The climate issue only has two legs to stand on, the claim that the science is settled, and the accusation that fossil fuel company executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists via disinformation campaigns to undercut the ‘settled science.’ Give a round of applause to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and three of his closer Senate friends whose attempt to shore up that second leg on July 31st demonstrated that no matter who you are as a prominent public figure hurling the accusation, there you are: enslaved to either both or just one set of literally worthless ‘leaked industry memos’ as proof for your accusation, basically traceable back to a fellow named Kert Davies who currently runs the Climate Files website, and who dates back in his highly suspect long-term promulgation of the two ‘memos’ sets to the 1990s. But this dicey enslavement situation doesn’t stop there. Via recently released Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”) documents out of the New York State Attorney General’s office, that ‘love affair’ apparently applied to AG Eric Schneiderman’s office back in 2015 while further corroborating the interconnectedness of Kert Davies with other suspicious character assassination efforts against Exxon and scientists who are skeptical about catastrophic man-caused global warming.

Allow me, at the end of this post, to throw in a zinger about Hunter Biden’s connection to the Clima-Change™ issue as a counterpoint to the Senator Sanders situation. First, though, watch this:

The July 31 Sanders letter implored U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to “bring suits against the fossil fuel industry for its longstanding and carefully coordinated campaign to mislead consumers and discredit climate science in pursuit of massive profits.” What evidence did the Sanders letter have to prove Big Coal & Oil ran longstanding, carefully coordinated disinformation campaigns? Why, ye olde “victory will be achieved” memo set ….. sourced from Climate Files. Yep, that Climate Files, the website operating under Kert Davies’ Center for Climate Investigations (CIC). That Kert Davies, formerly of Environmental Working Group / Ozone Action / Greenpeace, and now installed as of mid-July 2023 as the “Director of Special Investigations” at the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI). CCI being the outfit headed by Richard Wiles* – “Big Oil, beware.” He and Davies go all the way back to when they both worked at Environmental Working Group. As I detailed in my Feb 15, 2023 blog post, Wiles’ CCI organization is enslaved to both ye olde “reposition global warming” memo set (falsely attributed to the Western Fuels Association “Information Council for the Environment” public relations campaign) and to ye olde American Petroleum Institute “victory will be achieved” memos, and it is CCI who’s been peddling these worthless, never implemented sets around to any gullible municipality political leaders chomping at the bit to launch “Exxon Knew”-style global warming damages lawsuits.

Why do I put “ye olde” in front of those memo phrases here at GelbspanFiles? Because the sheer repetition of them over the last 25+ years right up to just over two weeks ago as the central ‘evidence’ for industry-led disinformation campaigns is so lame, it deserves ridicule. Senator Sanders just demonstrated that any given prominent accusation about Big Oil employing skeptic climate scientists is enslaved to Davies and his worthless set of industry memos as evidence of that ‘corruption.’ Q. E. D.

But as I said at the top of this blog post, the association to Kert Davies doesn’t end there, and the overall ‘dicey associations’ plot just got thicker because here’s where the NY State Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”) documents come in. The 108 page set which the “Government Accountability & Oversight” watchdog group received is here, the one in particular that I draw attention to is on pages 21-22, a February 19, 2015 email from Rockefeller Family Fund Director Lee Wasserman to NY AG office Environmental Protection Bureau Chief Lemuel Srolovic and NY State Special Counsel for Economic Justice Steven Glassman. Notice the two names Wasserman is citing (color-highlighted emphasis is mine, the redacted words are by the NY AG office):

(This is only the second place I’ve seen it written in my own “more than a decade tracking” him – Davies must hate being identified as “Roland.”)

But no … just no. First of all in just a small detail, like so many who attempt to set up background narratives in this climate issue, Wasserman doesn’t have his story right about Passacantando and Davies. 2015 minus a decade minimally is 2005, when both were at Greenpeace, where Passacantando had merged his prior little Ozone Action environmental group into Greenpeace USA half a decade earlier. Davies worked directly at Ozone Action as far back as 1998. More accurate for Wasserman to had said the two have been working together for nearly two decades. (it would have been an act of basic responsible journalism for the producers of the April 2022 “The Power of Big Oil” to disclose how Passacantando’s and Davies’ appearance in that program stems from their decades-long association, period. But that’s another story.)

The critical item in the Wasserman email is where he tied the two together about the big newspapers’ – plural – breaking story literally days later in the Boston Globe / New York Times / Washington Post of Dr Willie Soon being “paid $1.2 million by Exxon.”

In my Feb 25, 2015 GelbspanFiles blog post, I told how Kert Davies, after his unexplained Oct 2013 departure from Greenpeace, suddenly re-emerged out-of-the-blue in a big way to hurl his then-new accusations by himself. Over 7 months earlier, I briefly mentioned how John Passacantando went one more increment completely off the public radar.

I didn’t know it at the time, it wasn’t only Kert. John and Kert were responsible for those new ‘breaking news’ accusations. The Monday meeting of both at the NY AG office was the same day all three newspapers broke the accusation story against Dr Soon.

Lee Wasserman just couldn’t keep his mouth shut that Davies had help in his accusation effort against Dr Soon. This corroborates what is seen in a different 2016 leaked email within a same-year report by the Washington Free Beacon, in which Wasserman was the headliner which also named Passacantando and Davies, concerning efforts to portray Exxon as corrupt in the eyes of the public. Let’s not lose sight of a related important problem here: Wasserman’s Associate Director at the Rockefeller Family Fund is Lisa Guide, who is married to John Passacantando.

Hugely ironic that Wasserman speaks of “money flows” and “material demonstrat[ing] a long-term and collaborative pattern,” apparently oblivious to how psychological projection is a primary hallmark of far-left enviro-activists. Dr Soon has vehemently debunked the accusation that he’s been paid any money by anybody to spread disinformation, but IRS documents prove John Passacantando swims in multi-millions of dark money, and when it concerns his and Davies’ worthless (worthless!) two–trick pony “evidence” about collaborative industry disinformation campaigns, the only real ongoing conspiracy effort in the entire climate issue may very well be the potentially epic acts of defamation these two have committed, if both (and other possible co-conspirators) knew their cornerstone memos was false but promulgated the evidence with malice anyway, or if they all hurled the accusations with reckless disregard on whether the accusations were true or not.

But back to where we started: Sen Sanders et al. shouldn’t be imploring Attorney General Garland to bring suits against the fossil fuel industry for longstanding, carefully coordinated campaign to mislead the public, AG Garland should bring suits against the people who project these accusations over a variety of corruption — say, for example, Hunter Biden’s possible corrupt business dealings with foreign businesses that may also have involved his father, then-Vice President of America. Along with potentially what looks like a highly suspect collaborative effort between Hunter Biden and Al Gore’s then-CEO of Gore’s Climate Reality Project Maggie Fox back in 2012 back in 2012 – 2014.
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* There’s always more. Like so many other prominent accusers on that side of the global warming issue who cannot. keep. their. stories. straight. when telling their tales, Richard Wiles claims Kert Davies founded the Center for Climate Investigations in 2013. Davies’ own Twitter header photo places the date on Feb 21, 2014. Davies didn’t post his first Tweet until two days later, and his first post at his CIC site is dated Feb 18, 2014.

And it doesn’t end there. Up next will either be is my blog post dissection of Naomi Oreskes repeat blunders in her latest Friend of the Court filing on behalf of the plaintiffs in District of Columbia v ExxonMobil.