Russell Cook
I don’t just write about these things, I try to get something done. Upon learning the news on Feb 23 that the Supreme Court will be adding the effort to hear the concerns about the Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County situation, I fired off the verbatim email below to the main lawyer representing the energy companies (I spelled out the individual web links instead of embedding each one as I’ve done below; the bold highlighted words below where highlighted the same way in my email).
It bothers me no end how the defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits argue endlessly on esoteric jurisdiction technicalities when the golden opportunity to outright kill each one of these lawsuits is practically right in front of them in every lawsuit where the claim is that they ran ‘disinformation campaigns.’ No, it’s the enviro-activists who are putting out the disinformation, and this whole lawfare effort is deserving of deep investigation for fraud activity by the Department of Justice. I don’t just write about that suggestion, either; I’ve put in to major tip efforts to the DoJ about it.
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Mr Shanmugam,
I just learned of the news about SCOTUS scheduling a hearing over the climate cases.
Forgive me for the bluntness of my question, born out of frustration from my own documenting of the fatal faults in the current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits ever since they started appearing in 2017:
Are the defendants in these cases literally unaware that the core accusation elements within essentially all of them in one form or another (Boulder v Suncor contains the false accusation against skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon, apparently plagiarized out of the 2017 San Francisco v BP filing are all completely without merit?
- These lawsuits make claims that two leaked memo sets – the notorious “reposition global warming” and the notorious “victory will be achieved” sets which were never implemented anywhere;
- These lawsuits claim particular old newspaper advertorials prove disinformation campaigns happen where two of those ads were never actually published anywhere and the third ad that was published is disingenuously cropped to wipe out ad text that contains no disinformation;
- These lawsuits make claims about Dr Willie Soon accepting Exxon bribes that are so false that they may stray into epic defamation territory (“List of the Climate Lawsuits Falsely Accusing Dr Willie Soon of Taking Exxon Bribes“)
So . . . . why is it not argued that these lawsuits should be dismissed because they do not present a prima facie case that ‘industry disinformation campaigns employing skeptic scientists’ happened?? Why is it not suggested that the collective climate litigation lawfare efforts should be referred to the Department of Justice as possible instances of widespread fraud activity? (please see: “The Plagiarism Problem Plaguing the ‘ExxonKnew’ Lawfare Lawsuits — Summary for Policymakers“)
Again, forgive my frustration on this matter. Set aside the angles about dubious science and Federal vs state jurisdiction – plaintiffs hand their heads on a silver platter to defendants over the blatantly false political accusations in these lawsuits. Please do feel free to ask me any questions you have about my decade-long work on this narrow angle of the climate issue. There’s much more to it all, I can elaborate at huge depth.
– Russell Cook
GelbspanFiles.com
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I have my fun with popular movie lines in this blog occasionally to drive home points concerning the climate issue. The image below is one of those, the ‘bad guy’ in a particular movie who nevertheless had a line I can turn 180° against the promulgators of the “crooked skeptics” accusation. They think they are the good guy “Equalizer” bringing ‘justice to ClimaChange™ victims, and if they knew about me, they’d think I’m the bad guy. I’m not. I’m a threat to their entire agenda, as will be any major people with influence who can put a stop to all the lies and defamation and actual disinformation in the climate issue.
Eugene Volokh likes to say that lawyers’ true super power is the ability to turn every question into a question of procedure.
Every modern judiciary I know of is designed around ritual. I have had lawyers tell me that justice is a religious matter, or why pardons exist.
Honestly, this series of cut and paste lawsuits should be dealt with as a RICO case. Only judges forgiving the misconduct of other lawyers would prevent that approach. I’m
Yes – and the problem doesn’t merely involve the one San Francisco law firm (under investigation by the U.S. Senate/House) cutting ‘n pasting their own false accusation material ‘industry memos evidence’ from one lawsuit filing to the next, it also involves the far more suspect instances of other supposedly unrelated law firms / law offices apparently plagiarizing the material out of that San Fran law firm’s efforts. One of the law firms representing a single Puerto Rico municipality has already had its lawsuit dismissed over outright plagiarism of the other multi-municipalities lawsuit. What worries me is that almost none of the judges across the country are aware of the overarching plagiarism problem – which likely doesn’t involve lawyers copying other lawyers’ ‘homework,’ but very likely instead involves a behind-the-scenes template provided to all of the law firms / law offices. Hence my plea at the end of my WUWT guest post here for people with major influence to become more aware of the fatal faults across the board with all of this climate litigation lawfare.
This is also science vs advocacy science on trial. We know which one will get two votes.
How many of these cases need to be disqualified before enough is enough?
Therein lies the problem. They can be disqualified all day long over jurisdictional legal technicalities, the folks behind all of this will just file more rehash versions somewhere else. Kill one on how it literally cannot provide viable evidence that the energy industry ran disinformation campaigns operating under the directive to “reposition global warming as theory”, and all the others relying on that same false accusation will all fall in domino fashion. The climate lawfare mob won’t file new “ExxonKnew” lawsuits based on this template because they put all their eggs in that particular false accusation basket. No joke. It’s the best ‘evidence’ that mob has ever had.
SCOTUS should realize that litigating anything climate related is an egregious waste of their time and taxpayer’s money.
All of these cases should be dismissed for lack of standing. The harms are purely fictional.
The problem with that approach is the hurdle to overturn Mass v EPA.
plaintiffs do not have to present any convincing evidence in the lawsuit that they have been harmed in order to have standing.
That would be weird. Why?
‘Harm’ (or not) from CAGW aside, the point in my WUWT guest post here is that claims are made within these lawsuits that the industry ran specific disinformation campaigns, and supposedly ‘leaked industry memos’ prove the claims to be true. At considerable length in my GelbspanFiles.com blog, I prove that those ‘industry memos’ describe situations that were literally never implemented; thus not one of these lawsuits succeed in presenting a prima facie case that any disinformation campaigns ever occurred employing skeptic climate scientist ‘shills.’ It’s their core argument that the industry deceived the public.
“plaintiffs do not have to present any convincing evidence in the lawsuit that they have been harmed in order to have standing.”
What is the basis for a lawsuit then? All of the lawsuits claim harms.
claiming harms is different from presenting convincing evidence of harms. The claim of harms only needs to be plausible for the case to survive a standing challenge and for the case to proceed.
Equally – I’d submit – when these lawsuit put out claims that the industry paid skeptic climate scientists to spread disinformation and base that ll on a pair of never-implemented industry memos / a pair of never published newspaper advertorials / and a 2015 press release (taken offline in 2020) of a pending investigation into Willie Soon where the ultimate results of that produced no evidence of wrongful declarations of funding …. then those claims are not plausible, the cases relying on those claims cannot stand challenges concerning their supporting evidence, and thus judges have grounds to grant Motions to Dismiss.
None of my above WUWT guest post concerns plaintiffs’ claims of CAGW harm, only the claims about disinfo campaigns. These lawsuits claim the industry knew CAGW would happen from their products, but engaged in disinfo campaigns that paid skeptic scientists to say otherwise. No evidence offered within these lawsuits supports those claims. They all present one form or another of the same claim, relying on the same ‘evidence.’ Defendants and their law firms seem to be oblivious to this …… why they’ve never explored that fatal fault is a total mystery to me. As I imply at the bottom of my guest post, I’m doing all I can to get that fault exploration out to influential people who can do something about it.
Lawfare continues to be the primary method of blocking commercial activities across the Western World.
These fallacious legal challenges to lawful use of resources have to be dealt with in more simple ways than the full on court cases the aggressive lawfare warriors prefer.
As we saw in the Steyn versus Mann case the process of endless legal challenge is beyond the capacity of most people’s wallet with the eventual outcome a meaningless $1 damages i.e. no case to answer.
The fact the judge added a punitive fine to the case simply increased the scale of disrepute the legal processes have sunk into. False evidence put into court by Mann has resulted in the case lingering on and on.
This is not the way to maintain a civilised society, which is probably why the climate alarmists are so wedded to it.
In my view, the defendants themselves, and their counsel, need to get serious and refute the claims directly. Stop conceding the core belief that emissions of CO2, from using natural hydrocarbons as fuel, have caused and will cause “warming” and climate harm in the form heat waves, storms, floods, and sea level rise. It’s not that hard to demonstrate that the claims have no merit.
NASA knew in 2009 not to use the language of danger or harm, as they accurately described the heat-engine nature of atmospheric and oceanic circulations.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/16/wuwt-contest-runner-up-professional-nasa-knew-better-nasa_knew/
The modelers know perfectly well that the IR absorbing power of incremental CO2 in the atmosphere is negligible in the proper context of dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PDJP3F3rteoP99lR53YKp2fzuaza7Niz?usp=drive_link
Stop allowing the plaintiffs to pretend that “science” supports their claims!
Thank you for listening. This is important.
The legal strategy here is – “If at first you don’t succeed, change the wording slightly and file again.”