Tag Archives: Kert Davies

Inconvenient Truth: The BBC Buries a False 2020 Climate Issue Report Title

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Chris Morrison’s July 2 blog post at The Daily Sceptic, “BBC Complaints Director Takes Six-Month Sabbatical to Learn How to Promote ‘Climate Crisis’,” was reproduced at Anthony Watts’ WUWT site as a guest post the next day. After reading it at WUWT, I simply wanted to put in a comment reply saying I’d had my own encounter with that BBC Complaints Director, Colin Tregear, back in 2021, after I filed a complaint about BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast titled, “‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact.” My BBC complaint detailed how there was no truth to that memo directive was evidence of the fossil fuel industry operating disinformation campaigns, so for my July 3 WUWT comment, I wanted to link straight to the BBC’s page with that false accusation phrase as its title of the broadcast episode within their series of “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” reports, and then mention how BBC concluded that my complaint was meritless . . . . but that title wasn’t there at the BBC’s otherwise unchanged program page.

It’s possible – just potentially possible – that as the result of my complaint, I managed to live rent-free long enough in someone’s mind at the BBC that they ultimately felt compelled to bury their fatal mistake of failing to check the veracity of the accusations supplied to them (plural!) by their guest in that episode, ex-Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davies. Continue reading →

“We Decry Disinfo!!” sez International Group citing Disinfo

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Hat tip to Marc Morano’s ClimateDepot website for news of the otherwise ridiculous International Panel on the Information Environment’s (IPIE)’s June 2025 report “Information Integrity about Climate Science.” The report itself is 120+ pages long, but let’s cut to the chase to show how this one, like so many others which accuse the fossil fuel industry of spewing disinformation, are instead psychologically projecting how they are the ones spewing disinformation. Just like the others, this report and its key players are separated by three degrees or less from Ross Gelbspan’s utterly false “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” accusation about supposedly ‘leaked industry documents.’ Just like the others, all it takes is one errant citation in this report to shoot itself in the foot with a cannon about the whole idea of ‘industry-orchestrated’ disinformation. Just like the majority of the ExxonKnew” lawsuits, pin your collective premise on material that turns out to be disinformation promulgated by disinformers, and your credibility is out the window no matter what else you say. Continue reading →

Enter the Predictable Dragon—the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy

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Regretfully, I only became aware late yesterday (hat tip to Kyle Kohli at Energy in Depth for that news) of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing today about ‘dark money influence’ into the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. But I was able to fire off an immediate email to GOP witness Scott Walker at the Capital Research Center with tips about all my blog post references on the Democrat’s invited witness, Public Citizen’s David Arkush. Mr Walter replied early this morning thanking me for the tips. Perhaps he can relay my work to Committee majority Chairman Ted Cruz. The Committee’s link for the written testimony submitted by Arkush seems to be nonfunctional, but the copy uploaded by Climate Litigation Watch works fine … and proves once again that it is not the fossil fuel industry that should be investigated about pushing disinformation, it’s the enviro-activists who should be hit with that. Watch this: Continue reading →

Estate of Juliana Leon v Exxon Mobil Corporation

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Borrowing a line from the day-later UK Guardian news flash about this May 28, 2025-filed lawsuit – and by default, all the prior “ExxonKnew” lawsuits I’ve dissected – “Previous suits accused companies of breaching product liability and consumer protection laws and engaging in fraud and racketeering. But [Leon v Exxon Mobil Corp] is the first attempt to hold oil companies responsible for an individual climate-related death.” Yes, first-ever lawsuit using that lawfare tactic, but not the first time I’ve seen it pushed. I first wrote about this ridiculous personal injury angle, from David Arkush of the “Public Citizen” group, back in March 2023. He’d submitted his ‘scholarly paper’ draft version to the Harvard Law Environmental Review (HELR) on the notion of ‘climate homicide,’ which inadvertently showed his nearly complete enslavement to the same meritless ‘evidence’ which most the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits claim is proof that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientist ‘shills.’ When his paper was finally published in May 2024, I firmly suggested to HELR that his paper needed to be retracted. HELR did not do so, which thus only gave Arkush and Public Citizen the green light to proceed full steam ahead on the idiotic idea. Upon seeing Arkush and Public Citizen putting out a proposal to Arizona prosecutors just two months later on how to charge for ‘climate homicide,’ my blog post title for my dissection of his proposal posed the question of whether he was doing nothing more than trying to – ineptly – muscle his way into the lawfare territory already staked out in 2017 by the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm. I say “ineptly” because he ultimately used all of the four core accusation elements seen in their multiple filings.

No public prosecutors took the bait. But an apparently not-especially-bright law firm did. The questions now concern how directly Arkush / Public Citizen are involved in the case, and whether this new angle case is actually an outgrowth of a common shared template which all the other law firms / law offices seem to be using, where they choose elements of it as they see fit. In this dissection, I’ll show possible tell-tale ‘lawsuit template’ connections, including this case’s enslavement to two of the four worthless accusation elements. There’s three other utterly fatal overarching problems to this newest lawsuit effort, of course. Continue reading →

State of Hawai`i v. BP P.L.C.

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In the wake of the Department of Justice filing a lawsuit on May 1, 2025 against the State of Hawaii (and others) over the dubious act of announcing plans for filing future climate lawfare/regulation actions, it would appear that Governor Josh Green of Hawaii retaliated right back at the Trump Administration – on the very same day – by filing this Hawaii v BP lawsuit. Big mistake, because Governor Green’s ineptly thought-out decisions will only likely eventually give the DoJ and/or other Federal investigators an excuse to hit harder against not only this lawsuit, but all of the other “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. This filing was actually not remotely spontaneous, it arguably was at least eight years in the making, if not longer. It’s nothing more than the very latest in the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling’s series of “boilerplate copy filings.” How do I know that? Let me count the ways via the same checklist I’ve used on their prior copy ’n paste efforts, plus let me point out where Sher Edling is now digging an even deeper holes for themselves on at least two false accusations of theirs. Technically this filing wouldn’t go into my list of lawsuits plagiarizing other law firms’ / law offices’ “homework,” since Sher Edling is more or less entitled to re-use their own material wherever they take this traveling circus act, but what they repeated out of their just-prior Maine v BP filing over at the other far end of the country inadvertently draws attention to speculation that attorneys aren’t just lazily copying other material as though it was their own, they instead may be operating on a central template supplied to them. Continue reading →

The ‘Reposition Global Warming’ / ‘Victory’ Memos, ‘Chicken Little’ & Willie Soon go to the Supreme Court

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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.  Continue reading →

Naomi Oreskes’ Embracing of the “Victory Will Be Achieved” memos

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Like I said at the top of my prior blog post, it doesn’t matter where you drop into the accusation about fossil fuel industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns, nothing lines up right. The inspiration for this blog post comes from a result (utterly typical of many) in my daily email alert from Google of search results for articles containing the words “global warming” — a Jan 22, 2025 anti-President Trump piece at “The Conversation” website by Wrigley Institute Director for Environment and Sustainability Joe Árvai titled “How the oil industry and growing political divides turned climate change into a partisan issue.” The author is a psychology professor with exactly zero expertise in climate science who’d likely accuse me of being unqualified to speak on the issue … because I have exactly zero expertise in climate science. Psychological projection being a major hallmark of extremist enviro-activists, the title of his article needs to aim its accusation at enviro-activists for turning climate science into a partisan issue. When he speaks of ‘oil industry disinformation tactics,’ he needs to aim that 180° back at people on his own side. I could devote an entire blog post to all the elements of mis- disinformation in his piece. However, I’ll instead focus on a gem citation within his piece that’s something congressional investigators / law firms representing defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / genuinely objective journalists might want to look into:

Naomi Oreskes’ embracing of ye olde “victory will be achieved” memos. What does she know about them, and when did she know it? Continue reading →

The Fossil Fuel Industry Ran Disinfo Campaigns – ‘our ASSUMPTION is they did’

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Emphasizing for the benefit of congressional investigators / law firms representing defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / genuinely objective journalists: It does not matter where you drop into the collective accusation about the fossil fuel industry employing skeptic climate shills to spread disinformation — you’ll never find tidy answers tying up situations, you’ll find problems that only lead you onto a path of finding endless related problems. It never ends, no matter where you start. The example in this blog post concerns an item within Roland C “Kert” Davies’ 2011 version of his false accusation that Harvard Center for Astrophysics’ Dr Willie Soon was supposedly paid by Exxon to lie. I showed in my prior blog post the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits in which Davies 2015 rehashed accusation is their source – but while compiling that list and the brief timeline of prior accusations leading to the 2015 rehash, I spotted how Davies tangentially said something in his announcement of the 2011 version which essentially undermines one of the other of the four central accusation elements at the heart of most of these lawsuits. Continue reading →

List of the Climate Lawsuits Falsely Accusing Dr Willie Soon of Taking Exxon Bribes

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This list will be an ongoing compilation, with updates noted in red, similar to my list of global warming lawsuits. Additions to this list will be ref’d in this top paragraph – 5/29/25, Estate of Juliana Leon v Exxon Mobil Corporation added.

In a bit of wishful thinking, the hugely suspect Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) gloated in its December 19, 2024 ‘News & Analysis’ piece that more than “one in four Americans now live in a community suing Big Oil, underscoring the rapidly growing wave of calls to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for its decades-long climate deception…”

The reality of the situation is that CCI itself is noted by both the Climate Litigation Watch website and the Energy in Depth website as apparently one of the main drivers pushing any gullible state / city / municipality leader in America to consider filing an “ExxonKnew” lawsuit. I’ve shown here at GelbspanFiles that CCI trumpeted their mid summer 2023 hiring of Roland C “Kert” Davies as their Director of Special Investigations, and within my tag category of major mentions of him, that he has direct associations with the four main elements of the central accusations in nearly all of these lawsuits. I’ve further suggested that since every one of the 35 current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits is enslaved to at least one if not all four elements, that we do not actually have any such “growing wave” of lawsuits, we instead have the same basic template — call it the “John Passacantando, Kert Davies, et al. [dba Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action / Our Next Economy / CIC ] v. Exxon & any other applicable energy companies” template, for lack of a better description — being repeated ad nauseam.

The main law firm pushing these lawsuits is already under investigation by the U.S. House and Senate. With new Senate GOP majority rule and the power to subpoena witnesses and demand they produce particular documents, these investigations are going to need bulletproof backup material to proceed. Since the entire accusation surrounding Dr Soon as it pertains to accusations in these lawsuits has every appearance of originating from just two individuals – Passacantando and Davies, who both also appear to be participants in efforts to portray Exxon as a corrupt organization – it would be handy to have a list of how far and wide their accusations have been spread into the main law firm’s filings, and into the filings by others who’ve apparently plagiarized the accusations.  Continue reading →