Tag Archives: Naomi Oreskes

The Real ICE ads, Part 5: How long has this disinformation been going on?

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Enviro-activists say that not only did Exxon and the rest of the fossil fuel industry know the science of man-caused global warming was settled as far back as the 1970s, they paid ‘shill’ expert climate scientists to say it was not settled in deliberate disinformation campaigns. Enviro-activists, however, are loathe to engage in any direct science discussions with those skeptic scientists because, well …, quite simply they do not have expert level climate science experience or knowledge to match the expertise of those skeptics. How do enviro-activists circumvent that fatal problem? They need a shell game diversion. They have one in the claim that smoking gun proof for those corrupt disinformation efforts was revealed in ‘leaked industry documents’ in which – I’m paraphrasing here – industry executives declared ‘victory will be achieved when we reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.’ No joke on the literal words there, anyone can undertake an extensive internet search to see just how widespread the primary “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” memo strategy phrase is (along with its directly related audience targeting phrases “older, less-educated males” and “younger, low-income women”), and then do the same deep search for the secondary “victory will be achieved” memo set. Both memo sets are worthless as evidence because neither were ever implemented anywhere by any fossil fuel industry executive. It is disinformation, whether accidental or deliberate, on the part of any enviro-activist to say any fossil fuel company operated under the directives of either memo set.

The most plausibly sinister-sounding of the two sets was used by Al Gore in his 2006 movie in an accusation comparison of its strategy to a tobacco industry memo strategy, and he first quoted the set’s audience targeting phrase in his 1992 book; yet the rejected “reposition global warming” set’s key strategy was so obtusely worded that it was rejected outright by the people it was presented to. One of the officials in the “Information Council for the Environment” (“ICE”) PR campaign told me firsthand that their official copy was ultimately tossed into the trash, while the head of the campaign implied elsewhere that its too-narrow audience targeting suggestion was idiotic.

But someone else apparently thought the memo set copy they had, including its worthless discarded unused bits, could be turned into a weapon to use against the fossil fuel industry. Who ‘leaked’ it and when, and how did they portray the set to the recipients back then? What did the recipients know about the validity of the set, and did they undertake any due diligence to find out anything about the set? Continue reading →

The Real ICE ads, Part 4: what the public actually saw in Flagstaff Arizona & Bowling Green, Kentucky

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And now, the actual publicly seen Western Fuels Association “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) newspaper ads that were printed in the Flagstaff Arizona and Bowling Green, Kentucky newspapers, which I suggested at the end of my October 8, 2021 Part 1 blog post that I needed to find. As usual, what I actually found within this latest exercise does not resolve and solidify widespread accusations that these newspaper ads are definitive proof of coal/oil industry-led disinformation campaigns, what I’ve found instead raises significantly more questions about the core clique of enviro-activists who’ve long promulgated the accusations. Continue reading →

The Real ICE newspaper ads

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Information Council FOR the Environment. For, not on.

What does it tell you when the most prominent promulgators of the accusation about ‘fossil fuel industry executives colluding with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns’ — either people supposedly closest to very specific details of it, or entities which need to be above reproach when they repeat its specific details — proclaim that one glaring example of industry-orchestrated disinformation was the ‘misleading newspaper ads’ in the Western Fuels Association’s “Information Council on the Environment” public relations campaign? Continue reading →

Headline: “U.S. House Panel Commits Political Suicide; Expands Inquiry into Climate Disinformation by ‘Big Oil’”

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That was the widespread news headline, in one form or another (minus the ‘political suicide’ bit, of course) on Thursday, September 16th, 2021. The main news item was that Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, and sophomore-term House member Ro Khanna, D-Ca, sent letters hours earlier to four major fossil fuel companies and two lobbying groups, demanding that they appear in front of the Oversight Committee on October 28, and that they bring documents with them showing how they were engaged in — no joke! — “in a long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.” Those were the actual words in the nearly identical letters, which can be viewed in their entirety at the links within the Oversight Committees website page’s press release.

How could this House Oversight Committee stunt be revealed to be act of political suicide? If the ‘defense witnesses’ at the October 28 hearing decide to seize the leadership opportunity on this, they could show how the ‘industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns‘ accusation only points a huge arrow at where the real disinformation efforts are apparently seen in this issue, a core clique of enviro-activists who’ve pushed a pair of never-implemented, ‘leaked industry memo sets’ that are worthless to prove any “industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation” exists anywhere. Plus, the sheer lack of viable evidence behind the accusation points an even bigger arrow at the basic journalistic malfeasance on the part of mainstream media news reporters, when it comes to their decades-long failure to ask probing questions about the basic accusation, which dates back to the 1990s. Continue reading →

What’s old is not new again, no matter what direction you try to spin it

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Another way of putting today’s blog post topic is to say that if global warming believers demonstrate how they only have one or two sets of leaked industry memos from the 1990s to support their assertions about the ‘inherent racism of the fossil fuel industry‘ or that ‘the industry’s publicity is a complete lie’ …. well, then that’s all they got. One of these days their enslavement to those memo sets — the “reposition global warming” set and the “victory will be achieved” set — will experience a ‘jumped the shark’ event that will be reported by more prominent people than me, but in the meantime, this blog will have to suffice for reporting on such things.

No joke, two separate spin efforts just within the last 35 days: the underlying racism of the fossil fuel industry, and the effort to smear that industry as complete liars. Continue reading →

Anne Arundel County v BP P.L.C. et al.

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When the day arrives where enviro-activist media writers attempt to dissuade the public from reading any of my analysis of the “Exxon Knew”-style global warming lawsuits, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they descended to hurling superficial accusations such as saying my label of “Sher Edling boilerplate lawsuit filings” doesn’t fit the definition of “boilerplate.”

The Sher Edling’s law firm’s Maui v Sunoco filing is 139 pages long while their Annapolis v BP is 171 pages, which is so much of a huge length difference that these cannot be literal copies from one courthouse filing to the next. If Mr Cook is wrong on that claim right from the start, it stands to reason that none of his blog posts are worth reading.

Uh, huh. That would be a pure “nothing to see here, move along” Streisand Effect tactic, potentially prompting people to ask instead what it is, specifically, that I detail in these lawsuit filings. In my dissection of Annapolis v BP, my comparison of it to Maui v Sunoco detailed how both, along the prior thirteen Sher Edling boilerplate filings, contain largely the same blocks of text, and I illustrated specific faults with those blocks via a checklist of the repetitions and their ties to dicey sources, along with an additional note about a particular omission problem. I went so far as to speculate that the strange omission might be repeated in a future Arundel County lawsuit filing.

That omission is indeed repeated now in Arundel County v. BP. But on top of that, this latest boilerplate filing is actually as close to a literal copy ’n paste from one courthouse to the next as it could be. Continue reading →

Has the whole ‘crooked climate skeptics’ accusation strayed into criminal libel/slander territory?

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Just askin’, before the Big Tech effort to censor inconvenient questions spreads as far as into blogs like this. While the largest companies on the defendant side of all the “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits are still exploring legal technicalities paths concerning changes of venue, what happens if the smaller energy companies’ law firms start pulling all the loose threads in the accusation where it’s implied that a certain set of ‘leaked memos’ with the awkwardly worded strategy goal to “reposition global warming” is proof that Big Coal & Oil had a corrupt pay-for-performance arrangement with skeptic scientist ‘liars-for-hire’? That memo set is presented as ‘evidence’ in the majority of the current “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits, e.g. the most recent among them, Annapolis v BP’s paragraph 116. What will it indicate if efforts are made to quash those lawyers’ statements about the faults they find with that accusation? If legal analyst voices far bigger than mine start exploring whether that accusation is indeed a form of criminal libel/slander, what could the public interpret from an even more concerted censorship effort to silence those bigger voices? Continue reading →

City of Annapolis v. BP PLC, et al.

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Same old accusation — that energy companies willfully hid the ‘harm’ of their products from the public by colluding with skeptic climate scientist ‘shills’ in disinformation campaigns to undercut the “truth” about catastrophic man-caused global warming — different day. The mob of enviro-activists who place all their faith in this accusation never being questioned seem to be oblivious how the more often these Sher Edling law firm boilerplate filings are trumpeted as something new, exciting, and adding to a long list of “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits, the harder it will be to hide the fatal faults in them.

The only ‘new’ thing about this otherwise worn out state / county / city lawsuits traveling circus act is the amusing spin effort applied to the status of this latest Annapolis v. BP filing which previous ones didn’t get. Continue reading →

“The Capitol Riot and Climate Disinformation” — John Schwartz, New York Times

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“They’re more closely related than you might think” is Schwartz’s subhead for his January 13, 2021 New York Times article. The subtle implication is that if any person doesn’t accept the settled science of the 2020 U.S. presidential election or the settled science of catastrophic man-caused global warming, that person should be vilified and shunned from society.

Obey, accept news media narratives without question about ‘global warming science,’ or else, and obey mandates to, shall we say, not speak of preventing the theft of the 2020 election, lest it incite more violence ….. or else. OR ELSE! But when Schwartz chose “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star Naomi Oreskes as his go-to source for the history of disinformation efforts in his article, he inadvertently amplified how the actual threat to the well-being of the country is not some right-wing conspiracy to subvert democracy and protect corporate profits, it’s disinformation from the mainstream media itself.

Continue reading →

City of Hoboken v. ExxonMobil, et al.

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These lawsuits suing energy companies ‘to recover the costs’ of damages from global warming are really stacking up now. In addition to Imperial Beach, San Mateo, Richmond, Santa Cruz, Rhode Island, Baltimore, Honolulu, the District of Columbia — just to name a few — Hoboken, New Jersey is among the very latest communities to unwisely join this collection with their with their September 2 filing, Why is this unwise? If the industry defendants’ lawyers decide to prominently challenge the veracity of the core accusation within the lawsuit, namely that fossil fuel industry executives employed ‘shill’ skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns to deliberately deceive the public about the harm of global warming, it could not only expose how Hoboken officials didn’t undertake basic due diligence to check the basic veracity of the accusation, it could also torpedo all the rest of the lawsuits across the country in a similar manner, while further exposing how the mainstream media completely overlooked the obvious faults in these lawsuits and in the 25 year+ history of the basic accusation and the core clique of people who’ve promulgated it. Continue reading →