Russell Cook
On June 26th just a little over a week ago, David “climate homicide” Arkush and co-authors at his Public Citizen group put out a press release titled “New Memo Details Legal Case for Prosecuting Big Oil for Extreme Heat Deaths,” containing a link to a 51 page proposal for prosecutors in the state of Arizona (Democrat ones, of course including the state’s Attorney General), noting:
Though this memo asks a particular question — how officials in Maricopa County could pursue reckless manslaughter or second degree murder prosecutions for deaths caused by the July 2023 heat wave — its analysis is relevant in most jurisdictions where prosecutors might seek justice for climate victims.
I already had a tag category at GelbspanFiles dating back over a year concerning Arkush’s ludicrous ultra-lawfare fixation. He’s now taken that fixation likely beyond its breaking point. It’s one thing to push the bizarre “charge fossil fuel companies with climate homicide” idea in ‘scholarly papers,’ but it’s quite another to propose the idea straight to state prosecutors. That’s what he’s presenting in the above press release. Forgive the rather morbid visual analogy here – the man virtually points a loaded revolver at his head and the heads of his co-authors and practically asks law firms defending energy companies in “ExxonKnew” lawsuits to pull the triggers for him.
Before we dive into Arkush’s latest blunder, let’s first review for any new readers of GelbspanFiles what the core faults are with the “fossil fuel industry execs ran disinformation campaigns employing skeptic climate scientists” accusation. Then I’ll show where Arkush dutifully regurgitates them, followed by a simple question for everyone to ask.
• Accusers say”smoking gun” leaked memos prove the fossil fuel industry ran a disinformation campaign specifically targeting “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women” in which skeptic scientists who knew global warming science was settled were paid to knowingly “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” A sinister effort, directly comparable to deception efforts of the tobacco industry.
No, the unsolicited memo set, with its alternative campaign names, was rejected – never implemented in any form – by the group it was sent to. That group pitched their copy of the set into the trash. Doesn’t matter who proposes what, a never-implemented plan cannot serve as evidence of people acting under the plan.
• Accusers say “smoking gun” advertorials with imagery of “Chicken Little” and a “Doomsday” planet, along with specific others, e.g. the “Flat Earth” advertorial, are proof of the industry’s attempts to “reposition global warming.”
No, the “Chicken Little” / “Doomsday” / “Flat Earth” advertorials were never published anywhere. One law firm using the Chicken Little ad crops off the bottom of the ad, as does their source, for a reason: the bottoms of the “Chicken Little” / “Doomsday”ads have the never-used PR campaign name – both of them – along with a non existent toll-free number, despite what the “Chicken” says. Ditto for the “Flat Earth” ad.
The degraded photocopy “Chicken Little” / “Doomsday” images source from what I term “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action.” The old Ozone Action cover letter mentions the “Flat Earth” ad but no scan image of it appears anywhere in their 50-page collection (no need to trust me; although Greenpeace took their complete scans collection offline in 2022, with zero explanation for doing so, I’d downloaded their 50 page “ICE” PDF file when it was still online, and saved it here). Greenpeace USA = John Passacantando & Kert Davies. Ozone Action = Passacantando & Davies. Climate Investigations Center / ClimateFiles = Davies … apparently dark money-funded by Passacantando’s millions, after both left Greenpeace.
Those memos and advertorials are the literal best the accusers have in their arsenal, dubiously sourced. Other allegations simply trail behind as a much weaker second-rate efforts, designed to make it look like there is plenty of additional viable accusation material, not just the one solitary “smoking gun” situation above. In my Backgrounder list of keywords / names, I detail what to look for anytime somebody prominent hurls the accusation about ‘industry disinformation campaigns.’ With that in mind, let’s now look at David Arkush’s latest attempt at pushing his “climate homicide” idea.
In my blog post about enviro accusers’ enslavement to the worthless “Chicken Little” advertorial, I noted how it finally dawned on johnny-come-lately David Arkush to include that ad and its hand-in-glove association with the “reposition global warming” memos. I could only guess that he’d been given a stern lecture about being previously inattentive to that accusation’s value. Whatever the explanation may be, he now fully embraces it. The big PDF file primer for AZ prosecutors features the memos / advertorials as a particularly big footnote #116 for what was just a quick reference to the PR campaign they are falsely attributed to.
Who’s the source there? The Union of Concerned Scientists. They didn’t dig up any of that, I covered their inept foray into this situation nine years ago. They couldn’t even get the one-and-only-name-ever-used for the official public relations campaign completely correct. Who’s their source? Greenpeace USA. Who did they thank for their material? Kert Davies, who – don’t forget – worked for both Greenpeace USA and Ozone Action, the latter being the group where the “reposition global warming” memos first got their ongoing media traction. Watch the pattern arise out of that, this is the way the accusation crumbles apart, around a core clique of promulgators. Meanwhile, let’s click off the other checklist items in this proposal from my Backgrounder list of keywords / names:
✓ “Victory will be achieved memos” – the never implemented set. Interesting – isn’t it? – that this primer cites Kert Davies’ ClimateFiles site just 5 footnotes above, but doesn’t cite it for his copy of the API memo set, but instead chooses the Inside Climate News’ copy. They are the same set. Not similar – identical. His same 2013 Greenpeace copy. Again – not similar; identical.
✓ “Exxon paid $1.2 million” – the bribery accusation of skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon, which implodes under hard scrutiny. Unlike the various current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits which bury the source of that accusation behind generic-looking website archive pages which nevertheless always lead to Kert Davies at Greenpeace USA, this primer for Arizona prosecutors commits a ‘citation cascade’ tactic where its source is the above-noted Union of Concerned Scientists’ Mulvey & Schulman dossier collection. Who does UCS cite as their source? Greenpeace / Climate Investigations Center.
✓ Naomi Oreskes, via her Richard Lawson memo cited in – of all places – her hugely problematic chapter contribution piece within someone else’s book, which falsely places the “reposition global warming” memos in an archive they’ve never been in, while mentioning the above-noted advertorials being in the same archive handled by an ex-U.S. Senate staffer associated with Al Gore who alerted her to them.
✓ Oreskes’ subordinate Geoffrey Supran – as a star witness recently in a May 2024 U.S. Senate hearing, he demonstrated his own enslavement to both the “reposition global warming” memos accusation and the “victory will be achieved” memos accusation. He even doubled down on the latter memo set in his spoken testimony. This is the same Senate hearing this primer says it heavily relied on in its Acknowledgements section.
✓ Benjamin Franta – right above Supran in the footnotes. The citation paper from Franta is simply irrelevant to Arizona prosecutors and actually aids “ExxonKnew” lawsuit defendants on how Exxon didn’t know. But give Franta credit in that paper for citing Naomi Oreskes 4 times to impugn the credibility of skeptic climate scientists. What can be relevant to opposition to the accusations about ‘fossil fuel industry disinfo’ campaigns is Franta’s own enslavement to key people associated with the accusation — which, David Arkush inadvertently pointed to by recently citing Franta’s Doctor of Philosophy thesis.
✓ Carroll Muffett, via the citation of his “Smoke & Fumes” report’s document #16 — that old document, the one where Muffett did not highlight a particular paragraph showing how fossil fuel company leaders back in the late ’60s might be hearing about global cooling. Uh ….. yeah … that Muffett.
✓ Center for Climate Integrity (CCI)
✓ “Victory will be achieved memos” – the never implemented set. Interesting – isn’t it? – that this primer cites Kert Davies’ ClimateFiles site just 5 footnotes above, but doesn’t cite it for his copy of the API memo set, but instead chooses the Inside Climate News’ copy. They are the same set. Not similar – identical. His same 2013 Greenpeace copy. Again – not similar; identical.
✓ “Exxon paid $1.2 million” – the bribery accusation of skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon, which implodes under hard scrutiny. Unlike the various current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits which bury the source of that accusation behind generic-looking website archive pages which nevertheless always lead to Kert Davies at Greenpeace USA, this primer for Arizona prosecutors commits a ‘citation cascade’ tactic where its source is the above-noted Union of Concerned Scientists’ Mulvey & Schulman dossier collection. Who does UCS cite as their source? Greenpeace / Climate Investigations Center.
✓ Naomi Oreskes, via her Richard Lawson memo cited in – of all places – her hugely problematic chapter contribution piece within someone else’s book, which falsely places the “reposition global warming” memos in an archive they’ve never been in, while mentioning the above-noted advertorials being in the same archive handled by an ex-U.S. Senate staffer associated with Al Gore who alerted her to them.
✓ Oreskes’ subordinate Geoffrey Supran – as a star witness recently in a May 2024 U.S. Senate hearing, he demonstrated his own enslavement to both the “reposition global warming” memos accusation and the “victory will be achieved” memos accusation. He even doubled down on the latter memo set in his spoken testimony. This is the same Senate hearing this primer says it heavily relied on in its Acknowledgements section.
✓ Benjamin Franta – right above Supran in the footnotes. The citation paper from Franta is simply irrelevant to Arizona prosecutors and actually aids “ExxonKnew” lawsuit defendants on how Exxon didn’t know. But give Franta credit in that paper for citing Naomi Oreskes 4 times to impugn the credibility of skeptic climate scientists. What can be relevant to opposition to the accusations about ‘fossil fuel industry disinfo’ campaigns is Franta’s own enslavement to key people associated with the accusation — which, David Arkush inadvertently pointed to by recently citing Franta’s Doctor of Philosophy thesis.
✓ Carroll Muffett, via the citation of his “Smoke & Fumes” report’s document #16 — that old document, the one where Muffett did not highlight a particular paragraph showing how fossil fuel company leaders back in the late ’60s might be hearing about global cooling. Uh ….. yeah … that Muffett.
✓ Center for Climate Integrity (CCI)
That last one is where the big question needs to be asked concerning what exactly David Arkush / Public Citizen are up to here. As detailed at both the Climate Litigation Watch website and at the Energy in Depth website, those groups describe how CCI is apparently one of the main drivers pushing the prosecution idea opportunity to any gullible state / city / municipality leader in America who’s willing to consider it. There’s every appearance in the world that the “ExxonKnew” traveling circus act, with guest star Geoffrey Supran, is CIC’s exclusive turf. To top that off, who did CCI hire just one year ago as their “Director of Special Investigations”? Kert Davies.
The whole Arkush / Public Citizen proposal here weirdly looks like an effort to muscle in on what the CIC is already doing. Or are they, actually? They wouldn’t want to cross paths with the person who feeds them, would they? Congressional investigators / attorneys defending energy companies in “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / objective, unbiased reporters might want to ask what’s going on here.
I can understand how the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling, handler of 18 of the current “ExxonKnew”lawsuits, is in this climate lawfare realm – they’ll get an enormous cut of the winnings … if they do succeed in winning one or forcing settlement payments from any of the lesser defendants who thing they can solve their own problem by crying “uncle.” I can understand how Roland C “Kert” Davies is in this – he’ll likely get rewarded from a cut of Sher Edling’s winnings. I can understand how Naomi Oreskes is in on this – she also gets a cut by being on retainer with Sher Edling. I can even see how alleged “journalist” Amy Westervelt gets in on this – I had to update the bottom of my Puerto Rico v Exxon Part 2 dissection with a new doc I found where Westervelt apparently seems to be directly supplying Puerto Rico lead lawyer Melissa Sims with Davies-supplied docs info. Thus Westervelt can get her reward portion of the winnings out of that non-Sher Edling lawsuit by directly working with the law firm.
The mystery here is how David Arkush and his associates at Public Citizen get in on the winnings, if that was their plan all along.
They all could lose any remote chance they had of becoming filthy rich out of this show, with Arkush taking the slightly plausible concept of entire companies forced to pay for global warming damages into the far more laughable notion of putting a range of industry executives in prison (others, too??), for murder. The only thing they’ve accomplished here is reinforce how – among any given prominent accusations about ‘Big Oil’ disinformation campaigns – the common thread is worthless ‘industry documents’ promulgated by a tiny handful of enviro-activists.
Nobody has ever been killed from fossil fuel industry-induced wild climate escalation, while more CO2 emissions is actually a huge benefit for billions of people.
Who could conceivably be charged with criminal behavior in this issue? I’d suggest it is the core clique of enviro-activists who’ve taken possible civil action defamation into criminal-level libel/slander.
Exxon is responsible for ALL the oil burned?
Responsible for all the heat deaths, or even just the ‘extra heat deaths’? – then who is responsible to get the medal for the ~10 times as many saved from freezing in the dark?
Who’s responsible for all the comforts of modern life that have practically doubled the average life span since the widespread use and production of oil?
Why are people happier and well employed when oil is relatively cheaper than when it’s very expensive?
Basic, everyday facts that seem to soar over the heads of the legal geniuses and Nobel hopefuls.
Yup. Cheap, reliable fossil fuels save lives.
The moral panic surrounding climate change assumes the absurd, unprovable or disprovable premise that atmospheric carbon dioxide(CO2) is the climate control knob. From there, it assumes that “scientists” or “experts” or some mysterious, elephantine, uncorruptable bureaucracy knows precisely what the correct CO2 level should be, knows how to make that happen, and when they do make it happen life on earth will get better. . . or less worse slower, or something. . .
This bundle of absurd assumptions leads to absurd scapegoating like the “Big Oil” lawsuits, an underemployed, has-been child actor throwing tantrums at the U.N., and a widespread feeling that the domestication of fire should be prohibited.
Prohibiting the domestication of fire is far more ludicrous and impossible than the attempted prohibition of beverage alcohol in the U.S. in the 1920s. Fire is much more essential to human life.
Unfortunately, humanity is vulnerable to these absurd convulsions. Much damage ensues, mostly to the innocent. ‘Twas ever thus. An African proverb applies here:
“When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.”
Keep in mind that most ordinary people are “the grass.”
Exxon didn’t burn the oil, consumers did so any liability is with them.
Tobacco companies were held liable for smoking deaths, not tobacco farmers.
I don’t understand why more hasn’t been made of this. The very towns cities, even prosecutors’ offices, that are advancing these ridiculous claims have used fossil fuels and, I am certain, continue to use fossil fuels for their electricity, cars and office heating. They doubtless continued to do so after discovering that they were “misled” and that fossil fuels are contributing to global warming. So how can they claim Exxon was misleading them (or the public) when their conduct is the same both before and after discovering the alleged lie?
And answering that wouldn’t begin to answer the salient question – were those ads, whether they were run or not, defensible positions based on what we knew then, and what we know now? I haven’t seen the ads, but I suspect they were probably pretty accurate in identifying uncertainties about climate change that are unresolved to this day.
I have. There’s no “there” there, they just asked straight up questions to suggest there was another side to the Al Gore issue that the news media was not telling the public about. But the enviros, ranging from this latest idiotic ‘climate murder’ effort all the way back to the mid- late-1990s put all their eggs in the basket of particular lousy cropped leaked photocopies to say, “here’s the smoking gun!“ It was irresponsible of them never to check the veracity of what they were given, and it’s epic level journalism malfeasance of the legacy news media to run with such drivel instead of verifying if any part of it happened the way the enviros described.
Problem there is for evidence of CAGW harm from burning fossil fuels. First of all, Exxon could not have possibly known about AGW harm as far back as the ’60s – ’70s in the face of all the science concern about AGC. The next question to ask is what benefit tobacco smoking ever had for anyone, beyond giving a person a slight buzz or something (I’ve never smoked; I wouldn’t know). Contrast that with all the benefits to humankind resulting from the use of fossil fuels. How many millions of lives would have been lost without readily available, affordable power to run police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, medical facilities, disease-reduction plastic food containers, on and on and on?
If the Arizona state prosecutor does end up starting legal action, the oil companies should halt sales of their products in the state for the duration. Perhaps after thousands of people take to the streets to demand gas and oil the state might realise that even if the premise of the case were true, fossil fuel products are still a net benefit to everyone.
Better still, they should petition the court to ban the sales until the case is resolved so if was proven (laugh) they caused the deaths, there would be no more casualties.
Harold the Organic Chemists Says:
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 is 427 ppm by volume. This is only
0.839 grams of CO2 per cubic meter of air. This very low concentration of CO2 in air
is no threat to humans and all other plants and animals. Most of the CO2 produced by
the use of fossil fuels is absorbed by oceans and taken up by plants on land.
Where do the green wackos get these crazy ideas?
I am reliably informed by a submariner that the danger level for atmospheric CO2 while dived is north of 5000ppm and isn’t a real danger until above 8000ppm. Plants would love it that high as they did in the past.
Commercial greenhouses – here in Europe – are kept at an air concentration of between 1 000ppm to 1 200ppm to hasten plant growth, improve plant health and use less water.
Since 2 000, an area the size of the USA has ‘greened’ around deserts, shrinking them, as vegetation has taken advantage of increase in CO2 from around 380ppm to 420ppm. This fixes topsoil and water, provides fertiliser for new growth from plant decay, and provides habitat for myriad fauna.
I wonder why Earth/plant/animal worshippers would want to reduce CO2 and destroy this and return land to desert. Strange creatures, environmentalists
Greenies believe that biting the hands that feed them is a moral imperative. Biting the hands that feed you is even more imperative. You might not be green enough, for all they know. Only the greener-than-thou get to make the rules for everyone else.
As for commercial greenhouses — whose operators actually know something about greenery, CO2 requirements, and the like — or God forbid, deserts that shrink? Don’t let the word out. Ordinary people might feel less inclined to panic. We can’t have ordinary people feeling okay when greenies’ jobs depend on panicking the multitudes.
And… after post-2008 financial crisis and reduced CO2 emissions, and particularly the CoVid near complete shutdown and drastic reduction in emissions, there was no visible signal in the data recorded at MLO to show either event.
In fact for 2020/21/22 the recorded concentration continued to rise slightly – so if not from fossil fuels what caused that increase?
It’s not a crime to dispute what Climate Alarmists claim.
Climate Alarmists want to make it a crime because that’s what Nazis do.
Climate Alarmists don’t want to accept the fact that climate science isn’t even close to being settled, and there’s no evidence CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, essential for life on Earth.
So Climate Alarmists lie and sue in an effort to get their way.
Yesterday I was told in another comments section that I’m not allowed to call them liars.
Call them incompetent
Call them ‘stills’ because you may not be allowed to call them liars, but they are still liars.
Heard that word too often by both participants in the last presidential debate. It has become another piece of language that has been “used up” and become an allusion to the reaction it used to suggest.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse from the neighboring state of Rhode Island would have thrown me in the hoosegow years ago for climate skepticism, what the inestimable Senator calls “denial.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from my home state of Massachusetts would have done something similar many years ago, too, if he could get away with it. RFK Jr. is now running for president. Who knows how many deniers, skeptics, etc. will find new homes in the hoosegow if he gets elected.
I don’t understand calling someone a liar because they state their beliefs. That’s the same as a Christian calling a Muslim a liar because the Christian doesn’t believe Mohammud was a prophet (and vice versa).
When someone says something they KNOW is not true then they are lying. When these dingbat Climate Alarmists say THE WORLD IS GOING TO END! they (for the most part) believe it.
They are not liars. They believe in AGW and they believe in their Priests and Priestesses (Gore, Mann, Hanson, Orestes, Greta, etc.)
Don’t follow their lead and redefine English words. It just adds to the confusion.
“I don’t understand calling someone a liar because they state their beliefs.”
Well, if they actually believe what they say, then they are not liars, they are sadly misinformed.
I do try to make distinctions between deliberate liars and True Believers.
The problem is it is hard to tell which is which, except in the case of Naomi Oreskes and some others. We know they are lying. They know they are lying. Yet they lie anyway. That’s what propagandists do. Those are the kinds of people my “liar” tag is aimed at.
I have three tag categories at my GelbspanFiles blog for prominent mentions of Oreskes, one concerning her – let’s put it politely – basically “faulty narratives,’ another for her – let’s put it politely – “inconsistent tales‘ of what got her started into the climate issue, and one more catch-all category where she’s brought up in connection with her or someone else not being exactly truthful on matters concerning accusations about “industry-paid skeptics.” The late Ron Arnold absolutely confirmed for me within his study of her climate issue accusations that her bit about ye olde “reposition global warming” being archived at the DC office of AMS was flat out not true.
The unresolved mystery here – which I’m doing my absolute best to prompt investigators with more subpoena power than I have to look into – is why she would say such a thing about those worthless memos, and why so many of her related narratives about them do not line up right. It can’t be explained away with “well, she might just be a complete narcissistic psychopath.” Something else may be going on here. When a person of her caliber and influence essentially invites the label “the queen of disinformation,” it’s an indication that there are way more troublesome hidden details to discover.
“Climate change” — or whatever the fashionable term morphs into — is NOT an existential crisis, not even a matter requiring immediate, drastic action. Most especially IT IS NOT A HOAX.
A hoax is constructed from deliberate falsehoods that can eventually be revealed, and disproved. Climate change, as commonly discussed, is a moral panic. It has more in common with mass manias like the witch manias of the Middle Ages, Holland’s 17th century investment bubble in tulips, the fear of nuclear holocaust of the 1950s & 60s, fears of a cancer epidemic caused by industrial chemicals, and other such terrors.
Moral panics can’t be disproved in the way that hoaxes can be disproved. The common notion that climate change is apt to cause mass extinctions of wild animals and plants, and the possible extinction of all humanity is statistically absurd, and cannot be proved or disproved by “science.” It can’t even be accurately documented.
The notion that a change in temperature of a few degrees one way or the other is apt to obliterate life on “the planet,” lead to massive increases in storm severity and frequency, etc. is ABSURD right on its face. Deaths from natural weather disasters — both in percentages and absolute numbers have fallen sharply, and worldwide throughout the last century.
The notion that atmospheric carbon dioxide is the climate control knob, is EVEN MORE ABSURD, it that’s possible. Climate is complex. Changes can’t be attributed to one variable. The other variables can’t be eliminated and tested experimentally, like for instance feeding arsenic to laboratory rats.
Two things to keep in mind:
describes how this cycle works itself out.
“Men it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Charles Mackay
There is a more modern book, “When Prophesy Fails”, which documents the tendency of a certain hard core of believers to not recover their senses slowly, but rather double down on their belief system.
There are both civil and criminal RICO laws, and their use against this lawfare would set an interesting precedent.
“…for deaths caused by the July 2023 heat wave…”
In English Contract Law this is known as ‘Act of God’ or ‘Force Majeure’ and is beloved of actuaries in exclusion clauses which are applied to events beyond Human control.
The deaths were caused by the heat wave, not fossil fuel use, so it would be necessary to prove that that particular heat wave was caused exclusively by fossil fuel emissions and would not have happened anyway. Good luck with that. Death-causing heat waves have happening throughout history.
Imagine the implications for flood insurance.
But you can buy flood insurance – even though it is an act of God. Insurance in general started as a way to spread the losses from sea trade. Storms came up (as well as pirates) and insurance companies were willing to play the odds – and mostly made money.
It doesn’t matter how good the evidence is against these corrupt and false claims, if the judge is a bent Democrat, then they will succeed.
I entered email communication with Amy Westervelt after asking about her, “Drilled Down: Old School Climate Denial Is Back” (Junkscience.com has a saved copy (pdf)).
She sent my questions to Martin Hoffert — a climate modeler who had collaborated with Exxon scientists in the 1980s. He, in reply, provided the Supran, Rahmstorf,& Oreskes, 2023 Science paper Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections as evidence of Exxon dishonesty.
That paper is basically a Science-facilitated attack on the integrity of late 1970s-2000 Exxon corporate officers.
Reading Supran, et al., I became curious about the source of their Figure 1b, which reproduced a 1977 graphic of 150,000 years of air temperature. I wondered where such information was available in 1977.
Investigating the 1977 source led me to read the incriminating Exxon documents.
In those, both the Exxon scientists and the corporate officers came across as serious and attentive. They worried about the possibility of CO₂-caused warming, but knew the models (and thus the science) were unreliable,
That is, the Exxon people behaved in the opposite way Naomi Oreskes, et al., have represented them. Responsible and concerned, rather than greedy and dishonest.
All of that completely corroborated your heroically thorough study, Russell, and led to “What I Learned about What Exxon Knew” with an Addendum and a WUWT post.
Amy was civil and came across as a cheerful journalist, interested in the truth of things. But the conversation pretty much ended when I provided her evidence that Supran, et al., (2023) was much less than credible.
She turned out to be partisan. Not interested in knowing that Naomi Oreskes, et al., evidently played fast with the truth.
Yep, because Supran – to describe in a harsh term – was (perhaps still is) little more than a toady subordinate of Oreskes. I posit that Supran leaned all he knew about ‘industry disinfo campaigns’ straight from Oreskes. Meanwhile, Oreskes once introduced Westervelt as “my good friend and colleague.” A real journalist would be aghast at your revelations about her pal. Folks who are potentially co-conspirators close ranks and shun inconvenient truths.
One more thing — repeating out of my analysis of the April 2022 broadcast screed by the PBS Frontline “The Power of Big Oil”,
I am increasingly of the view that much of the climate movement is composed of excess elites in the Peter Turpin sense. If you are not familiar – Turpin writes about how various civilizations collapse – elite overproduction is one of the 4 main reasons.
Lawyers that can’t get even a real law job? Permanent lawfare on behalf of the environment. I have been seeing ads on public transportation buses from some group advertising that “owls can’t file motions” and “lizards can’t testity”, that kind of nonsense.
Not a lawyer? No problem – there’s plenty of space for more “community managers” i.e. social media agitprop.
Peter Turchin
Yes, get his books. You will never see protest movements the same way after reading them.
A motivation for these lawsuits among elected officials and bureaucrats is that they can generate money for government to spend. They simply harness certain businesses to collect disguised tax revenues from the gullible and helpless public.
There isn’t enough wealth in the universe for the spending and economy destroying wishes of government, and the constant need for new sources of revenue will lead political people, especially Democrats, to see great big dollar signs in the foreground and never think about what is hidden in the background — unintended consequences or their own impure motives.
Seeking help for memory lapse. In past general readings one particular US academic journalist features as a leader in acts like Exxon Knew by setting up cells dedicated to coordinating content and training other journos to use it. Might be a prof, east US, surname might start with K.
Any ideas who this main journo is/was? Ta. Geoff s
Why another? It’s the obvious workflow. First stage makes a foothold in theology, the second proceeds to the real witch burning. Because the second can make the support cast of “moderates” hesitate in fear of their own turn eventually coming, thus requires some “Established Truth™” to push through. Why would he needs the first if the second was not part of the plan?
But why not? The “ExxonKnew” team had its chance. Their attack mostly failed and rather than creating a precedent for other predators, the drawn-out fight hinders them. When a more aggressive specimen wants to try a different angle — sorry, “rattus rattini rattus est”. :] Likewise, if Arkush and his pack fail as well, the next one will feel free to trample over them too.
For an earlier example of pseudo-expert swindle backed by power, the Pentagon Papers case was much more haphazard, sure. But it used a more reliable organizational misattribution, also was very limited in time («A new phase of the Fourth Republic was born. Later, the ARVN defeated the Viet Cong […] No one cared.») and in scope (non-threatening for those it tried to convince). An easier objective.
You offer valid observations, particularly on the first bit. Out here in the real world, a person might publish an op-ed article floating a ludicrous idea backed by a tale of some event taken totally out of context, and folks might say how dumb it is, end of story. No harm, no foul to the op-ed writer, other than he might be ridiculed at cocktail parties – “Aren’t you the guy who wrote that piece with the …. ?” Nobody else is harmed in any manner.
But if the guy prompts a prosecutor to officially file criminal charges against an innocent person, all kinds of harm arises – now the defendant has to answer the accusation, and everyone now needs to actually examine ‘evidence’ supporting the arrest warrant. If the evidence is utterly bogus, the prosecutor gets hit with false arrest, and the guy gets hit by the defendant in a separate legal action for defamation. If the op-ed writer cries that he honestly relied on ‘evidence’ given to him, it doesn’t stop there, the defendant peels back the layers of the accusation onion until the source is revealed and held accountable. In this case, David Arkush is likely in the clear, as is his source, the Union of Concerned Scientists. But their source, the two Greenpeace USA guys, are not. Once folks with real investigative power and/or prosecutorial power begin examining everything surrounding those two and their closest associates, well, that opens Pandora’s box. Among all the other problems, it exposes an epic level of mainstream media journalism malfeasance on the whole accusation hurled at the defendants. Years back, I posited that if President Bill Clinton had just pointed out one fatal fault with a core accuses, we might not be discussing the AGW issue today, the issue would have died a natural death at the hands of skeptic climate scientists, and the accusers would have been exposed as charlatans.
CAGW is a ludicrous idea. It stays alive simply because the public only hears about “settled science” and occasionally something sorta plausible sounding about “liars for hire” working for oil companies, while the oil companies themselves only kick the can down the road saying, “this is a matter for legislatures to decide, not courts.” It is outright political suicide for enviro-activists to cross their fingers and plunge into the liars angle because it will expose how that angle of the climate issue never had a leg to stand on, but was instead designed to deceive the public about the credibility of the very people who would kill the climate issue with overwhelming science facts.
On your point about Exxon et al. – they are part of the reason why the issue lives on in zombie-like fashion. Case in point was the American Petroleum Institute’s Mike Sommers, who had a ball set up for him on a batter’s tee to hit a home run out of the ballpark regarding the worthless API 1998 “victory will be achieved” memos. I did my best at the time to alert him and others to this opportunity. All he had to do at the U.S. House witch hunt hearing was lay out how the memos were never implemented and were floated by particular enviros having an ongoing vendetta against the oil industry. But no, when confronted by – of all people – Rep Ilhan Omar, the man didn’t even swing at the ball, he spit out a cockamamie reply about not knowing what she was talking about and that he was still in school in 1998. That sort of thing and all the legal technicality maneuvering by Exxon over jurisdictional questions keeps the issue alive, when they have every opportunity in the world to drive a stake through the heart of the accusation and the main promulgators pushing it.
And if this does not in turn get dragged forever, they will get a slap on the wrist. Or a fine paid from the bottomless pockets of the clown defence funds. How often do the excessively righteous people get anything worse?
The mainstream media journalism malfeasance is right on the surface, it does not require some lucky opportunity to dig out. Unfortunately, what was demonstrated by Climategate (as well as Gamergate and other consumer revolts) is that the big fish is not truly affected by any storms in a teacup. Occasionally some of the lowest-tier thimble rig operators were allowed to suffer, sure — after all, their clumsiness caused scandals. But they were only slightly less disposable than toilet paper even before the last advances in
automated BS generatorsLarge Language Models.Doesn’t just about everyone know this by now? But this will not matter at least until it will be laughed at pretty much openly and everywhere. Maybe even then it will be like jokes about late stage Brezhnev in USSR — pretty much omnipresent, but no visible effect.
That, I’m not certain about at all — not the generic sense of it, where everyone on our side has heard the line about the ‘scientists on the payroll of Big Oil‘ — but instead the absolute core of the accusation of which its cornerstone is only a pair of leaked industry memo sets that can be consolidated into a single accusation line where fossil fuel execs can be nailed to the wall for saying “Victory will be achieved when we can reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” The impression I get is that almost nobody is aware of how that ‘leaked memos’ accusation is the literal best the enviros have ever had going all the way back to the 1990s to support their accusation. It never gets questioned at all.
The thing that worries me is that not enough people on our side mention that the opposition is all massively vulnerable to total collapse regarding their core accusation about ‘industry-corrupted skeptic scientists.’ The ‘faulty science’ in this issue basically sails over the heads of most in the otherwise disinterested general public. What the public would much more easily understand is the outright lies about the corruption accusations, and then they would ask why the supposedly trustworthy legacy news media never looked into those lies and where they originated.