My just-prior blog post basically concerned the problem when folks display little in any intellectual curiosity on whether material presented to them is above reproach. Place blind trust in some authoritative assertion about a controversial matter, and the path forward might go right off a cliff. Notice in that screencapture, the controversial matter was the accusation surrounding the notorious “victory will be achieved” fossil fuel industry memo (never implemented, by the way, but yet still beloved by political luminaries). While this post covers a nine year-old accusation about that memo set which actually names me while making an accusation about the memo, this situation is every bit relevant right now today. When hurling an accusation, as the folks did in 2016, it’s wise to first make sure the accusation is not fatally undercut in a manner that opponents can use against it.

The 2016 situation I’m speaking of is one I found when simply doing an internet search to see if anyone at the present time was referring to my work exposing how the “victory will be achieved” is useless as evidence to prove the oil/coal industry ran disinformation campaigns to deceive the public about the ‘climate harm’ of burning fossil fuels. But I’d forgotten to switch the search to “Past month,” and still had it on the “Any time” search setting.

Toward the bottom of the search results page, sandwiched between a pair of reproductions of my four month-old blog post was an entry for something in a U.S. Congressional documents page’s PDF file, concerning the “Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic” and a blog post reproduction of mine that was not even remotely recent. Ok, what the heck was that all about? What confused me the first time I saw that search result was Google’s alternate short description which seemed to quote words of mine that I didn’t recognize at all – ‘… saying Exxon knew it was supplying a product that is more difficult…”

Simple explanation: Google’s auto-generated description words there came from a totally different section (I knew that wasn’t something I’d write) of the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic’s 54 page December 14, 2016 “Petition for Suspension or Debarment of ExxonMobil,” written on behalf of whoever the Waterkeeper Alliance Inc outfit was, and sent to the EPA Suspension and Debarment Division. They wanted the U.S. government to stop doing business with Exxon.  Fine.  Whatever.  Probably a desperation maneuver taken in the waning days of the Obama Administration before President-elect Trump took office for the first time. No chance of that debarment happening, and worthy of the question of how big the ‘carbon footprint’ went into that total waste of time, effort, and resources.

Not a total waste, however. There is a teaching moment in it for legal profession people. One centering around why my name is in this thing. Paraphrasing from my opening above, it’s wise to first make sure an accusation is not fatally undercut by the evidence you use to support your claim.

From page 26 of this petition, there is this, and its footnote #156 in particular: (I’ve replaced the outdated non-functioning Heartland links with Internet Archive versions)

The Heartland Institute, another nonprofit think tank, is at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.156 In 1998, a memo leaked to The New YorkTimes revealed ExxonMobil and other corporations convened by the American Petroleum Institute (API) planned to confuse the public about the scientific certainty of global warming using the media, science community, and education system.157 Heartland Institute has since implemented the “strategies and tactics” outlined in the API memo …

156 See Climate Change, THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE, https://www.heartland.org/topics/climate-change/index.html, (last visited Dec. 6, 2016); Russell Cook, The ‘Non-smoking Gun’ Leaked Memos Pattern, THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE, (Nov. 25, 2014) http://blog.heartland.org/2014/11/the-non-smoking-gun-leaked-memos-pattern/; Joseph Bast, Global Warming Madness and How to Stop It, THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE, (Feb. 1, 2007) http://www.webcitation.org/6dHrlYgGD; see also Global Warming Skeptic Organizations, UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/global-warming-skeptic.html#.WEcaM-YrI2x, (last visited Dec. 6, 2016).
157 See John Cushman Jr., Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty, N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 26, 1998) http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/26/us/industrial-group-plans-to-battle-climate-treaty.html.

The New York Times article didn’t even bother to mention that the “victory will be achieved” memo’s ‘plans’ were never implemented (even the far-left Mother Jones magazine was even able to figure this out in 2005), and it doesn’t even quote the notorious “victory” memo phrase itself. The memo actually had no value at all since, the initial effort surrounded concern about the remote chance that the U.S. Senate would consider signing the Kyoto Protocol Treaty, and when the people opposing the treaty realized the treaty had no chance of passing at all, there was no need to battle it at all, in any manner. But as I’ve said many times before here at GelbspanFiles (e.g. here), the “victory will be achieved” memo really is nothing more than a set of truisms on how all would agree that it’s a victory when the public is fully informed about all of the climate issue’s science facts, not merely the dubious assertions advanced by the IPCC, Al Gore, and enviro-activists. It’s actually easy to mirror-reverse the intent of the memo in a way that Greenpeace would lovingly endorse.

Whoever it was who wrote up this 2016 Exxon Disbarment petition was oblivious to how my own piece pointed out the fatal fault of the API memo as ‘evidence’ of any industry-orchestrated disinformation efforts. By default, when it was never implemented in 1998, there’d be no way for Heartland to operate under its directives afterward, and when it was subsequently ridiculed in every possible way by enviro-activists, it defies logic that Heartland would openly embrace it without explaining why. That’s just simple common sense. What part of it being a ‘non-smoking gun piece of evidence‘ is not understood there? But then the people on pro-Al Gore side of the issue operate on emotion-driven rationale rather than any semblance of common sense. If somebody assisting in writing up that silly petition had said, “Uhhh, this page about ‘non-smoking gun memos’ doesn’t help to support what we are trying to say …,” then that person might have been kicked right out of the office.

That was back then. This is today, this year, where the bigger the reliance is on worthless ‘industry memos,’ the harder the ultimate crash will be when all that irrational reasoning falls apart.
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Emphasis on ‘this is today.’ Next up, See my follow-up post here — the very current Oregon County of Multnomah v Exxon lawsuit had a particular officially filed Declaration piled on top of it barely 2¾ months ago which doubles down on ye olde worthless “victory will be achieved” memos set … while pointing an arrow the size of Texas at another ‘source’ for ‘industry-led disinformation campaigns evidence’ which instead undermines the whole credibility of that specific accusation. The promulgators of these lawfare actions are just that oblivious to their own political suicide efforts