On Oct 7, 2024, news reports (e.g. Thomas Catenacci’s “Anti-Energy Lawfare“) described the same-day release of Senator Ted Cruz’s / Rep James Comer’s investigation analysis Sher Edling, the San Francisco law firm that is – by my current count – ‘boilerplate-copying’ 18 “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits from one place to the next, and ‘assisting’ in 4 others.

Elections matter. At the time of the Oct 7 news reports, pre-general election, the U.S. Senate was in the minority. With the Senate now firmly set in the majority and with Senator Cruz having subpoena power, that changes the situation. While his and the joint investigation with Rep Comer focuses principally on the dark money funding of Sher Edling, that focus could broaden to cover what I consider a far bigger set of fatal faults surrounding that law firm. So, first is my brief number lineup, followed by more details below for each, which include screencapture image links and blog post links supporting the particular items at greater depth: 1) provably false accusations of industry-corruption behavior. 2) Hidden original citation source. 3) Subsequent text omissions. 4) deceptively cropped images. 5) The Naomi Oreskes Problem. 6) The Dr Willie Soon false accusation. 7) Matt Edling and Victor Sher. 8) (stay tuned, I’ll likely add more to this post at a later date)

1) “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.” In all of their ‘boilerplate copy’ filings, this is essentially all the Sher Edling law firm has as viable evidence that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. Each of the above red-highlighted words is from their individual accusations.

• 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; I have an entire tag category of blog posts about the highly suspect multi-decade promulgation of that memo set. Its truisms could be mirror-flipped to reflect what enviro-activists wish for.
• Dr Willie Soon was never paid $1.2 million by Exxon to do anything, as he explains here.
• The 1991 “reposition global warming” memos – falsely attributed to the Western Fuels Association – were never implemented anywhere, including their illogical audience targeting suggestions. The memo set’s alternative spelled-out ICE name, “Informed Citizens for the Environment” was unsolicited and rejected with the rest of the memo set.
• Two out of the three ‘newspaper advertorials’ Sher Edling relies of to say ‘disinformation campaigns happened’ were never published anywhere while the third – published in three small city newspapers – contains no actual disinformation.

2) Specifically regarding the “victory” memos, my dissection of the October 2022 Platkin v Exxon, lawsuit illustrates how Sher Edling had – since day 1 of their filings – used the same innocuous-looking “DocumentClould” link as their source for the “victory memos.” With only small changes to the link, it is revealed that the file was uploaded in 2013 by Kert Davies when he worked at Greenpeace. Why does Sher Edling seemingly hide the original source?

3) As I showed in my October 2017 blog post relating specifically to the “reposition global warming” memos accusation, the first of Sher Edling’s lawsuits quoted the never-implemented public relations target audience of “older less-educated men” and “younger, lower-income women,” implying sinister intent on the part of fossil fuel company executives. The very latest of their lawsuits, as I showed in my dissection of that one, omitted the latter claim. However, the omission of that latter part began almost immediately with Sher Edling’s second trio of Dec 2017/Jan 2018 filings, e.g. in Santa Cruz v Chevron, as I noted here. They are never again mentioned in any post-2017 filing by Sher Edling. Question is, if both narrowly targeted PR audience subjects are proof of bad intent, why omit the latter targets?

• Ross Gelbspan spoke of both audience member targets in his 1997 book.
• Al Gore said Gelbspan was the discoverer of the memo, but Gore quoted both audience targets in his 1992 book years before Gelbspan ever mentioned them.

4) Regarding the two never-published ‘newspaper advertorials’ and the one that was actually published, there is an appearance of deceptive cropping of all three within Sher Edling’s ‘boilerplate copy’ lawsuits, first-to-last, from the County of San Mateo v. Chevron July 2017 filing to Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico v. Exxon in July 2024. Inexplicably in an October 2017 video presentation, Vic Sher himself showed that there was ad text below the big planet image of the “Most Serious Problem” ad. He further said in that video presentation (27: 52 point) that all three were published in the New York Times, and even more inexplicably gets the name of the ICE campaign wrong even though it is clearly spelled out on the screen right in front of him, calling it the “Informed Council for the Environment” instead. Was that some kind of Freudian slip? It’s pretty much impossible to read the blurry ad images in his lawsuit filings, but what is readable elsewhere at the bottom of the “Chicken Little” ad and at the bottom of the “Doomsday Canceled” ad is the never-used “Informed Citizens for the Environment” name. Where is “elsewhere”? Those same horribly degraded photocopy images used to be in Greenpeace/Ozone Action‘s now-offline scans collection, which I downloaded years earlier. Fortunately for investigators, Greenpeace’s PDF file for this whole pile are nicely preserved at the Internet Archive.

• Ozone Action’s Science Policy Director was Kert Davies. Ozone Action was the group where the collective accusation surrounding the “reposition global warming” memos and allegedly related content began getting steadily increasing media traction.
• After he left Greenpeace, Davies – via his own Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files website – was credited with supplying content to Sher Edling.

5) I have a separate SPM on Naomi Oreskes here. As I implied in my May 2021 blog post, having Naomi Oreskes on retainer at their firm is an open invite to find out where the smear of skeptic climate scientists originates, along with finding out what the real reason is for Oreskes being involved in the climate issue in any manner, considering the sheer amount of her inconsistent narratives and her fundamental inability to keep her own personal stories straight.

• She claimed the ICE PR campaign operated under a name it never used and a directive they never operated by; her copies of the never-published newspaper ads are the same as the Greenpeace scans.
• Sher Edling cites, e.g. in Honolulu v Sunoco, her very obscure book chapter contribution as a source for an industry memo that is little more than a truism which any industry official would make if they are facing an unsupportable call for their industry to be wiped out. It was within that book chapter that she also said she was alerted to the assortment of memos – and advertorials – attributed to Western Fuels by a person who turns out to be formerly associated with Al Gore, where the association included Gore accusing a skeptic climate scientist of illicit industry funding. Are Oreskes’ copies of the memos and other docs from Al Gore? Is the lousy Greenpeace/Ozone Action photocopies collection the identical set?
• In my dissection of the seventh of Sher Edling’s filings, Rhode Island v. Chevron, I showed how Sher Edling reproduced a mostly complete quote from U.S. President Lyndon Johnson which supposedly proved he knew about the certain of man-caused global warming in 1965. The exact way Sher Edling worded the quote is a quite solid indication that they got it from Naomi Oreskes. She had disingenuously inserted an ellipsis into her quote of Johnson’s speech to imply a significant amount of non-relevant text was skipped. Problem is, she only omitted three words, which fundamentally undercut her whole premise that Johnson was concerned with global warming. I say “reproduced” – past tense – because Sher Edling’s filings stopped using that ‘evidence’ after their #8 filing, Baltimore v. BP. If that ‘evidence’ was solid from the start in lawsuit #1, why is it not solid all the way through to the latest one?

6) From the start in lawsuit #1, Sher Edling essentially implied Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr Willie Soon was bankrolled by fossil fuel industry money in order to spread disinformation. From that first filing to their eleventh, Charleston v Brabham Oil, their sole source of evidence for this accusation was a Smithsonian Institute 2015 press release which only stated that the Institute was just starting its examination of whether Dr Soon had failed to properly disclose his funding. In Sher Edling’s 12th filing in October 2020, Delaware v Chevron – as I detailed at length in my dissection of that one – Sher Edling resorted to using an Internet Archive link version of that press release because sometime before Sept 2020, it was no longer online. It looked like this, over 5½ old by the time of filing for Delaware with no results from the Smithsonian Institute on what the results of their examination was . . . . . . apart from them pulling their press release offline. Hence the necessity of Sher Edling to switch to an Internet Archive version. Dr Soon says the reason for the disappearance of the press release was elemental: they found he’d done nothing wrong.

• Sher Edling continued using the Archive version through to their #17 / #18 filings, which I showed in my combined dissection of their twin Dec 2023 Indian Tribe lawsuits.
• In a story involving a whole separate apparent plagiarism problem, California AG Rob Bonta’s office seemingly copied its “bankroll” accusation against Dr Soon out of the #16 Sher Edling filing, except Bonta’s office switched out the Archive link for a different source. More info on that particularly strange problem in my dissection of Bonta’s ‘supposedly-unrelated-to-Sher-Edling-filings’ California v Exxon lawsuit.
• Sher Edling’s #19 filing, Chicago v BP apparently plagiarized its “bankroll scientists” “fund scientists” accusation against Dr Soon directly out of Bonta’s filing . . . . including the new switched out citation source. It was easier for me to place a translucent blue rectangle in at the point to show where the identical wording ended.
• Sher Edling’s very latest #20 filing, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico v. Exxon, went back to using the Archive link version. What explains that?

7) I covered several details surrounding the two top leaders of Sher Edling in my dissection of the now-dismissed 2018 Baltimore v BP lawsuit. Back then, I suggested it was not exactly helpful to Matt Edling that he was a Twitter follower of Naomi Oreskes and other left-leaning enviro-activists, and matters didn’t improve for him later in 2021 when he reposted a Tweet combo coming from two of the names I have in my checklist of people who are enslaved to the worthless “reposition global warming memos.” Within the last few months, Matt Edling is still is not subtle about his political leanings, including right up to two days before the Nov 5, 2024 election. Regarding Tweets, keep in mind that supposedly objective people don’t react well in congressional hearings, such as Naomi Oreskes, when asked about problematic Tweets. Meanwhile, Victor Sher, as I noted in my 2018 Baltimore dissection. might have a larger problem from being the “spotted owl” attorney for the Sierra Club back in the late 1980s.

If congressional committees having oversight influence on this litigation lawfare situation see as many crippling problems as there are within these lawsuits on their accusations about industry disinformation campaigns alone, the ultimate result won’t involve discussion on switching them out of state / city / county courts into Federal ones, it will be about kicking them out of the court system entirely for failing to make a a prima facie case that any industry-led campaign to deceive the public ever happened at all.