While it was great news from the Energy in Depth website on August 7th that South Carolina circuit court Judge Roger Young dismissed Charleston v Brabham Oil on jurisdictional / statute of limitations / and other angles, the opportunity to knock this one down on its core – and very false – central 4-element accusation which is present in all such Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits was missed again. Allow me to show two instances within the judge’s court ruling where he figuratively sideswiped gently against them, unaware how he could have sent then crashing into the ditch, and thus turn onto the path for that version of ‘failure to state a claim‘ dismissal.

I’ve uploaded Energy in Depth’s “docviewer” file of the judge’s dismissal as a PDF file into my GelbspanFiles media library which enables me to attach a page number extension to the end that can take readers to the full context of each page.

First item: PDF file page 31 / print page 30:

Plaintiff argues that Defendants are engaged in a “continuing tort” in the form of a purported conspiracy akin to those alleged against tobacco companies. This theory fails as well. Plaintiff does not allege a continuing tort. Rather, Plaintiff relies on allegations of disconnected acts and statements by various entities—some of which are not even defendants here—in different times and places. Far from being “continuing,” Plaintiff’s allegations fall into at least two general categories: (1) alleged denials of climate science in the 1990s and 2000s, and (2) “greenwashing” statements in more recent years. The only apparent common thread is that these are statements and acts with which Plaintiff disagrees …

The key there is “denials of climate science in the 1990s. Specifically, Charleston‘s citation of the 1991 “Information Council for the Environment” public relations campaign memo set (with the standard requisite effort to tie particular sentences alleged to be in those memos to specific newspaper advertorial scans), and Charleston‘s citation of the 1-day workshop discussions that were summarized into the 1998 “victory will be achieved” memo set.

Judge Young aptly noted there can’t be a continuing disinformation action. What he was unaware of was that the ‘disinformation action’ never happened in the first place.

Set aside whatever bizarro, ill-advised enviro-appeasement action the industry is doing today, that’s irrelevant. The “reposition global warming” memos’ strategy and audience target goals were never implemented in any form anywhere by any fossil fuel entity; the “victory will be achieved” memos were also never implemented (never implemented!). A claim about a particular action resulting from a suggestion cannot stand as evidence if the suggestion was never implemented. It is just that simple. Pile on top of that how Exxon, et al. could not have possibly known for decades about catastrophic global warming in the face of all the reports about runaway global cooling. Cooling!

Second item: PDF file page 35 / print page 34 (last paragraph):

Complaint affirmatively alleges that the dangers posed to the climate by fossil fuel use have been well-documented and publicized since at least the 1960s. … in 1965, “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee’s Environmental Pollution Panel reported that a 25% increase in carbon dioxide concentrations could occur by the year 2000” and listed numerous expected side effects that would be caused by “global warming.”

Judge Young was referring to this paragraph in Charleston, PDF 62 / pg 58, paragraph #58. The fatal problem with that paragraph is right there:

Like I said in my dissection of Rhode Island v. Chevron, those three little dots, an elipsis, implies a large amount of unnecessary text is omitted. What text was missing in President Johnson’s speech text words there? Only three words; “radioactive materials and.” Include those three words in his speech text, and they totally undermine the entire notion that the exclusive driver of global warming was carbon dioxide. There’s not a single enviro-activist out there calling for an end of greenhouse-inducing radioactive material emissions into the atmosphere. Who was it who first saw the need to omit those words from the speech? Naomi Oreskes. Who’s the law firm handling Charleston? Sher Edling. Who’s on retainer with Sher Edling? Naomi Oreskes.

Naomi Oreskes omits quite a few critical facts in her narratives, it turns out.

• In her ‘expert’ claims that the “Informed Citizens for the Environment” PR campaign operated under the directive to “reposition global warming as theory,” she omits how that name was never used and that the directive itself – as I’ve already noted above – was never used.
• In her claims that the notorious “Chicken Little” newspaper advertorial proves the existence of industry disinformation campaigns, she omits how the ad is always cropped at the bottom which proves it was never published anywhere.
• In her claims that scholars could read the “reposition global warming” memos – and other docs supposedly related to the PR campaign – at the American Meteorological Society’s Washington D.C. archives, she omits how those docs were never at the AMS DC office for anyone to read.
• And in her claims that she learned at an obscure science conference who the ‘merchants of doubt’ in this climate issue, she omits how the use of a time-travel machine was needed for that event to have taken place the way she describes it.

Kill one lawsuit at a time via some legal technicality, two more will take its place circumventing those technicalities, but they’ll still be enslaved to the same literally worthless ‘industry evidence.’ Obliterate their core ‘evidence,’ and the enviro-activists will be reduced to filing more pathetically emotional and irrationally desperate efforts featuring climate-terrified youths or imperiled farmer victims.

The disinformation option about “crooked skeptic climate scientists” will be out.  Dead.  A stake finally driven through its heart.