What Naomi Didn’t Say, Sharon & Sheldon Did

There are golden opportunities for GOP congressional representatives or energy company defendant lawyers to hammer ‘expert’ witness testimonies about the validity of the ‘corporate-funded global warming skeptic liars-for-hire’ accusation. I’m not kidding when I say these so-called witnesses are enslaved to only one set of supposedly viable ‘leaked memo evidence’ for their accusation.

In my recent Part 1 and Part 2 blog posts about Naomi Oreskes’ appearances at U.S. House and Senate hearings, I detailed how she — who is otherwise enslaved to this worthless ‘leaked memo evidence’ elsewhere — only danced around that evidence with vague references to it while incorrectly naming the public relations campaign that supposedly operated under the directives contained in those memos.

At these two congressional hearings, Naomi Oreskes never directly mentioned the “smoking gun” memo strategy, reposition global warming as theory (not fact), or the memo’s audience targets of less educated men / lower income women that she and her fellow enviro-activists friends have said for more than two decades are evidence of a sinister pay-for-performance arrangement between fossil fuel industry executives and skeptic ‘liars-for-hire’ climate scientists.

But her fellow witness at the House hearing did.

Within Sharon Eubanks’ Prepared Written Testimony ‘evidence’ section on how the “Fossil Fuel Industry Funds a Deception Campaign,” there’s the following:

Coincidence? Probably not, because she is that Sharon Eubanks, who is seen as a participant in the notorious 2012 La Jolla California ‘Rico-teering’ workshop which Naomi Oreskes conceived in order to explore how energy companies could be prosecuted in a ‘tobacco industry-like manner’ (which Oreskes also suggested at the above-noted U.S. Senate hearing). The same La Jolla workshop where Oreskes mentioned how she had documents attributed to a particular industry group’s public relations campaign that supposedly operated under those memos’ directives. Lest anyone forget, the PR campaign never utilized those memos’ directives.

The coincidences’ keep piling up. When Naomi Oreskes appeared at the Senate ‘hearing,’ ‘committee ‘leader’ Senator Sheldon Whitehouse didn’t directly mention the “smoking gun” strategy memo phrase there …… but he did at one of his Senate floor speeches back in March (11:07 point of the video of the speech) regarding how energy companies should be prosecuted. He went so far as to have a placard printed up with the strategy phrase on it.

After more than two decades of enviro-activist accusers claiming they have devastating evidence proving energy companies engaged in a disinformation conspiracy with skeptic climate scientists, this is literally the best they can do: A memo set that was both never used and wrongly attributed to the Western Fuels Association’s “Information Council for the Environment” pilot project public relations campaign.

It’s a no-win situation for the top end people who keep bringing up this worthless evidence. If they didn’t check the veracity of the evidence from the start, then they have every appearance of letting their emotions cloud their judgement, which leads us to wonder what else they never verified. But if the top end people knew this evidence was not the sinister industry directive they portrayed it to be but proceeded to use it with malice anyway, they may have committed one of the biggest acts of libel/slander in history, and should be investigated and potentially prosecuted for this.

This can and will blow up in their faces …. but only if GOP congressional representatives, energy company defendant lawyers, and bold, objective investigative reporters seize the golden opportunity to expose this fatal fault.