It’s a 100% certain bet that none of the folks at the Public Citizen ‘consumer advocacy organization’ read my GelbspanFiles blog about the 100% certain inevitable crash of their prior ‘prosecute for Clima-Homicide™’ proposal (my post got even wider worldwide viewing as a guest post at WUWT, complete with a handy ‘you people that stupid?’ meme image at the top). Otherwise, they would not have come up with this announcement on October 15, (er … hold that thought until the very end of this post) October 17, 2024 regarding their latest proposal idea to prosecutors:

“We’re building the case for criminal prosecution of Big Oil brick by brick. Here is the first “prosecution memo” that lays out the case for filing, and winning, criminal charges for “reckless endangerment.” The law is clear. Barriers are only political.”

What the law is actually fundamentally clear about is that when presenting a case to a judge, the evidence you present must actually support your accusation. If it does not . . . the case is dismissed. If you’ve got no alternative evidence, that’s the end of the line on your effort.  Period.  What these people at the Public Citizen group are either oblivious to – or actually know but hope nobody notices – is that their ‘evidence’ for the claim that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns in collusion with skeptic scientist ‘shills’ is literally worthless. Public Citizen is not building a case ‘brick-by-brick,’ either, they appear to be doing nothing more than copying line-by-line from what already serves as ‘cornerstone evidence’ in one form or another about ‘industry-led disinformation campaigns’ in basically all of the currently filed “ExxonKnew” U.S. lawsuits, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico and points in between. I’m not exaggerating. What Public Citizen is doing is committing political suicide by again emphasizing the fatal fault plaguing the collective effort to accuse Big Oil of running disinformation campaigns to deceive the public.

The mystery about their illogical prosecution angle, which inexplicably sprang up in early 2023, is whether this is an effort to muscle in on the territory already (sort of) staked out by the Sher Edling law firm back in 2017, or if they are just some kind of new partner in the overall “ExxonKnew” lawfare efforts. I say “sort of” because the 2017 ‘brick-by-brick‘ territory of Sher Edling’s looks like the territory already mapped out by the 2008 Kivalina v Exxon lawsuit.

So – to emphasize how Public Citizen inadvertently again points an arrow the size of Texas to this overarching fatal problem – let’s do the quick hits between their July ‘2nd degree homicide’ ludicrous proposal and this new ‘reckless endangerment’ ludicrous proposal.

First, however, please note: while the July 2024 ‘climate homicide’ proposal lists four authors, and while the Oct 2024 ‘reckless climate endangerment’ proposal lists no authors, I label the collective ludicrous ideas and their fatal faults as the principal work of David Arkush, the Public Citizen group’s Climate Program Director, because he got top billing for the original March 2023 ‘scholarly paper’ about the notion of ‘climate homicide.’ It’s his baby, the buck stops with him on all of this. Also, in my March 2023 blog post about the news item of that ‘scholarly paper’ pre-publication draft, I mentioned how Arkush had – inexplicably, I thought – apparently ‘not gotten the memo’ from other climate activists that the most damaging bit of ‘evidence’ to say fossil fuel executives ran disinformation campaigns was the oft-regurgitated “reposition global warming” memos. Arkush only went with the second-best, the 1998 API “victory will be achieved” memos. I brought that up again in my April 21, 2024 blog post after I saw someone must have told him about memo set and accusations associated with it. If I may suggest it to investigators / energy company defendant attorneys — it would be wise to put him under oath to find out who taught him that lesson.

As I detailed in my dissection of Arkush’s July 2024 proposal for Arizona prosecutors on filing ‘climate homicide’ charges, it contained what I composite into the collective ‘best evidence’ the enviro-activists have in their arsenal for the accusation about fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns: “Victory will be achieved when we pay Dr Wei-Hock Soon $1.2 million to reposition global warming as theory (not fact) via deceptive newspaper advertorials.” For some odd reason surrounding the “reposition” accusation, Arkush and his co-authors did not repeat his quote out of the April 2024 Newsweek article about the “Chicken Little” advertorial, but instead substituted a line about “the jaws of a waiting dragon.”

Their bit about the “victory” memos was spelled out in one of their proposal’s footnotes. Their swipe at Dr Soon was pages earlier, while their now-mandatory inclusion of the “reposition global warming” memos accusation – with the ‘dragon’ line – was just a page after the accusation about the API “victory” memos . . . in no less than a two paragraph footnote.

Arkush and his Public Citizen associates must have gotten a stern lecture of how dumb that footnote and the footnote for the “victory” memos looked. So, while they identically repeated the main-text appearance of their swipe at Dr Soon in this new ‘reckless endangerment’ proposal, somebody decided to put the back-to-back footnotes about the “victory” / “reposition” memos into the main body text of the report.

Doesn’t matter who you are or where you hurl these accusations, the facts about them are fatal:

• The “victory will be achieved” memos were never implemented anywhere. Even the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine acknowledged that problem back in 2005.
• Dr Willie Soon (he does not go by “Wei-Hock”) was never paid $1.2 million by Exxon to do anything, as he details briefly here and more deeply here. The Smithsonian Institute took their 2015 press release offline in 2020 (click here, it ain’t there, and hasn’t been since sometime before Sept 2020) because at the end of their ‘investigation,’ he did not fail to properly disclose his research funding.
• The “reposition global warming” memos were never implemented anywhere. Not even their illogical audience targeting suggestions, nor their alternative “Informed Citizens” name suggestion for the official “ICE” “Information Council for the Environment” PR campaign name.
• Neither the “Chicken Little” nor the ‘waiting dragon’ advertorials were published anywhere. Both of the images contain the never used “Informed Citizens” name.

Doesn’t matter whether you have a 50-page proposal to prosecutors on how to sue fossil fuel executives or 200+ page lawsuits filed against fossil fuel companies, all of that other material is out the window when your core accusation about ‘industry-led disinformation campaigns’ is based on ‘evidence’ that is flat out worthless for proving your accusation.

On top of it all, what should be abundantly obvious is that you can’t file charges for 2nd degree climate murder if you cannot even prove that a murder happened anywhere from the actions of any fossil fuel executive. Uh – yeah – fossil fuel and its by-products can endanger a life simply from being flammable, but how many multiple millions of lives were enhanced from liquid fuel for transportation and plastics for germ-free food and medical supplies? Meanwhile, skeptic climate scientists and other experts on the topic can describe at length how what little global warming we’ve seen over the last 150 years cannot be attributed in any majority to human activity, while adding that prior warm times such as the Medieval Warm Period was also labeled as the Medieval Optimum because it offered longer growing seasons and better living conditions than cooler times. There is no endangerment from a slightly warmer planet.

So, the elemental question arises about anyone enslaved to promulgating this “ExxonKnew-but-deceived-the-public” accusation show: are they useful idiots who believe in such tripe and never do any due diligence to find out if it has merit, or are they a cog in the wheel of a multi-decade effort among a core clique of people keeping the accusation alive with constant regurgitations of it? These false accusations is all these people have, it’s all the’ve ever had going all the way back to the 1990s (uh, yeah … that Environmental Working Group and that Ozone Action and that Greenpeace USA). For some NY prosecution office attorneys, perhaps, this new proposal may just be a repeat from the 2015 proposal rehash ( … uh ….. yeah).

If the regurgitators here are just a cog, it would be wise of investigators / energy company defendant attorneys to find out if the any of them are weak enough when faced with prosecution to roll on the folks who are the source of the whole thing.
————————————————————————
Oh, one more thing … because it just never ends with the suspect behavior here: Up at the top, I had a line-thru about the Oct 15 appearance online of this ludicrous proposal. There’s a specific reason for that. Plenty of news erupted on Oct 17 about the report appearing online. But I saw the mere existence of it in the 11pm hour of Oct 16th appearing as a result within one of my occasional random searches for the words “reposition global warming, indicating it was online a day before. When I clicked on the link for the PDF file, no matter where else the link turned up, even within Public Citizen’s own pages, I was met with ‘nothing to see here.’ I tweeted about that odd vanished report situation 5 minutes after midnight on Oct 17th, and then I went to bed.

So… was there something in the report on the 15th which somebody decided was in need of scrubbing, or did some hapless intern at Public Citizen jump the gun two days prematurely which might have just been awkward timing for whoever it was planning to report about endorsements of the proposal on the 17th and not before?