On Oct 4, Multnomah County amended their filing to add a gas utility company as a defendant, along with Art Robinson’s Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM); more specifically, as I will detail below, his Oregon Petition Project. My response: Oh, brother. Redux. I already dissected the spectacular blunders surrounding the 2023 Multnomah v Exxon lawsuit; that bizarre filing effort looks like little more than a cloddish plagiarized copy of Puerto Rico v Exxon, which itself was so maladroitly cobbled together that I needed to do a two-part dissection of that one, plus I had to place an additional detail three months back at the end of part 2. I didn’t cover Puerto Rico‘s sections mentioning Art Robinson’s Oregon Petition Project because my two dissection posts were long enough already. I’ll admit error on failing to mention it now, it involves one more problem potentially tying their ineptness to that of the supposedly unassociated San Francisco Sher Edling law firm and their boilerplate-copy lawsuit filings. Since somebody within the Oregon law firms seems particularly bent on pointing an arrow the size of Texas at their inexplicable apparent plagiarism blunder … well, let’s now examine that angle and where it blows up in their faces, in four distinct ways. The full amended complaint is here.     

Item 1 on how their efforts blow up: I’m not exaggerating about the increasingly worse appearance problem of plagiarizing out of the Puerto Rico v Exxon filing for whichever of the law firms representing Multnomah County. Witness here, and witness also Multnomah making the teeniest of word changes here, and again (with a little more wording changes since Art Robinson’s “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine” is now a defendant) here. It’s a matter of time before someone with more money and resources than I have will use comparison / illustration software to see just how much identical or almost identical wording is shared between these supposedly unrelated unrelated law firms filing lawsuits 3700 miles apart from each other. Investigators will also be looking to see if there are undisclosed connections, too. What’s one angle to explore? One of the lawyers representing Multnomah County, Jeffrey B. Simon, mentioned his prior work with opioid litigation in this two week-old interview about the Exxon lawsuit. I’m aware of only one other lawyer making a similar statement within an interview about an “ExxonKnew” lawsuit. Melissa Sims, lead lawyer for Puerto Rico, in this Aug 2023 interview. She wanted in on opioid litigation. An elemental question arises here – is the ‘bright shiny object’ of climate litigation dangled in front of ovoid-chasing lawyers? The Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) is suggested as being behind promoting/recruiting for such litigation. Not helping attorney Sims on this was her joint interview appearance with CCI president Richard (not David) Wiles in July 2023.

Item 2: Want to see where Multnomah‘s 2023 fiing and their days-old second amended complaint are word-for-word identical to Puerto Rico …….. up to the point were they decided a key claim was not worthy of including from the identical citation source in all three? Witness here, here and then here in Puerto Rico.

The list of signatories was filled not with 17,000 actual scientists, but fictitious names, deceased persons, and celebrities, including pranksters successfully submitting the names of Charles Darwin, a member of the Spice Girls, and characters from Star Wars, and getting them briefly included on the list.

With that much ‘damaging’ evidence against Robinson’s OISM group and his Oregon Petition Project . . . . why didn’t the law firm representing the municipalities of Puerto Rico sue Art Robinson first? Are they so dumb as to let a golden opportunity like that slide right by?

Item 3, on how their efforts point to the ‘Puerto Rico plagiarizing from Sher Edling’ situation: “Wow!!,” say Al Gore enviro-activists, “Evil Arthur Robinson should be sued for concocting who knows how many thousands of fake names in that 17,000 pile!” “Wait a minute,” say people with significant knowledge of the skeptic side of the climate issue – and even people like Dr Michael Mann – “the Oregon Petition Project has over 31,000 signatures.” Both Puerto Rico and the original and amended Multnomah filings link straight to the petition’s website, where it clearly shows the tally to this day, and has had tallies (seen in archived pages) higher than 17,000 ever since minimally Oct 2007.

Oddly enough, in the Multnomah filings and in Puerto Rico, their footnotes disclosed the 31k signatories figure. So why feature the 17k figure in the main paragraphs of the filings? And is it pure total coincidence that the attorneys representing both Multnomah and Puerto Rico – again, 3700 miles apart minimally – last visited the Petition’s website on the exact same day??

Meanwhile, want to see where that ‘17,000‘ sentence part is found in suspiciously similar form, right before the bits about singers and movie characters? It’s on PDF file page 37 / print page 33 of the June 2020 District of Columbia v ExxonMobil filing. The filing which the Sher Edling law firm claims ownership of. It contains exactly zero footnotes, a person can only guess on who their source was for that accusation – but hold that thought for just a couple of moments. Where did the citation source for Puerto Rico and both Multnomah filings, Dr Michael Mann, get his info? His 2012 “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” book’s page 66 footnote #27reference is for an October 2001 “Skepticism about Skeptics” Scientific American magazine item, which is literally nothing more than a two-paragraph sidebar to some other article . . . . . it says nothing about Spice Girls singers or Star Wars movie characters, or even fictitious names of any type.

So far, this is not working out well for anyone. Moderately wise of someone within the law firms filing Multnomah to ditch Dr Mann’s false assertion about fake celebrity names in the Oregon Petition. Exceedingly careless of them and the firm representing Puerto Rico to not ditch the citation of Dr Mann’s book altogether, and find any other source supporting the accusation about “fictitious names, deceased persons, and celebrities.”

So now, where did Sher Edling and Dr Mann get their accusation info?

I covered that already with both my July 7, 2020 dissection of “D.C. v ExxonMobil, et. al Pt 2: the ‘17,000 Scientists’ Source Problem” and my much earlier pair of AmericanThinker examinations in Nov 2011 and in Oct 2010 of a then-current mentions of the Oregon Petition, where I detailed:

• an archive link where readers can check for themselves if any fake / celebrity names were put in the petition
• the 2008 (subsequently dismissed) Village of Kivalina v Exxon lawsuit contained the accusation against it.
• Kivalina‘s source was a decade-older Associated Press article quoting John Passacantando of Ozone Action.
• the same Passacantando who tried peddling the false claims to the New York Times.
• the same Passacantando who was somehow orchestrating a counterspin effort with a person in the White House to trash Boston Globe reporter Jeff Jacoby’s otherwise straight news 1998 report about the petition.
• the same Passacantando, with his tag-along subordinate at Greenpeace USA who were later (post-Greenpeace) revealed to be behind the false accusations that skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon was receiving Exxon bribes, and who were also revealed to be involved in basically vendetta-like efforts against Exxon.

Item 4: Up above in item 1 about Richard Wiles and his Center for Climate Integrity — there’s one more bone-headed detail concerning how this days-old second amended Multnomah complaint was put out to the public. I forget exactly how I first learned of the initial 2023 filing, it most likely showed up as a day-later search result in the daily email alerts I get from Google on any internet pieces with “global warming” in them. Wherever it appeared, the link for the filing went straight to the county’s own “multco” PDF file web page. I chanced upon this second amended version through my own daily search for spotting when the state of Michigan sues some fossil fuel company. No news of that yet, but a few days back the top result was for . . . . . wait for it . . . . . CCI’s Oct 11 announcement about the amended Oregon lawsuit. Try as hard as I might so far, I cannot find any other PDF file for this amended complaint other than CCI’s PDF file. It’s as though the county itself is not aware of their own revised lawsuit — do a search for “multco” combined with “exxon” with no time specificity, and the result is only for the June 2023 filing. Tighten up the search to only within the last year, which would included the last several weeks, and no result comes up.

How does it work that only Richard Wiles and his CCI have the file? And, lest anyone forget or is unaware of it, we’re talking about that CCI with its barely year-old Director of Special Investigations being Kert Davies. Who very likely was privy to his Ozone Action boss John Passacantando’s false 1998 accusations about the Oregon Petition Project, since he was working at Ozone Action within months of Passacantando undertaking those efforts.

Implausible as it may sound – people might say “surely this all can’t be that simple” – but it sure looks like a straight line can be drawn from this latest maneuver in Multnomah County (and their other cornerstone accusation) all the way back to the late 1990s era of John Passacantando’s Ozone Action group finally getting real momentum built up under the efforts to steer the public away from taking the science-based assessments of skeptic climate scientists and related experts seriously.

As ever, as it has always been from not long after the inception of the Al Gore era of the climate issue, the whole thing only has two legs to stand on, “settled science” and “liars-for-hire” skeptics. Yank out that second leg, expose it as the apparent epic defamation it is, and the ‘climate crisis’ issue cannot remain standing on just the first one. Undertake that effort, and the killer question will not be whether the fossil fuel industry conspired to deceive the public, but instead how big the conspiracy extends in the effort to deceive the public about the credibility of skeptic climate scientists, whose science-based assessments could potentially kill the ‘climate crisis’ hysteria. And people will ask how complicit the legacy news media has been on keeping the issue alive this whole time.