As I noted in my April 2nd & 3rd 2025 Tweets/Xs, I had only just learned about the 45 page Aug 21, 2024 “Brief in Opposition” (BiO) that NJ AG Matt Platkin, CA AG Rob Bonta, MN AG Keith Ellison, Connecticut AG William Tong, and Rhode Island AG Peter Neronha had filed against Alabama et al. v California et al — Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and four other state AGs complaint arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court should prevent states from filing such global warming damages lawsuits. My intention was to dissect the massive accusation faults in the “Appendix Volume One” attached to the Platkin et al. BiO, while mistakenly thinking that the Appendix itself was newly written in August 2024 especially for SCOTUS review. I was technically headed down an incorrect path – sorta – and was nearly done with my intended blog post before spotting my small error of assumption. The bulk of what I’d written still serves the purpose I’d intended, which is to point out the incalculably huge error these five Platkin et al. Attorneys General made in following the path that ‘Exxon knew about their products causing global warming, but chose instead to deceive the public through disinformation campaigns where they paid and directed skeptic climate scientist shills to repostition global warming as theory rather than fact.’

Allow me to explain my small error first.  Who actually reads multi-hundred page lawsuit filings start-to-finish? I don’t. I remember hearing one speaker at a Heartland Institute climate conference say he was a lawyer, but that lawyers themselves don’t read other lawyers’ lawsuits, they just read the introduction and the conclusion and hope that what’s in between corresponds to both. I don’t even do that much, I simply use my checklist of phrases and names to see if a filing regurgitates any elements of the false narrative that skeptic climate scientists were paid by fossil fuel company executives to spread disinformation. What I had not caught about about Platkin et al.’s 373 page-long “Appendix Volume One” was that it was nothing more than the complete individual lawsuit filings by AGs Bonta, Tong, and Ellison. Since other lawsuit filings had been as long as 240+ pages, I figured this Appendix might just only be the same kind of effort, with an extra hundred or so extra pages on esoteric court jurisdiction technicalities.

Thus I wrote out what’s seen in most of the checklist items below, without knowing the four main accusation elements I’d found in the gigantic Appendix were straight out of Minnesota AG Keith Ellison’s 2020 MN v American Petroleum Institute filing. When I got to the extra accusation about Princeton University’s Dr Will Happer, I did a due diligence search to see where else it was seen, and found it was identical to what’s in Ellison’s filing.  Oops.  I missed seeing the accusation against Dr Happer my June 2020 dissection of MN v API, it wasn’t on my checklist.

Nevertheless, since Ellison’s filing was offered as evidence to the Supreme Court Justices in hopes that they would not read it, I’ll use what I’d written in my initial blog post draft to reemphasize why these lawsuits are all ripe for outright dismissal;  the evidence in them that fossil fuel execs ‘knew’ as far back as the ’60s/’70s their products caused global warming – exclusively – but buried this certain knowledge under deceptive PR campaigns they ran employing ‘shill’ skeptic scientists . . . . is totally without merit.

I wish I’d known back toward the end of August 2024 that the AG’s opposing Alabama et al. had essentially handed their heads on a silver platter to the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. I only ran across this by pure accident on April 2nd via an internet search of AG Tong and the notorious (never published anywhere!) “Chicken Little” newspaper advertorial, and both turned up unexpectedly in the Platkin et al. BiO.

Notice in that reference to the “Chicken Little” ad, Platkin et al. claims it an indicator that the fossil fuel industry ‘knew’ their products caused climate change, but chose to undercut the ‘science consensus’ and deceive the public. “Knew,” meaning as far back as the ’60s / ’70s, as they imply elsewhere in their BiO. For all the effort to drag this discussion in front of the Supreme Court to argue over whether states can file such lawsuits or if these need to be restricted to the Federal Court system, it’s irrelevant where anybody files any lawsuit which makes claims about certain activities, when those claims are flat out false.

In that particular “Chicken Little” paragraph, Platkin et al. made three claims which they have no possible way of supporting. The never-published “Chicken Little” advertorial itself is worthless as evidence of disinformation campaigns. Next, science conclusions have never been validated by a “show of hands,” the notion is a logical fallacy. Regarding the third false claim, “climate change” … to what? That phrase is disingenuous on two levels, because not a single person on that side of the issue has any belief that the climate will change to a cooler one, none of them ever scream about the coolest year on record or that we are headed in that direction. In their gigantic Appendix, the Platkin et al. AGs also let it slip out, via the copy of CA AG Rob Bonta’s own lawsuit, that the ‘change’ was only in one direction, toward warming. Therein lies the last false claim: it was the exact opposite situation in the 1960s / ’70s. The exact. Opposite. Exxon could not possibly have known with any certainty that they were going to bake the planet 50 / 60 years into the future.

The questions concerning all three claims right there is whether these hapless AGs arguing on behalf of plaintiffs know about those problems, and are withholding what they know, or are they that ineptly oblivious to what the history of the climate issue is.

But where their troubles become massively more compounded concerns their four central outright accusations — I’ve summarized those lawsuits’ core accusations into a single sentence for simplicity’s sake — “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.” These hapless AG’s provided all four here in their gigantic Appendix presented to SCOTUS, plus the additional accusation against Dr Will Happer.

Since I’d only covered two of the four main accusation elements in that dissection, my initial blog post draft can now serve instead as a handy review / expansion of how those accusations fall apart, and how AG Ellison’s mistake of falsely accusing Dr Happer only worsens his own possible status along with that of his fellow SCOTUS BiO AGs.

✓ “Appendix Volume One” PDF pages 304-305 — the “victory will be achieved” memos, which were never implemented (never implemented!) in any form anywhere. I have multiple posts explaining myriad faults with the entire situation surrounding that accusation. Among the faults is how the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling apparently hides their source of the memo scans behind an innocuously-looking “DocumentCloud” file site (e.g. in their filing done for NJ AG Platkin), when the file is more directly seen via just 6 small changes to Sher Edling’s citation file address as an upload by the 2013-era Greenpeace worker Kert Davies. Hold the thought about Davies’ name for a moment, as you read the next section.

✓ Appendix PDF page 333 — the Willie Soon accusation, which Dr Soon himself can show is provably false. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that lawyers on his side could show how the accusation has actually crossed into pure defamation territory. The Appendix’s source here – and MN AG Ellison’s – is a Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Dossier” on Dr Soon, but within that Dossier, UCS cites its sources as “Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center” – the latter headed at the time of the Dossier publication by Kert Davies. There’s that name again. Two ex-Greenpeacers, John Passacantando and Kert Davies, were revealed in recent email documents obtained via Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) out of the New York state AG’s office to have been the originators of that false accusation against Dr Soon. Hold the thought about those two names until the second bullet point in the next section.

✓ PDF page 302 (print page 300a, which is the section the above-noted “App 300a-302a” refers to) — the memo directive to “reposition global warming” in a public relations campaign created to target “younger, lower-income women.” That memo directive was an unsolicited proposal along with its targeting suggestion to the campaign, and those proposal ideas were never implemented (never implemented!) in any manner.

• When the ExxonKnew lawsuits do contain this “reposition global warming” memos accusation (CA AG Rob Bonta’s does not), the usual citation source for it is a 2015 Union of Concerned Scientists “Dossiers” file. This giant Appendix’s copy of MN AG Ellison’s lawsuit cites Kert Davies’ Climate Files website specifically for “Bill Brier, Correspondence to O. Mark DeMichele (May 6, 1991). For AG Ellison, and by default his fellow AGs in their BiO presented to SCOTUS, that’s a problem. The words “reposition global warming” words do not appear anywhere in Bill Brier’s letter to Arizona Public Service CEO Mark DeMichele. While you can view the correspondence at Climate Files, you also can read the letter directly, PDF file pages 41-42, at The Internet Archive’s saved file of Greenpeace’s scans collection (which Greenpeace took offline in the spring of 2022). This isn’t the first time I’ve pointed out the blunder of the “reposition” memo phrase not being in a letter like it was said to be. I did so the first time in my dissection of Naomi Oreskes’ clumsy foray into her Friends of the Court briefs on behalf of the plaintifs. So, why on Earth did AG Ellison make the same kind of mistake in his filing? Did he not do the most basic form of due diligence to find out where the “reposition” strategy and the PR audience targeting goal was among those memo scans, to make certain his own lawsuit was above reproach?

• And for any new readers here, the above-noted Greenpeace’s scans collection of the so-called Western Fuels / “reposition global warming” memos is the collection that had its #1 PDF file page featuring the cover page explaining all of these out of the old Ozone Action organization. It’s where these ‘smoking gun’ memos began getting their growing amount of news media traction in 1996. Kert Davies, and his boss Passacantando, headed Ozone Action when that momentum was first growing huge. Davies’ Climate Files is cited 28 times as a documents source in this gigantic Platkin et al. Appendix overall, the most within the copy of AG Ellison’s filing.

✓ PDF pages 303-304 — the ‘industry disinformation’ ads. Both the “Chicken Little” advertorial and the “Doomsday is Canceled” advertorials were never published anywhere. The 3rd advertorial, “The Most Serious Problem” one was published, but the illustration is disingenuously cropped, where its otherwise non-disinforming text has been removed. Again, there’s that Greenpeace/Ozone Action false accusations problem. Piling on, this giant Appendix copy of AG Ellison’s filing cites UCS as the source for the ad scans. UCS can’t figure out the actual name of the genuine ICE campaign – it’s “Information Council for the Environment,” not on, but not only that, who do they cite as its source for these? Wait for it . . . . . . . . . . the above-noted Greenpeace scans collection, back when it was still online.

The single-source pattern here to a single massively dubious source is endemic among these lawsuits. I’d posit it is their potential undoing.

Meanwhile, here’s what I had overlooked in my June 2020 dissection of MN v API, which is now even more problematic from being repeated in material submitted to the Supreme Court:

PDF page 333 — AG Ellison, and how his hapless AG comrades, state outright that skeptic climate scientist Will Happer is “on the payroll of Defendants.” This accusation is totally false, and may also be pure defamation. It arises out of a 2015 sting effort against Dr Happer by Greenpeace, which I detailed back at that time as being a nonsensical situation. If Greenpeace / Ozone Action’s ‘smoking gun’ evidence about industry paying scientists to ‘reposition global warming as theory’ was so solid, why would there be any need at all to back up fresh new ‘evidence’? One of Greenpeace’s operatives actually ambushed Dr Happer in the Senate hearing room just before he was to testify in front of a hearing chaired by Senator Cruz. This happened two years after Kert Davies exited Greenpeace, and John Passacantando had left in 2008, but given the overall ongoing pattern of smear efforts against skeptic climate scientists, it would be worth asking if those two had any hand in this matter. Who knows what AG Ellison was thinking back in 2020 by inserting this accusation into his lawsuit, when it would draw attention to the Greenpeace operative who may have committed a Federal-level felony act of Senate witness intimidation. Now, it draws even more attention.

Maybe these AGs thought all this ‘evidence’ dumped on the Supreme Court would get overlooked. They apparently accomplished that feat — Alabama et al.‘s complaint was denied on March 10, 2025.

The much bigger question is whether this situation can either cause SCOTUS to possibly re-examine their March 10, 2025 ruling about these global warming lawsuits, or if it might end up being an impetus that ends up bringing down every one of these lawsuits.