Tag Archives: Vic Sher

Summary for Policy Makers (SPM): the Sher Edling law firm

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On Oct 7, 2024, news reports (e.g. Thomas Catenacci’s “Anti-Energy Lawfare“) described the same-day release of Senator Ted Cruz’s / Rep James Comer’s investigation analysis Sher Edling, the San Francisco law firm that is – by my current count – ‘boilerplate-copying’ 18 “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits from one place to the next, and ‘assisting’ in 4 others.

Elections matter. At the time of the Oct 7 news reports, pre-general election, the U.S. Senate was in the minority. With the Senate now firmly set in the majority and with Senator Cruz having subpoena power, that changes the situation. While his and the joint investigation with Rep Comer focuses principally on the dark money funding of Sher Edling, that focus could broaden to cover what I consider a far bigger set of fatal faults surrounding that law firm. So, first is my brief number lineup, followed by more details below for each, which include screencapture image links and blog post links supporting the particular items at greater depth: 1) provably false accusations of industry-corruption behavior. 2) Hidden original citation source. 3) Subsequent text omissions. 4) deceptively cropped images. 5) The Naomi Oreskes Problem. 6) The Dr Willie Soon false accusation. 7) Matt Edling and Victor Sher. 8) (stay tuned, I’ll likely add more to this post at a later date) Continue reading →

Background: Was It All One Big ‘Oopsy’?

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Call this blog post a combo ‘editorial’ / ‘backgrounder’ on the overarching inevitable problem the accusers of “industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists” will face. It’s simply a matter of time before any one of the 29 current “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits finally does go in front of a judge or jury to decide on its merits. This blog post concerns what the deciders need to know about the political accusation angles within these cases. I doubt that the people behind the “growing tide” of ExxonKnew-style / “growing pool” of lawsuits actually have any intention of winning via jury decisions; the objective quite likely is to intimidate the smaller of the defendant companies into thinking if they just cry “uncle” and pay out what they believe is a settlement fee they can somehow afford in order to keep their company alive for the foreseeable future. This was an effective tactic to force the tobacco industry into submission, an inevitable conclusion since tobacco smoke is harmful and Big Tobacco knew it, and the people filing lawsuits against Big Tobacco knew Big Tobacco knew it. Everybody knew it. A person would have to be spectacularly stupid to believe inhaling nothing bad could result from inhaling burning particulates big enough to see.

What the fossil fuel industry knew and what they did is an entirely different and uncomparable situation. Therein lies the problem for the pushers of the “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits and the core clique of enviro-activists who’ve promulgated the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation for decades, which is one of the two pillars these lawsuits stand on, and on which arguably the entire ‘climate crisis’ issue stands on. The core clique of enviro-activists may sincerely believe with all their heart in the soundness of the other pillar, namely the notion that “the climate science of man-caused global warming is settled.” None of them are climate scientists or have any expertise in the field, but as true believers, it’s fair to say their innocent ignorance about the full science is forgivable. The democratic right speech to free speech includes the right to be incorrect about a matter. The potentially fatal problem for them, and the key to comprehending why the whole tobacco industry settlements tactic will ultimately backfire in epic fashion is what’s seen in the truism statement below, as it pertains to the accusation that ‘fossil fuel executives employed skeptic climate scientist shills who spewed falsehoods in disinformation campaigns just like the tobacco industry did.’

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The Be-All / End-All “reposition global warming” & “victory will be achieved” Memos: Told ya so …

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Call this post a follow-up to both my similarly-titled November 16, 2022 post and a sort of “corroborating new information addition” to my Sept 2021 post about the Democrat House Oversight Committee’s political suicide. It’s a point I cannot emphasize enough, as it relates to enviro-activists promulgating the idea that there’s a fossil fuel industry conspiracy to mislead the public – via industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns – about the certainty of man-caused global warming. Always keep these two bits in mind when considering any prominent hurl of their accusation: first, a primary hallmark of enviro-activists his their psychological projection of their mindset as accusations aimed at others; and second; the very best evidence in their arsenal for their accusation about deceptive industry campaigns consists the above-noted memo sets. As I’ve detailed here at GelbspanFiles, both sets are literally worthless, neither were ever implemented anywhere, thus rendering them useless as evidence to prove deception efforts are rooted in the directives of those memos. Obviously.

So when these same two sets are put out front & center in one way or another by enviro-activists again and again and again, it is a valid concern to determine whether this is a conspiracy on their part to deceive the public about the legitimacy of the science-based disputes offered by skeptic climate scientists to counter the IPCC / Al Gore side of the issue.

Allow me to illustrate this troublesome situation once again, where what I found a couple of months ago, combined with the latest available info about those enviro-activists’ efforts (hold that thought until near the end of this post), reinforces the appearance of their apparent conspiracy efforts. Continue reading →

Mistakes. These Guys Make Mistakes. Big Ones.

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The critical thing that people must never lose sight of when examining the Clima-Change™ issue is how enviros wage their war on two fronts, namely that the science of man-caused catastrophic global warming is settled, and that skeptic climate scientists are “liars-for-hire on the payroll of Big Oil.” The science is fatally weak, skeptic climate scientists and other experts detail that at levels that’ll give you migraine headaches from trying to absorb it all. Not that the mainstream media will tell the public about any of this.

But the false accusations about industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists are much more faulty, promulgated by just a core clique of enviro-activists and their weak link helpers. They hand the massive mistakes they make on a silver platter to the law firms defending energy companies in all of the current “Exxon Knew” lawsuits, and they hand these same mistakes over the same way to U.S. House investigators, who now have the opportunity to mirror flip the prior Democrat-led hearings which egregiously sought to vilify fossil fuel company executives.

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The Be-All / End-All “reposition global warming as theory” Memos: When It’s All You Got, You. Have. Nothing.

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How’s it going to work out when you have to defend your accusation that this ‘leaked memo’ directive is smoking gun proof that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns to deceive the public about what the industry knew about the certainty of man-caused global warming? Just askin’ … for potentially 218+ friends ….

No exaggeration there about that worthless-as-evidence memo directive phrase (it was never implemented anywhere) being the only thing enviro-activists have in their arsenal to support their accusation about the fossil fuel industry bankrolling disinformation campaigns, and I’m not kidding about the sheer repetition of it recently which proves just how devoid that mob is of anything else to support their accusation, and how desperate they’re becoming in using it to keep the accusation alive. Continue reading →

Mayor and City Council of Baltimore v. BP P.L.C., et al.

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[July 12-17, 2024 Author’s updates: Case dismissed … because a judge who agrees man-caused global warming is a concern, but for the Federal government, not state courts. Ironically, as of July 17th, a week after the dismissal, the website administrator at the law firm had still not gotten the memo about this wipeout concerning a case example they think exemplifies their work. By the way, more on the backstory of this law firm here. ]

In my May 17, 2018 post on the King County v. BP lawsuit, I noted how I could have taken a shortcut to simply refer readers back to my earlier blog posts regarding identically worded lawsuits in different communities led by the same lawyer, Matt Pawa … but I instead offered additional troubling details about how he might be connected to dubious ‘evidence’ within that set of cases. Basically the same situation applies here with this latest City of Baltimore filing, regarding the eight global warming lawsuits under the Sher Edling law firm banner. My July 13, 2018 post on the Rhode Island variant noted the identical wording of them, and went into details of what I call “the fingerprints of Naomi Oreskes.” This Baltimore case suffers from the same affliction — it repeats the worthless set of supposedly Western Fuels “reposition global warming” memos on its PDF page 80 (printout’s pg 75), and Oreskes’ more than decade-old disingenuous portrayal of President Johnson’s speech is on its PDF page 56 (printout’s pg 51). But among my prior dissections of the Sher Edling cases, I haven’t mentioned anything about Vic Sher or Matt Edling. Continue reading →