There’s That Name Again … And There’s That Accusation Again [11/20/25 Update]

11/20/25 update — see red double asterisk addition midway down, and at the bottom of this post.

Among all the tsunami of other controversial political news is the barely weeks-old scandal involving the BBC over revelations of their journalism malfeasance. Since I know a decent amount about another as-yet-unreported angle of BBC inaccuracies, I’ve emailed several UK reporters and others digging deeper into the overall situation to my coincidental 12 days-old filing of my complaint to the UK’s broadcast regulatory agency on this matter. What I briefly explained is that in 2020, the BBC relied on unverified ‘industry memos’ in a careless and illogical manner to claim the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns; their effort was hardly different than what happened a few years ago when the anti-Trump news media relied on the meritless “Steele Dossier” to accuse President Trump of engaging in despicable acts. I further pointed out how the accusation against the fossil fuel industry has every indication in the world of being traceable to a particular enviro-activist, Kert Davies, and how much of a one-trick pony the worthless memo phrase is for the anti-energy company activists.

What I should do is create another post in my “Background” series, to compile all of Kert Davies’ fatal credibility problems for ease of reference when corresponding with objective reporters. I plan to do that for my next post here. But in the meantime, let’s see where the man popped up just recently, and where that one-trick memo phrase popped up. Continue reading

Ofcom Complaint – [ the 2025 version ]

Relentless, I am. So here we go again with my continuing saga on imploring the mighty BBC news organization to do their core job. Call me “old school” on the matter, but news outlets are obligated – in my opinion – to report the news with no partisan slant, and to view information provided to them with a jaded eye, questioning any aspect of it where something just does not look right, and demanding not one but multiple rock-solid sources before publishing major accusations. In the case of the mid-summer 2020 report in which ex-Greenpeace operative Kert Davies brought the BBC ‘evidence’ which supposedly fit their program series titled “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” about the fossil fuel industry ‘ran disinformation campaigns to deceive the public’ … the BBC program producers should have first cast a basic ‘due diligence doubtful eye’ on whether Davies’ ‘evidence’ was verifiably true or not. They apparently did not, a basic violation of BBC’s own guidelines about gathering material. From that basic failure, they conveyed factual inaccuracies to their listening audience.

As I first detailed in my July blog post, when I spotted how the BBC strangely reworded their program title to eliminate the very phrase that was the core of my official complaint I filed, it was a ripe opportunity to refile my complaint. Now, here we go into the last available step in the complaint process. Continue reading

BBC [appears to] Bury a False 2020 Climate Issue Report Title – Part 3

BBC Complaints did actually reply to my protest, seen in the 8/15/25 Addendum section at the end of my July 25, 2025 Part 2 blog post, with an open invite to take my complaint to their next level-up “Stage 2” BBC Executive Complaints Unit (ECU). I’ve done so, as seen in what follows. At the rock-bottom level of explanation, the BBC system renamed their online podcast report for their August 2020 “How They Made Us Doubt Everything Episode 6 ‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact‘ ” with the shorter-worded title, “The Tobacco Playbook: 6. From Fact to Theory.” It sure looked like they were burying the core fault about how the “reposition global warming” memos were not actually viable evidence to prove the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. My complaint concerned that very ‘burial’ appearance. Their 8/12/25 reply was that the shorter title was for ‘saving text space,’ and my rebuttal to that said they needed to re-examine their 2021 final decision because the entire report – in original title form or retitled – was based totally on unsupportable evidence. Neither their ‘title piece’ smoking gun ‘evidence’ was ever implemented anywhere, nor was the secondary “victory will be achieved” memos ever implemented anywhere. Thus, their original ECU final decision must be revisited now, before their credibility implodes on this situation later. Continue reading

Ben Franta All But Declares ‘Victory will be achieved,’ concerning Multnomah v Exxon

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. Continue reading

Google’s “Artificial Intelligence Overview” – on ‘Industry Disinfo Evidence,’ trust its info as far as you can throw it

Much ado these days with people thinking “A.I.” is some kind of all-encompassing savior to make life easier. Just do a generic Google search of “A.I. can help with” and watch the system fill in the last words with a whole range of situations … with Google A.I.’s own automatically generated input right at the very top, where its handy helpful little links in its “Show More” section to expand what it offers. All as though “A.I.” is benign, soulless and without political bias.

Speaking of Google searches, I’ve been using its basic system almost exclusively for over a decade, since that system clearly head & shoulders above any other search engine – you just have to know how to circumvent its biased results by doing boolean searches to prompt results it might not want the public to know about. It’s how I discovered exactly what the Ozone Action environmental group was, and who its staff were. But in May 2024, Google began adding its ‘AI option’ to its search methods menu. I’ve avoided it like the plague, knowing and proving already just months earlier that at least some forms of A.I. had no intelligence whatsoever. For this blog post, however, I’ll actually look into Google’s “A.I. Overview” for the very first time.  Watch this —

“Who discovered the fossil fuel industry memos with the phrase Reposition Global Warming as Theory (Not Fact)? What is their importance?” Continue reading

Oreskes’ Embrace of the “Victory Will Be Achieved” Memos, Redux, in Honolulu v Sunoco – Big, big mistake.

The widely shared Associated Press news on July 28th was that a hearing in Hawaii was scheduled to take place the next day on whether the Honolulu v Sunoco global warming damages lawsuit should be tossed out because the ‘statute of limitations’ on the case had somehow run out. The defendants’ law firms legal technicality minutiae maneuvers from all their prior 8+ months of effort to get it out of state court and into Federal court didn’t work, so it appears they are trying a different maneuver … but in ABC News’ July 28 regurgitation of the AP story, which I fortuitously screencaptured on July 29th, showed how Naomi Oreskes’ name just could not stay out of the overall situation. I say “fortuitous” because one day later when I reopened both the ABC “Honolulu’s lawsuit against fossil fuel companies leads climate change legal fight” story and the AP original version to copy words out of them – poof – Oreskes has vanished from both. But what’s seen in the internet cannot be unseen. What’s going on right there with that erasure? Luckily, someone smarter than me preserved an Internet Archive version of the original AP story, with the two Oreskes paragraphs intact.

Not an especially bright idea for the AP to say Oreskes had submitted an Opposition filing against the defendants’ ‘statute of limitations’ maneuver; dumber yet is to bury that fact like it never happened. However, that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this particular new situation. Continue reading

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

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

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

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

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