There’s some irony to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s 9/23/24 lawsuit speaking of “the plastic waste and pollution crisis” while only mentioning the other ‘crisis du jour’ “climate change” four times (the first instance is actually just a reference to a Canadian organization’s name). The lawsuit makes no comparison to alleged deception by the fossil fuel industry over their ‘knowledge’ of the harm of human-induced global warming. So, what possible connection(s) could there be to the efforts to smear skeptic climate scientists as ‘shills’ working for Exxon? Allow me to illustrate. Be sure to click on each link, the screencapture images will set up the big problem for AG Bonta.
While there was news of this lawsuit just days ago, and I recognized Rob Bonta’s name from his highly questionable identically titled 2023 lawsuit over global warming damages, I ignored the temptation to look for the actual filing, despite his odd notion about ‘Exxon knew plastics recycling was a crock, but hid that from the public.’ Exxon duped the public into throwing out plastic because the public thought plastic trash was recycled anyway?? Utterly illogical.
However, when a prominent figure I personally know in the climate issue reacted the next day the same way I did, that prompted me to go look for the filing to see if it possibly equated plastics ‘pollution’ to the equally ludicrous notion of ‘climate pollution.’ So, using the same checklist of key words / names I use whenever I see prominent people hurling the accusation about ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns, I looked inside Rob Bonta’s plastics lawsuit to see if any popped up. None of the ‘usual suspect’ names I know were there, and it did not compare plastics industry memos to ye olde endlessly regurgitated-by-eviros ‘leaked fossil fuel industry memos,’ which just never stop popping up elsewhere.
I tried one more simple word search, for just “climate.”
Bingo.
Yes, as noted above, four times as “climate change,” but the very first result was for the Center for Climate Integrity. CCI, a major outfit’s name on my checklist, I have a tag category specifically for them for any of my blog posts prominently mentioning their highly suspect efforts. Repeating from my checklist for emphasis, both the Climate Litigation Watch website and the Energy in Depth website detail how CCI is apparently one of the main drivers pushing any gullible state / city / municipality leader in America to consider filing an “ExxonKnew” lawsuit.
Regarding CCI, one especially damaging detail about them is how they recruited Roland C “Kert” Davies only last year to work for them as their new “Director of Special Investigations.” As I’ve said numerous times here at GelbspanFiles, he’s that Kert Davies, tracing all the way back to the old forgotten Ozone Action group in the late 1990s, the group that somehow magically “obtained’ ye olde “reposition global warming” memos and who claimed the “Chicken Little” ad was proof of industry disinformation campaigns – that never-implemented memo set and that never-published “Chicken Little” ad, which the Sher Edling law firm cites (hold that thought about the Sher Edling name for a few moments) as coming from Kert Davies’ Center for Climate Investigations “Climate Files” industry docs site.
Now, in this lawsuit, AG Rob Bonta cites CCI’s report “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis” eight more times, but with no website link to it. Back in February of this year, CCI’s page introducing their plastics report featured a headline trumpeting “Not just climate: Big Oil lied about plastic recycling, too, and must be held accountable.” Sound familiar? Think: “Just like Big Tobacco denied and lied about no harm from smoking, Big Oil denied and lied about no harm from their products causing global warming.”
Their report 60+ page PDF file report is here. Since we already have one prominent item out of my checklist, might there be any within this report? Yes, you could say basically three, none beneficial to anyone on that side of the ‘enviro-crisis’ / ‘industry disinformation campaigns’ side.
Since Kert Davies has never mentioned ‘plastics pollution’ in his anti-Exxon work that I’m aware of, but nevertheless is an enviro-activist now working at CCI does any of his work in any form appear in this CCI plastics pollution report? Oh yeh.
1) the notorious never-published-anywhere “Chicken Little” ad
2) the unsolicited, never-used “Informed Citizens” name variant of the actual “Information Council for the Environment” stillborn PR campaign, which itself was seen by almost nobody in the country
3) the citation source for the ad goes straight to Kert Davies’ Climate Files website
Keep peeling back the onion layers of problems, and it gets no better for California AG Rob Bonta:
• Kert Davies – currently at CCI, formerly the proprietor of Climate Files, supplied this literally worthless Chicken Little ad to the Sher Edling law firm, as I noted above.
• As I detailed in my 2023 dissection of AG Bonta’s other CA v Exxon lawsuit, his office apparently plagiarized its meritless accusation against skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon basically out of the prior most-recent-in-Sher-Edling’s-copy-’n-paste-lawsuits, Platkin v Exxon — with one very odd exception: Bonta’s lawsuit didn’t use Sher Edling’s multiyear-repeated press release source / archive link variant for the accusation, a different source was substituted.
• As I detailed in my dissection of Chicago v BP, Sher Edling’s February 2024 boilerplate copy lawsuit, their accusation against Dr Soon was literally word-for-word identical to AG Bonta’s . . . right down to Bonta’s oddly switched citation source. Rather than laboriously underline all the identical words, I just put in a translucent blue box where they ended.
Both AG Bonta and the Sher Edling law firm have a whole lot of ’splaining to do, considering both are supposedly totally independent of each other when it comes to these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits.
There’s a far larger situation going on here demanding deep examination. The core people in the ‘environmental crisis industry’ have a whole lot of ’splaining to do regarding what they do. Patrick Moore, one of the original quarter of Greenpeace founders, and who is otherwise deeply involved in righteous environmental / humanitarian causes, tells the story of how he left the group when they decided to see if they could take action fighting the ‘chlorine crisis.’
Chlorine outrage was a step too far into ludicrous territory for the old Greenpeace group; suing Exxon for plastics pollution may be a step too for the current pushers of enviro-lawfare. Both things unequivocally do more good than harm. Deaths from chlorine gas leaks / plastic toxicity are minuscule compared water borne diseases being stopped / sterile packaging preventing deadly germs from spreading.
This new plastics lawfare angle just pure overreach, the mistake was in not finding some other outfit than The Center for Climate Integrity” to print up a plastics screed that has zero to do with climate. Comparable to how the late Stephen Schneider criticized the Ozone Action group’s name when it was no longer even focused on ozone depletion during the final years of John Passacantando and Kert Davies running it. Ozone Action’s original purpose concerned the ‘ozone layer depletion crisis’ where polar bears would go blind from the excess UV rays if action wasn’t immediately taken to solve the crisis. Polar bears can still see just fine today.
Question is, how deeply connected are all the continual ‘crisis’ topics? AG Bonta’s lawsuit uses the word “crisis” a minimum of 79 times when there is no plastics crisis whatsoever, and there sure isn’t a global warming crisis, nor was there ever any cooling crisis. The guys at Climate Litigation Watch, in their blog post one month ago were betting on this newest ‘plastics crisis’ effort being just more of the same ol’ playbook tactics seen in the global cooling crisis / ozone hole crisis / acid rain crisis / climate emergency crisis. It’s what these enviro-alarmists do.
One more thing — back in mid 2008, when both Kert Davies and his boss John Passacantando were working at Greenpeace USA, the news of the day was the ‘floating plastics patch the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean’ crisis. Both men were later caught in efforts to ‘delegitimize Exxon’ along with working to impugn the credibility of Dr Willie Soon. How long are the odds that the roots of this latest plastics lawfare maneuver may well have its roots back in 2008? Did CA AG Rob Bonta just point an arrow the size of Texas at the origin of the ozone / global warming / plastics crises?
Just askin.’