As I implied in my just-prior blog post here, the worthless, never-implemented “victory will be achieved” memos aren’t just an accusation used under basically false pretenses around a decade ago, they are very much an ongoing current bit of ‘evidence’ used to support the stupid idea that ‘Exxon and other energy companies deceived the public on how they knew their products caused harmful global warming.’ Ben Franta, as I’ve suggested before, is quite a weak link in that whole false accusation chain, and just over 90 days ago – at this time of writing – he reinforced how it shouldn’t be the energy companies in the crosshairs for spreading disinformation, it should instead be guys exactly like him. He gets away with what he does because nobody of major prominence has questioned him about his accusations.

The three month-old reinforcement of his problem I’m speaking of is his “Declaration of Benjamin A. Franta” filed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Oregon state County of Multnomah v Exxon lawsuit. If I may stretch the traditional “fruit of the poisonous tree” term (surrounding illegally obtained evidence), I suggest that if a person’s main accusation – the tree – is bogus, then all else from this person is poisonous fruit. So, set aside all the ancillary other ‘evidence’ in Franta’s 76-page behemoth declaration here, and focus on his central bit about ye olde 1998 American Petroleum Institute “victory will be achieved” memos.

In nearly all of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, that memo set is often part of a core accusation suite of four elements about the fossil fuel industry running disinformation campaigns, and when I dissected the faults of the Sher Edling-filed Maine v Exxon filing, I illustrated that fault with just a single sentence; “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.” Multnomah – which I pointed out is an apparently plagiarized copy of Puerto Rico v Exxon – spelled out the “victory” wording directly (Puerto Rico laboriously retyped them). Multnomah‘s source for the memo set, just like Puerto Rico‘s, is the Inside Climate News organization’s copy of the memos. In all the Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits, their New Jersey one for example, their source is an innocuous-looking DocumentsCloud site file. Are those two sources independent of each other? No, they are not.

Part of the hole Ben Franta digs for himself in his Multnomah Declaration is to not name the “victory will be achieved” phrase directly . . . while playing a shell game on where the memo can be read: From his PDf file page 49‘s second paragraph:

Yeah, that’s one-and-the-same memo set that Greenpeace worker Kert Davies uploaded back in 2013 – which Sher Edling seemingly tried to bury – but notice here how Franta’s source first mentions “Climate Investigations Center Collection”, and then provides a link to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) “Industry Documents Library” page with that same label . . . . as though that’s the UCSF’s own ‘climate investigations arm.’

It isn’t.

The Climate Investigations Center with its integral Climate Files platform is – or was – Kert Davies’ post-Greenpeace workplace and before he moved into his present position at the Center for Climate Integrity. Franta accomplishes nothing more in this maneuver than throw another ‘middleman source link’ onto the pile when a link citation straight to Davies’ CIC / Climate Files page for the worthless memos would suffice. Or even a citation link to Davies’ Greenpeace-era upload when it still works fine. Or the Inside Climate News version. They are all the very same set of lousy photocopy scans. Franta could have even provided a source link to Desmogblog … oh, wait, he did, except that particular instance was nearly three years earlier.

One has to wonder who it was that suggested the Multnomah plaintiffs should call in an ‘expert’ for assistance when he beings no actual expertise to the table and only muddies the water with his switcheroo maneuver away from Desmogblog on his citation source for the “victory” memos. Hold that thought for a few moments.

The ‘dubious association problem’ for Franta doesn’t stop there. The UCSF “Industry Documents Library” is not some benign collector of documents. It’s the old “Legacy Tobacco Documents Library” renamed in a more innocuous way. I covered that problematic name change of the library originally created by Stanton Glantz in my June 2019 blog post, along with noting another name brought up in the transition. Who? Kert Davies.

That Stanton Glantz, a participant in the’ notorious 2012 La Jolla California workshop Naomi Oreskes conceived as a planning session on how to frame the fossil fuel industry as acting hardly different than the old tobacco industry The very same Stanton Glantz, who had document scans about ye olde “reposition global warming memos” inexplicably within his his Tobacco Docs Library which had literally nothing to do with the tobacco industry – a fatal problem I covered in a pair of blog posts way back in 2014 / 2015 here and here.

That Naomi Oreskes, who first gained her fame in accusing the fossil fuel industry of running disinformation campaigns where her source for that was ye olde “reposition global warming” memos — the other set of worthless memos that were never implemented anywhere. The very same Naomi Oreskes who shares the billing in her assortment of Friends of the Court filings with Ben Franta, in which their arguments about industry disinfo campaigns are enslaved to . . . . . . . wait for it . . . . . . . . . . both the “reposition global warming” memos and the “victory will be achieved” memos. Who was Oreskes’ / Franta’s source for the “victory will be achieved” memos in their amici brief? Kert Davies’ Climate Files. One more thing about those last two screencaptures – who’s the url address link for at the top? The Center for Climate Integrity. Kert Davies’ current workplace.

Odd that in all of Ben Franta’s 76 page-long Declaration, he only cites Kert Davies’ Climate Files as a source one time, and only for a document in which an Exxon official makes a statement of pure common sense. He cited Climate Investigations Center just twice, once for a basic guilt-by-association item, and another time for … a person’s statement of basic common sense.

Not helping himself at all on credibility, who does Franta cite 87 times in his Declaration for Multnomah, including where he says the source is a “climate journalism site”? DeSmog.

It isn’t.

That place is nothing more than a one-sided propaganda site, their original name was DeSmogblog, co-founded by James Hoggan (the guy in the sunglasses at Naomi Oreskes’ La Jolla workshop) as a blog having the express intent of taking down lying skeptic climate scientists. Who inspired him to do this? Ross Gelbspan. Who self-confessed no later than 8 seconds into an audio interview as being Desmogblog’s other co-founder? Ross Gelbspan. Who did Al Gore say was the discoverer of the “reposition global warming” memos? Ross Gelbspan. He wrote wrote over 500 blog posts for DeSmogblog as their star blogger from January 2006 to November 2010, the place that was built on his fame of ‘exposing the “reposition global warming” memos.

You couldn’t ask for a better example of a poisonous tree source than Desmogblog.

What group claims to have ‘obtained’ the “reposition global warming” memos alongside with Gelbspan? Ozone Action, the place where Kert Davies worked before he moved on to Greenpeace. And where does Desmogblog source their copy of the “victory will be achieved” memos? Greenpeace. Right above their entry for the “reposition global warming” memos entry which they source from the old “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” scans collection.

Back to the topic at hand, though: Ben Franta declares all he says is true under the penalty of perjury. The question here is did he actually commit that offense, or is he just not smart enough to undertake basic due diligence to make sure his statements are true?

The bigger question would be if he was faced with the grip prospect that perjury charges may stick to him, would he try to save his own skin by rolling on whoever it was who loaded him up with his core beliefs about ‘disinformation campaigns?’