of colluding with industry executives becomes readily apparent. With regard to the House Oversight Committee’s pre-hearing letters, detailed here, they didn’t disappoint. Directly and then on a secondary level.
But how did the Democrat-led House Oversight Committee members become aware of those worthless memos? Energy in Depth’s article offers this, via a link to an Oct 2021 E&E News article:
Activist academics Geoffrey Supran and Robert Brulle* also disclosed to the media that they provided assistance to the committee. [*that Brulle]
Oh, really? Hold that thought for a little bit, the dicey situation around that gets one increment thicker. Keep in mind, too, that Supran is little more than a subordinate helper for “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star / 2012 La Jolla workshop creator Naomi Oreskes, and on some occasions is of very little use for her (that association problem by itself is a whole other story worthy of deeper investigation). The question is whether he is nothing more than a supplier of worthless document copies and even more worthless talking point printouts about them. Hold that thought for a little bit as well.
The Dec 1 Energy in Depth article also mentioned the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) as a group that is supporting various “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits. I’ve mentioned CCI a couple of times before, but only briefly a couple of years back, and a little more in my Feb 7 post regarding their “PayUpClimatePolluters” campaign. Time now to create a tag category at GelbspanFiles for them …. because there is always more to the way these accusation promulgators are interconnected.
As the result of seeing EiD’s mention of CCI back in December, I did a little deeper dive into the organization to see where else their own website mentioned those two worthless memo sets. Predictably enough, they did not disappoint, either.
Both mentions of ye olde memos happened on the same day, October 6, 2021, within two of the biography accusation pages for the six witnesses scheduled to testify before the Oversight Committee.
The API “victory will be achieved” memos, understandably enough, are mentioned in the bio page for the current API CEO Mike Sommers. For anyone who missed it, Sommers himself missed the golden opportunity to shoot down all the false perceptions about the memos when Rep Ilhan Omar clumsily asked about them during the 10/28/21 committee hearing. Sommers’ even more clumsy reply was that he had no clue what she was talking about. How he retains his position at API after illustrating that degree of ill-preparedness remains a mystery, the reference in the Committee subpoena letter to him about those memos was clearly seen on pgs 2-3. Oh, by the way – loyal readers of GelbspanFiles guessed it already, CCI’s source for the memos themselves is Kert Davies’* Climate Files website.
(* For the benefit of any new readers here: that Kert Davies, the man whose header photo at his Climate Investigations Center (CIC) “Climate Watchdog” Twitter account is ye olde horribly degraded “victory will be achieved” photocopy scan, the same Kert Davies whose workplace prior to Greenpeace was Ozone Action, the place that was the first to provide lasting, ongoing media traction to ye olde “reposition global warming” ‘leaked memos;’ the same Kert Davies who runs the Climate Files platform through his CIC website, the same Climate Files apparently supplying the Sher Edling law firm with worthless never-published newspaper ad “evidence.”)
CCI’s Oct 6 ’21 mention of the “reposition global warming” memos in their page for Chevron CEO Michael Wirth gets stretched close to, if not past the breaking point, in their efforts to tie them to Chevron via the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Mining operation Chevron acquired in 1984 by purchasing Gulf Oil. Yeah, right …. mighty international Chevron executives were directing skeptic climate scientists on what to say in a public relations campaign so small that almost nobody saw it.
But the problems with CCI’s reference here get much worse. Predictably, they also cite Kert Davies’ Climate Files site as the source, and then they offer something Kert Davies never said: CCI says the “Chicken Little” ad and the “Doomsday Canceled” ad (the two seen in the old “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” scans collection that were never published anywhere, each with their unsolicited, never-used logo name variants) were published “in the New York Times and and other influential publications.”
Where did we see and hear that utterly wrong claim? Oh, yeah … from the man I featured in my Feb 7 blog post “Mistakes. These Guys Make Mistakes. Big Ones.” Vic Sher, head of the Sher Edling law firm.
Do a site-specific search of CCI pages for the “reposition global warming” words, and the results are only seen three ways – in the biography accusation page for Michael Wirth; in CCI’s commandeered copy of the old “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” scans collection housed previously in CCI’s PayUpClimatePolluters’ site (PayUp’s memos source was … guess who?); and in publicly available copies of the assortment of Sher Edling boilerplate global warming lawsuits.
Coincidence on that last lawsuits copies bit? Probably not.
And one last bit to ponder, arising out of Climate Litigation Watch’s Feb 13, 2023 blog post about items concerning the Center for Climate Integrity. Specifically, CCI’s “not listed anywhere on Youtube” video, something CCI didn’t especially make readily available for us in the general public to see, but instead something they were using to entice New Jersey officials into filing “Exxon Knew”style lawsuits. Starring Geoffrey Supran, no less. Climate Litigation Watch made a permanent copy of the 1-hour video; I illustrate the key bits in the video here to reinforce what I said in my blog post title at the top. Transcribing verbatim from Supran’s claims that fossil fuel disinformation campaigns occurred:
8:35 point: … as another memo in 19- 1998 put it, “victory will be achieved when average citizens and the media recognize uncertainties in climate science.”
8:55 … perhaps the most blunt assertion of this strategy was the coal and utilities industries in 1991, which simply wrote “reposition global warming as theory, not fact.” And those plans really put into motion … plans to deny the science and to delay action with various forms of propaganda.
No, they did not, and the ‘various forms of propaganda’ he speaks of — once again — has every appearance in the world of being pure psychological projection from him and his enviro-activist associates’ side of the issue.
The CCI host, by the way introduced him at the 4:45 point, and at 5:14, ended with this:
… he’s also an expert advisor to U.S. House Oversight Committee‘s ongoing investigation into fossil fuel industry disinformation.
For all intents and purposes, he is not a stand-alone guy, he is where he is now because he owes his existence to Naomi Oreskes, she is his superior.
Naomi Oreskes is on retainer with the Sher Edling law firm. Her second, current career, stems from accusations aimed at skeptic climate scientists which source the “reposition global warming” memos, a set of directives that were never implemented, directive documents she says are archived in a place where they never were.
See the overarching problem here?