Russell Cook
For those who haven’t caught it, please see my updated count of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Now, at least for today, there are 29 instead of 30. The ineptly done Carrboro v Duke Energy is gone, as of last week. It was nice how the judge issuing that order alluded to Duke Energy’s Motion to Dismiss gripe about a particular “Kentucky” disinformation ad accusation, but I submit the small exploration done by Duke Energy’s attorneys revealed only the proverbial ‘camel’s nose under the tent.’ When the fossil fuel industry folks with influence grow a spine and explore much deeper – or when somebody ends up doing their work for them – every one of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits can implode, enabling the public to see where the real disinformation has been in the climate issue this entire time.
Right at the outset of my Dec 2024 dissection of Carrboro, I said it was an outlier climate lawfare effort, and I detailed at length how the law firm representing the town very oddly decided to rely on the worthless evidence from an outfit called “Energy and Policy Institute,” for the accusations about Duke Energy running old disinformation campaigns which ‘attempted to reposition global warming as theory.’ Notice in the screencapture below, the lawsuit tried to tie Duke to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) via that worthless ‘leaked industry directive’, and then say Duke was responsible for the campaign effort in Kentucky.
As I showed in my dissection – which I advise new readers to go through to be up to speed on what I say here – that was weird for the law firm to do that at several levels.
Repeating what I noted above in my opening paragraph, Duke Energy’s Motion to Dismiss pointed out the North Carolina town of Carrboro was trying to an ad campaign that happened in Kentucky to Duke Energy. To his own credit, the judge granting the Motion pointed out just how “fatally imprecise and lacking in concreteness” the overall accusation was about Duke ‘deceiving the public,’ but he only glanced off of the ludicrous accusation about the Kentucky ‘deception’ campaign. The one with the horse ad, as I showed in my dissection post. My GelbspanFiles blog is the one and only place where readers can quickly zoom in on the ad text and see for themselves how there’s no actual deliberate deception going on by an energy company about climate science. And see how the Edison Electric Institute had no actual involvement in the genuine ad campaign seen by the public. None.
Too bad neither the judge nor Duke Energy pursued that fatal fault to any depth at all. The core claim that Duke is intimate with the internal workings of the Edison Electric Institute would be a stretch difficult to prove absolutely true; but the plaintiffs fail abysmally to present even the most basic of prima facie cases that EEI spearheaded a disinformation campaign – their ‘evidence’ implodes in their faces. Worse, as I noted in my dissection of Carrboro, the filing’s use of three newspaper advertorials which the Western Fuels Association’s “Information Council for the Environment” PR campaign published fatally undercuts all of the other lawsuits which rely on two never-published ads ( – never-published! – and another horribly degraded photocopy of one that was published) sourcing from Greenpeace USA neé Ozone Action.
Despite the assortment of ‘spin’ that this case was something unique, it was absolutely nothing more than another in a string of meritless lawsuits claiming an energy company ‘knew’ about the harm of global warming, but sought to hide that knowledge’ by deceptively ‘repositioning global warming’ in the eyes of the public.
Duke Energy dodged a bullet courtesy of the maladroit handling by Carrboro‘s chosen law firm, but this dismissal won’t prevent new versions of these from being regurgitated in some other ‘novel’ way. The January 23, 2026 Michigan v BP lawsuit was also described as ‘novel’ … but predictably, it was nothing more than the same old predictable regurgitation about crooked skeptic scientists employed in industry-orchestrated disinfo campaigns. It’s the literal best the enviro-activist climate lawfare mob has.
This will stop the moment someone with major influence and power shoves – to use the allegory I started with here – the Carrboro nose harder under the tent, then keeps on pushing and ultimately drives a dagger through the heart of the central accusations for all the world to see – Exxon et al. didn’t know, and they never declared “Victory will be achieved when we pay Dr Wei-Hock Soon $1.2 million to reposition global warming as theory (not fact) via deceptive newspaper advertorials.”
Offence is apparently the best form of defence. And does alarmism not need a lot of defending right now?
2015 (The Arctic was due to melt at any moment):
Very mild weather in most parts of Europe has left large sections of the Alps with a lack of snow. Tourist officials in many alpine areas say that holiday makers will have to get used to such conditions.Most ski resorts in the Alps have opened up their season with slopes of artificial snow.
2015 was the warmest year on record and that has led to a lack of snow especially in the lower regions of the Alps. In one of the warmest Decembers in history snow could not even be made by machines because of high temperatures. Especially Austria, Switzerland and the northern part of Italy depend on snow for their tourist industry .
https://www.english-online.at/news-articles/environment/lack-of-snow-alps.htm
Today’s Alpine Olympics?
Winter Olympics are stopped by SNOW: Blizzards cause bedlam in Italy as cars crash, events are cancelled… and even the indoor competitions are delayed!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/winterolympics/article-15574571/winter-olympics-snow-cortina-chaos.html
PS The Arctic has not melted – yet.
The only dependable prediction to rely upon from climate doomsters is that there will be an updated prediction made every year.
And that it will be wrong.
and more money will be needed
No – some will be right, but they will be after the fact.
“Winter Olympics are stopped by SNOW….”
Due of course to “carbon pollution”. /s
“…Exxon et al. didn’t know…” Correct.
They could not have “known” what cannot be reliably established even today. No one knows that emissions of CO2 from the use of hydrocarbon fuels have any perceptible influence on trends of any climate variable.
How is this so plain to see? The modelers of the ERA5 reanalysis compute a gridded hourly parameter called the “vertical integral of energy conversion.”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knv0YdUyIgyR9Mwk3jGJwccIGHv38J33/view?usp=drive_link
What does this demonstrate? It shows that the minor incremental radiative absorbing power from rising concentrations of CO2 is massively overwhelmed by dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation. There never was a good physical reason to expect harmful impact at all.
There’s my non-lawyer “pro bono” contribution to deal with this long-running series of bogus claims.
The result is seen in the graph Willis built based on NASA CERES mission data. The graph clearly shows no increase in ability of the atmosphere to warm the Earth. Although the data is now 2 years old, I doubt the last 2 years will show any changes.
“When the fossil fuel industry folks with influence grow a spine…”
Do they read this site?
I do all I can to point out the fatal faults in these “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, but as an ordinary private citizen, my reach is limited, Thanks once again to WUWT and Charles Rotter here for widening that reach. People with influence or people who know people with influence do read WUWT, so it is simply a matter of time before somebody big sees the path on how to kill these lawsuits over their literally unsupportable core accusation elements. Big favor to ask any WUWT readers who are UK residents with knowledge of how to pry lawsuit documents out of the UK High Court – both Lord Monckton and I are trying to get our hands on the Casquejo v Shell plc lawsuit document. I do daily searches for it myself, and have a login account at the HM Courts efile site – no public appearance of it so far. If one of you can get the PDF File, let us know. I described back in December how there are indications of that one containing the same vicious accusations seen in the American “ExxonKnew” filings. If it does have those, the American law firm that filed it may be in a wee spot of trouble …..
We talking about BIG LAW here, why would they want to kill off “ExxonKnew” and forego the honeypot?
Alas, you bring up the precise fear I have, although I’m hoping it’s a tinfoil hat conspiracy belief for me. Nevertheless plausible — if a law firm presented concrete evidence in a Motion to Dismiss where they proved that plaintiffs’ law firm made accusations that are proven untrue, and a judge confirms that, case dismissed. End of the line, especially if the false accusations are obvious for everyone to see. Defendant law firm gets high praise from the folks they represented, and maybe a bonus for ‘job well done.’ But they’re now out of a job. If instead they ignore the false accusations and instead make every effort to keep the case alive by filing all sorts of legal technicality maneuvers on jurisdiction, or tangential considerations** having nothing to do with the core accusations (Exxon knew, but deceived the public with disinfo) ….. well, then, defendant law firm can keep on working. I really hope I’m wrong about that.
(** Multnomah v Exxon should have been dismissed on charges of plagiarism alone already. Judges really don’t like it when they discover that sort of thing.)
Exxon is deep into CCS, which is an absurd contradiction.
https://lowcarbon.exxonmobil.com/lower-carbon-technology/carbon-capture-and-storage
Plaintiff’s lawyer, “So I see you openly accept that emissions of CO2 need mitigation for the good of society, is that accurate?” “Umm. Yes, that is accurate, as our company promotes CCS solutions.”
Insane.
Pull all CO2 out of the atmosphere. Wipe out humanity.
Am I the only one to see a tiny, wee, problem with this?
This is greenwashing by Exxon. The captured CO2 will be injected into depleting oil wells to enhance oil recovery. Oil companies have been injecting gas into oil wells for decades.
“Oil companies have been injecting gas into oil wells for decades.”
True, but now there is more to it than that. This reports an offshore lease for the express purpose of CO2 storage, not just for enhanced oil recovery.
https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/news/news-releases/2024/10102024_exxonmobil-secures-largest-carbon-offshore-storage-site-in-the-us
Also here.
https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/what-we-do/delivering-industrial-solutions/carbon-capture-and-storage/how-do-we-keep-carbon-capture-and-storage-safe
People need to be reminded that the “CO2 causes global warming” thing is not only not a fact, it is not even a theory yet, it is just a hypothesis.
I’ll see your hypothesis and raise you a conjecture
It’s merely a supposition.
An assumption on which all else is built.
As part of a discussion about the unrealistic results of high CO2-sensitivity CMIP6 models, I found this very recent paper explaining steps taken to address this problem.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2025MS004967#:~:text=Abstract,are%20inconsistent%20with%20paleoclimate%20evidence.
This seems relevant to the “Exxon knew” discussion as it shows details of a recent problem affecting the knowledge gained from highly sophisticated models. The models used by Exxon 50 years ago were nowhere near this level and therefore the certain knowledge gained back then was little.
Using these snippets from the article cited above one can easily imagine how going backwards in time over the last 10 years removes these improvements of these recent yet still imperfect models blows up the uncertainties and leaves no certain knowledge:
“””Along with most CMIP5 models, CESM1 (the predecessor to CESM2) had too few low-level extratropical clouds that contained too much ice and too little supercooled liquid over the Southern Ocean (Trenberth & Fasullo, 2010).””‘
“””One important microphysical update for CESM2 was replacing the simple temperature-dependent ice nucleation scheme used in previous versions with an aerosol-aware ice nucleation scheme following Hoose et al. (2010) and implemented in CESM by Wang et al. (2014).”””
“””Zhu et al. (2022) identified a set of modifications to CESM2 which reduces the ECS via modified representation of cloud microphysical processes. This set of modifications leads to better agreement with the global-mean LGM cooling relative to the present-day climate. Moving from CESM2 to this version of CESM2 which is calibrated to paleoclimate evidence, “PaleoCalibr” CESM2.”””
And about processes in the current model leading to CESM3:
“””Although the physical reason for the microphysical timestep dependence is not clear, it agrees with recent studies emphasizing that fast microphysical processes are poorly resolved at the model default timestep (Santos et al., 2020).”””
“””All of the PaleoCalibr CESM2 simulations of Zhu et al. (2022) and those used here have been performed in the version of CESM2 that has ∼2° horizontal resolution, as opposed to the ∼1° resolution version used in most applications including most CMIP6 simulations and LENS2. As is standard practice, there are microphysics-related tuning differences between the two resolutions (separate from the minor retuning included in the PaleoCalibr modifications).”””
“””However, we compare the TCR with the ECS for these simulations and find that while the PaleoCalibr modifications decrease the ECS compared to that of both CESM2 1° and CESM2 2°, they have negligible impact on TCR (Figure 1b). This is in contrast to other CMIP6 models, for which TCR and ECS are correlated.”””
“””we expect that the challenges in accurately simulating microphysical processes and their impact on the larger scale climate are not unique to CESM2, and will continue to be a substantial source of structural uncertainty in future model generations (Bodas-Salcedo et al., 2019). This work also highlights the sensitivity of ECS to small modifications to the model”””
I don’t know how any of this works but it always seemed to me that the energy executives didn’t seem all that motivated to win. Like they weren’t worried about losing because the rate payers were going to be the ones to pay up. We need to motivate these executives, we need to find a way to guarantee that if we rate payers lose you executives are going to lose a lot more.
Surgically implant a spine? 🙂
You are thinking of electric companies. We are talking about the companies that mine/drill/etc for oil/gas/coal. They have customers, not rate payers. They aren’t guaranteed a profit by anyone.
“therefore the certain knowledge gained back then was little.” As it is now. 😉
Story tip:
The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments related to the case of Suncor v. Boulder County; likely with the intention of ending frivolous climate litigation in the USA once and for all.
Not so frivolous for lawyers, who profit mightily. Nothing much has changed since Shakespeare’s time, when one of his characters said “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Or at least, stop frivolous climate litigation. Possibly by requiring the complainant to pay to the defendant the sum of damages sought, plus the defendant’s costs, plus exemplary damages, if the complainant’s suit fails.
I’m dreaming, of course.<g>
My next GelbspanFiles blog post – a short one – will be on exactly that news development. I try to contact people with influence on these matters.
Australia had it’s own version of the case with Santos and gas
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/17/santos-greenwashing-court-case-dismissed
The greentards took issue with them calling gas “clean energy” and a path to “net zero” the court disagreed based on evidence.
No doubt the green slime will have the lawyers crawling thru the judgement to try and breath some life back in it. Their problem is there is no right of appeal on High Court decision you have to seek leave to appeal and you need compelling reasons.