This happens – I’m in the midst of compiling a blog post, I look up something I remember in connection with another accusation angle, then I spot something that doesn’t line up right in the whole narrative. What I’d planned to describe concerning “Committing Acts of Journalism” (or the lack thereof by the reporters over the last two+ decades on the climate issue) will have to wait until the next blog post, (is in my next post as of 2/24/25) because I just spotted a new problem with the basically still-current (originally Matt Pawa-led) pair of 2017 Alameda County / San Francisco County lawsuits. I dissected that pair jointly in my October 6, 2017 People(s) of California v. BP, while also bringing up those two again in my November 30, 2024 Maine v BP dissection, since the Sher Edling law firm inexplicably decided to apparently plagiarize Matt Pawa’s old 2017 accusation paragraph to use in their filing for Maine. What I did not catch in my latest dissection there was the basic fault with Matt Pawa’s citation source for the bit about Dr S Fred Singer’s “launch[ing] repeated attacks on mainstream climate science,” namely the 2007 UCS report. Those words are not in that report that way. I can show where they are seen that way, and where the actual source is . . . . . . which does not help the credibility of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits one bit. It reinforces the fatal fault in essentially every one of these.

No need to trust me on whether the ‘attack mainstream climate science’ bit is in the UCS Smoke & Mirrors report, the whole thing in its full 68 page context is here. Of the five results for the word “attack,” the best this report can come up with is an unsupportable connection to ye olde 1998 American Petroleum Institute’s “victory will be achieved” memo. Unsupportable — because the memo was never implemented. Never implemented! Dr Singer is only mentioned twice in the report’s main passages, but not with any connection to any ‘attack, and the 22 other instances appear either in attached table lists, or in end note references, SEPP even less.

Was that a misstep on Pawa’s part back in 2017? If he delegated the assembly work to some law firm intern who did not have a good grasp of the whole history of the “crooked skeptic scientists” accusation, it might explain this.

The key to getting to the bottom of the origins of the ‘attack mainstream science’ accusation is the “Pawa” name and what he is a little more famous for, as in being the “brains” behind the climate lawfare effort – meaning his launch of the first-ever such lawsuit, his 2008 (dismissed in 2012) Village of Kivalina v Exxon. Look within that one, and the very first instance is the same ‘attack the proponents’ line in his 2017 pair of lawsuits and Sher Edling’s Maine; the second instance in the same paragraph connects the ‘attack’ word to the accusation about ye olde “reposition global warming” memos, a hint of where the whole accusation begins to fall apart.

What’s the source in Kivalina for that accusation? Two sources, which I covered in my dissection of that filing, but the latter of the two is Matt Wald’s 1991 NY Times article which never uses the word “attack” at all. The first source, Bob Burton and Sheldon Rampton’s “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally” PR Watch article does indeed use the ‘attack the proponents’ line, but in a manner which only undermines the entire accusation because of the citation cascade tactic they use with their own three sources in order to make it look like they have more than one source. The filers of the current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits do essentially the same tactic, hoping nobody has the time or temperament to look deep into this material.

• CLEAR site — By using the Internet Archive to look for what Burton & Rampton’s PR Watch article was citing, it can be seen that they were citing CLEAR’s old catch-all site home page. Good luck finding anything among all the possible link paths remotely about “attack the proponents.” An educated guess, however, of what Burton & Rampton were referring to is likely a report CLEAR was in the process of compiling about the Western Fuels Association which didn’t get published until Nov 1998. In that one, CLEAR noted about ye olde “reposition global warming” memos that the set had been “obtained by environmental group Ozone Action and journalist Ross Gelbspan,” the source for that assertion being a “Ties that Blind” report by Ozone Action. Hold the thought for a few moments, about where the word “attack” appears within those memos, the hint of which Burton & Rampton already offered in their PR Watch article.

• Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 book … which almost contains the specific “attack mainstream science” accusation twice in his “A Congressional Book Burning” chapter — the first instance aiming it at congressional Republicans, and the second instance aimed at skeptic climate scientists — but hold that thought for another moment on where he said it elsewhere like what’s basically seen in the current San Francisco / Alameda County and Maine lawsuits, which is a massive problem.

• Sharon Beder’s “Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism”book. You can search through an entire book scan (after setting up a free account login). The word “attack” is found 19 times, but never refers to an attack on science, mainstream or otherwise. Do a search for the word “reposition” and just one result comes up. She says her source is “a media strategy obtained by Ozone Action,” her footnote #27 goes to “Ozone Action 1997, page 5” which is that group’s “Ties That Blind” report. Notice how she did not say that Gelbspan also obtained the memos. Since her book was published in January 1998, she would have been referring to Ozone Action’s particular industry influence report from likely not later than mid 1997. The online report only occupies two pages, but the latter part of it matches up well with what’s in her book – minus the bit about Gelbspan obtaining the memos. Ozone Action’s report does not contain the word “attack” at all.

There’s only one single source there, Ross Gelbspan, in some sort of association with Ozone Action. Or vice versa.

Like I said in my Oct 2015 blog post, I would’ve been lost without Sharon Beder when it came to finally being able to find the elusive “reposition global warming” memo set, after many months of a fruitless search. In 2009-2010 Ross Gelbspan alone was widely credited for exposing them, but nobody linked straight to them for the public to see them for stand-alone judgement. After I found them, I was the first to link straight to them in what is now an offline Greenpeace Investigations scans file, because I could readily see there was nothing actually damaging in them.

So, where is the word “attack” in that memos collection? Fortunately, the Internet Archive preserved the 2007 PDF file download version of the “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” scans collection, and I have my own download copy circa 2010 in case the Archive versions stops working.

Burton & Rampton’s reference to “attack the proponents of global warming” – and thus the Maine v BP‘s / California v BP accusations – is seen on scan page 28 in what appears to be genuine memo pages that were a part of the official “Information Council for the Environment” public relations campaign (as distinguished from the rejected memo set with the “reposition strategy and unsolicited spelled-out name variant and rejected narrow audience targeting suggestion).

Read the actual print ad text in the ICE newspaper advertorials — do those look like outright attacks of climate science, or do they simply question what was being said at the time? Read the actual text for the single taped radio ad by Rush Limbaugh — does that constitute an attack on science in any sense of the word?

Who was it who implied the fossil fuel industry was out to attack mainstream science?

Ross Gelbspan. In a 1997 TV interview about his newly-published book.

There’s a large coal operation called Western Fuels, it’s a $400 million coal operation, in their 1991 annual report, they were very candid, they said “We want to attack mainstream science …”

He didn’t just say that a single time. In his 2006 Earthlands presentation, he named the same name seen in the Maine v BP / California v BP accusations:

Western Fuels, which is a 400 million dollar coal operation, it was very candid in its annual report, it said it was out to attack mainstream scientists, it hired three scientists who were skeptical of this phenomenon Pat Michaels, Bob Balling, Fred Singer, it turned out they paid these three scientists more than a million dollars under the table, which was never disclosed publicly until we wrote about it. Western Fuels and several coal utilities then launched a big PR program, they sent these scientist all over the country to do a lot of media interviews and lectures and appearances … We got a copy of the strategy papers for that campaign. And it says specifically the campaign is designed to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“, and more specifically it was designed to target “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women” …

See that? Essentially a straight line can be drawn from Ross Gelbspan in 1997 through the 2017 Matt Pawa’s pair of California lawsuits, to the Nov 2024 Maine v BP lawsuit. But Dr Singer had no involvement with the ICE campaign whatsoever, and – I can’t say it often enough – neither the memo strategy nor its audience targeting goal were ever implemented.

Regarding Gelbspan’s bit about the Western Fuels 1991 annual report – when I wrote my July 2013 “Why Say Sinister Plans are in a Coal Association’s Annual Report… when they aren’t?” it was a complete mystery why the man would paint himself into such an indefensible corner via a fervent misguided hope that nobody would ever think to check if Western Fuels ever made such a statement. But when Al Gore had this memo collection in his possession years before Gelbspan did, … and when I have it on firsthand confirmation that a Senate associate of Al Gore’s was demanding to have annual report copies and other docs from Western Fuels back in the early 1990s … and when Al Gore demonstrated an outright desire to launch a character assassination attack against Dr Singer in 1994 …….

… the growing appearance here is less that Gelbspan discovered the memos at all, and instead a pile of leaked docs / annual reports was dumped on him, with the instruction for him to use all of that to attack proponents advocating for the public to hear.

… the growing appearance here is less that Gelbspan discovered the memos at all, and instead a pile of leaked docs / annual reports was dumped on him, with the instruction for him to use all of that to attack the proponents of the public hearing all of the available science information.

Sorta looks like the same thing happened within the last year for the people who assembled the latest Maine v BP lawsuit, doesn’t it?