It wasn’t for a lack of trying on my part right before the May 1 “Denial, Disinfo & Doublespeak” U.S. Senate Budget Committee hearing to warn staffers of the GOP committee members that their star witness, Geoffrey Supran, was massively vulnerable to withering questions about his alleged “expertise” on the existence of ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns. I even went so far as to turn my emails to those staffers into an open letter to widen the chance of other Senate GOP staffers seeing my alert, where they might relay the opportunity to the proper people. Marc Morano of ClimateDepot retweeted my alert about my blog post, which enabled my Tweet to achieve nearly 700+ views, when my others usually only get tens of views.
Alas, to no avail. Even worse now, Geoffrey Supran actually walked into that hearing with his Prepared Written Testimony where he all but handed his head to the GOP Committee members on a silver platter. Or, in another visual analogy, he not only brought in the rope to hang himself, he dragged in the gallows behind him. Or all but handed the execution rifle to the GOP members with his written testimony and supplied the single bullet to kill his credibility.
The man is exactly that inept. Watch this:
The main body of his prepared testimony is only 12 pages long, followed by another six pages of footnotes, and then 230 pages of irrelevant add-on reports. Why are they irrelevant? Because when his core assertion that ‘Exxon knew as far back as the 1970s that their products caused global warming harm, but hid that knowledge behind disinformation campaigns” is totally without merit, then all the secondary fluff that follows it is not worthy of consideration. It’s akin to declaring the moon is made of green cheese based on two reports and an accompanying illustration of a green-tinted moon, followed by hundreds of pages on the tangents of cheese fermentation.
But Geoffrey Supran could not even get past the second page of his written text without citing the collective enviro-activists’ cornerstone evidence which supposedly proves fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns took place:
The 1998 American Petroleum Institute “victory will be achieved” memo was nothing more than a set of truisms on how the public would be better informed if they knew more of both sides of the issue. It was never implemented, and I have an entire tag category of blog posts explaining the massive faults with the multi-decade promulgation of that memo. It contains no actual disinformation — there’s no “there” to it; if its truisms were mirror-flipped to reflect what enviro-activists wish for, it would be happily endorsed by Greenpeace.
The 1991 “reposition global warming” memo has long been falsely attributed to the Western Fuels Association’ tiny, practically unseen by any significant portion of the public “Information Council for the Environment” pilot project public relations campaign — it was a rejected proposal (WFA tossed their copy into the trash) which had unsolicited name choices and unsolicited audience targeting suggestions, and its prime directive was too abstract to comprehend.
Nutshell: rejected / unused ‘plans’ are totally worthless as evidence that actions were carried out as directed by those plans. Duh!!
And yet just as recently as this Senate Budget Hearing seeking to ‘expose disinformation,’ those two worthless memos are the very best the entire enviro-activist mob has to nail the fossil fuel industry to the wall.
Where do Geoffrey Supran’s footnote citations go to for those two sets? His endnote #22 for the “victory” memo goes to “https://perma.cc/LJ33-LSEB,” it’s the first time I’ve ever seen that used. As I’ve detailed numerous times at GelbspanFiles, here in particular, all other citations of the “victory” memo ultimately trace initially to Greenpeace USA’s 2013 upload of it to the innocuous-looking “DocumentCloud” site via Kert Davies, a decade-long operative there, who subsequently left it to form his Climate Files documents site, an outgrowth of his Climate Investigations Center. Greenpeace’s scans actually date back to their 1998 report and its horribly degraded photocopy scans of the memo.
For whatever strange reason Supran’s strange “perm.cc” link creation effort leads . . . predictably, where else? . . . to Kert Davies’s scans at his Climate Files site. Why Supran chose not to link straight to the current online Climate Files page is anybody’s guess.
Where does Geoffrey Supran’s footnote citation #23 go to for the “reposition global warming” memo? Kert Davies. Directly, not behind some innocuous”perm.cc” link.
No joke. And notice the “Informed Citizens” name there.
Davies’ page link – meanwhile – features not only the “Chicken Little” advertorial adored by legions of enviro-activist accusers that was never published anywhere, it also features the unsolicited spelled-out ICE acronym that was never used.
Like I said before, Supran is exactly that inept.
During his live appearance at the Hearing, Supran said (starting at the 1:50:15 point) “… as a leaked memo put it in 1998. ‘victory will be achieved when average citizens and the media recognize uncertainties in climate science’.” It looked like he was reading straight out of his prepared testimony, but he skipped over the “reposition global warming” memo. Odd, that memo looks far more like a sinister money-backed operation directive that some generic-sounding truism.
There’s more, though, in his testimony. Again, seemingly reading from his prepared testimony, he says unequivocally starting at the 1:51:58 point,
As a scholar of disinformation, I do not use the word ‘lie’ lightly. But no other word adequately describes the oil industry’s brazen efforts to mislead the public …. the oil industry has funded contrarians and economists. For example, astrophysicist Willie Soon published academic articles in exchange for 1¼ million dollars from Exxon, API, the Koch Brothers …
In essence, the accusation against Dr Soon is a lie. Provably so, and arguably has strayed into outright defamation territory whether Supran knows it not to be true or if he repeated this lie with reckless disregard to whether it was true or not.
Who did Supran cite for that accusation against Dr Soon in his prepared testimony? Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center – meaning Kert Davies. His citation goes to a Greenpeace link . . . which itself never mentions a solitary work directly referring to Davies’ Climate Investigations Center. Readers must jump through a hoop before they find the CIC reference — that arises after clicking on the link in Greenpeace’s “UPDATE Feb. 2015” item, a February 2015 New York Times article about Dr Soon which I covered back in that same month/year, about what struck me back then as Kert Davies’ mysterious public reappearance after he’d inexplicably departed from Greenpeace two years earlier. My Feb 2015 blog post noted how the NYT could not bring itself to say Davies previously worked at Greenpeace, only only stating instead that he was the Executive Director of CIC.
Geoffrey Supran is the one who put Greenpeace and Kert Davies together. He should not have been the “expert witness” at this Senate Budget Hearing on disinformation. Davies should have been.
Completely missed in this hearing was the opportunity to challenge Supran on any of this. The only thing that came out of it was questions from the GOP Senator John Kennedy, which embarrassed Supran – in a profane way I won’t repeat here – over retweets of a pro-Hamas group. It illustrated Supran’s political zealotry side interests … and did nothing to expose how he does not actually know a thing about fossil fuel industry disinformation.
One more thing (because the central problem to the enviro-activist mob’s is ever present) – the other witness at this Senate Budge Hearing was Sharon Eubanks. Remember what I said above about how the pair of ye olde worthless memos are the very best this mob has to offer to prove disinformation campaigns exist? In her own submitted written testimony, Ms Eubanks dutifully regurgitated the “victory” memos accusation, and then doubled down on it in her much longer written testimony afterthought-type addendum, where she also spit up the “reposition global warming” memos …. while contradicting both Geoffrey Supran and Kert Davies on what the actual name of the ICE campaign was. This ‘afterthought’ addendum is actually from her prepared testimony for an October 2019 House hearing – I covered that wipeout of Ms Eubanks here. Ms Eubanks provided no clickable or spelled-out citation weblinks for either her “victory” memo or “reposition global warming” references in that 2019 prepared testimony or this current one. But if there is one huge hint who her source is, it’s seen in the reference following her her “victory” memo reference, one of seven going to Kert Davies’ Climate Files.
What was the very best the enviro-activist mob had nearly 4½ years ago is still the very best they have today. And it is every bit as worthless today as it was back when it first started getting its ongoing, growing media traction almost 30 years ago . . . where Kert Davies worked. He and his boss there were revealed in recent months as invitees to a 2015 meeting in the New York state Attorney General’s office, where the teaser about the duo was that they were about to break news of the Exxon bribery of Dr Soon.
See the pattern here?
Psychological projection being one of the primary hallmarks of far leftists, when Geoffrey Supran says there is a brazen conspiracy effort in the climate issue to mislead the public, he’s pointing an arrow the size of Texas at himself and his fellow accusation promulgators. They are the people who clumsily leave the door of accountability ajar with their dishonesty, and lawmakers should push it wide open.
Such is the tragedy of these events. People like Supran and Eubanks regurgitate their disinformation from a core source, and they will brazenly keep doing so unless they are backed up against the wall with the brightest of spotlights aimed at them to either prove their accusations or to roll on the people who spoon-fed that trash to them.