The pushers of climate litigation lawfare keep bizarrely paying out enough rope to hang themselves. The latest instance over the span of just the last eight weeks comes courtesy of the Public Citizen liberal climate policy advocacy group …. and they basically nail themselves to the wall along with every other major promulgator who is enslaved to the never-implemented “reposition global warming as theory” ‘leaked industry memo.’
From my most recent periodic internet search for the notorious “reposition global warming as theory” memo phrase to see where it’s popped up, I initially found just a partial sentence, albeit with a source that wasn’t at first readily obvious:
Despite all of this knowledge, Big Oil companies spent decades working to, in the words of one fossil fuel coalition, ‘reposition global ….
Google weirdly gave nothing but Instagram results for it containing identical wording from multiple different accounts with all varieties of online post dates and website article titles … meaning none of them were the source, they were all just auto-generated repeaters somehow. I don’t have an Instagram account, who knows how that works. But after trying a search where I ditched the first five words of the above sentence, I turned up a single solitary Google result – a Facebook short video dated July 3 by the Public Citizen group. A search of their ‘title’ for their little video turned up their TikTok identical video version, and by inserting “Instagram” into a search of their video ‘title,’ that turned up the originating Instagram video version behind all of those other pointless auto-regurgitation results.
Yep. That Public Citizen group, which got a big media splash in 2023 over its ‘scholarly paper’ authored by David Arkush, advocating the ludicrous idea that Big Oil executives could be prosecuted for ‘climate homicide.’ Dumb as that idea was, Arkush dug a deeper hole for himself by displaying how his idiotic notion was enslaved to the standard – and completely unsupportable – core accusations about the industry running disinformation campaigns to deceive the public. I first analyzed this new ‘climate lawfare tactic’ in my 3/31/23 blog post, where Arkush was clearly the lead author. In my subsequent Public Citizen / David Arkush blog post on their proposal to Arizona prosecutors about their ‘climate homicide charges’ idea, I only highlighted Arkush as one of the co-authors of this idea – I reason that if a specific concept is initially attributed to a lead author, that author now owns the idea ever afterward and everything that went into supporting it. So, I made no specific mention of how ‘top billing’ of the Arizona proposal oddly switched to a guy named Aaron Regunberg.
Regunberg is the narrator face in the above July 3 “You can blame Big Oil” video. It would appear from his days-old “It’s time to prosecute climate crimes – with laws that already exist” article in the UK Guardian that he’s the new point man for the Public Citizen group. Too bad for him, as I will demonstrate next; this situation actually potentially makes him one more person to throw onto the pile of ‘weak links people’ in the chain of people who regurgitate the accusation about ‘shill skeptic scientist on Big Oil’s payroll to reposition global warming as theory.’ Bank on it, these weak links will fold like cheap suits when hit with any inquiries on how they support their accusations.
I’ll leave it up to PhD-level climatologists / atmospheric physicists and experts in statistical data gathering/temperature trend analysis to dispute / debunk all of Regunberg’s ‘science claims’ up to the one minute 38 second point of his video, and after the 1:49 point. The cliff he plunged off – sandwiched between all of what he claims the industry ‘knew‘ – is this single sentence that’s right in my wheelhouse. It’s a window into the world of how the entire accusation surrounding it implodes under hard scrutiny:
Despite all of this knowledge, Big Oil companies spent decades working to, in the words of one fossil fuel coalition, ‘reposition global as theory, not fact,’ in order to lock us into the dangerous future we’re currently living.
As I’ve said many times here at GelbspanFiles, that memo directive was rejected by the officials running the actual 1991 “Information Council for the Environment” public relations campaign, and was never implemented anywhere. Best ‘smoking gun evidence’ that it is in all of the enviro-left’s arsenal to support their 30 year+ accusation about industry disinfo campaigns – from 1991 to Regunberg’s Public Citizen video right here – it is nevertheless totally worthless. But Regunberg didn’t simply read a memo directive that never happened, which nullifies both his and the Public Citizen group’s credibility, his TikTok / Facebook / Instagram / Youtube video screens showed what he implied was the actual memo document, where the “reposition” phrase was additionally highlighted in a turquoise color. People would understand if he took the original, actual memo page and added color highlighting.
But that’s not the only thing that happened with this image. Compare Regunberg’s / Public Citizen’s image with the original Greenpeace USA photocopy scan, which is where the Regunberg’s / Public Citizen image comes from:
Same degraded photocopy dust spots in both images. However, what’s not in the original Greenpeace USA photocopy scan? Look up in the upper left corner.
There’s no “Information Council for the Environment” logo on Greenpeace’s photocopy scan. Go one page back in the Internet Archive copy of Greenpeace’s scans collection, and what is seen? The unsolicited and never used “Informed Citizens for the Environment” spelled-out alternative name version for the PR campaign.
By deceptively pasting that “Information Council for the Environment” logo onto the memo page, Regunberg / Public Citizen undercuts Naomi Oreskes’ notorious ‘expert’ declaration about what the official spelled-out name of the ICE campaign was. Oops.
This ‘Regunberg / Public Citizen’ gift on a silver platter to energy company defendants lawsuits – keep in mind that the Leon v Exxon lawsuit is seemingly based on the Arkush / Regunberg / Public Citizen wrongful death tactic – becomes one increment more dicey, when you know where to look for the larger fault. Their Youtube short video version featured a link to their June 4 ‘You can blame Big Oil’ online report, featuring all of the video’s elements in longer form, including their accusation about the memo.
Who’s their source for the memo image? In two clickable links, it’s The Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Climate Deception Dossier #5” images scans PDF file.
That’s a problem. The UCS’ 49-page PDF dossier file scans – as I detailed in one of my blog posts about major faults in this angle of the climate issue – are one page short of Greenpeace’s otherwise absolutely identical 50-page scans set. UCS, while noting in their sources section of their collective ‘Dossiers’ that the scans came from Greenpeace, simply omitted the Ozone Action cover page when they copied the collection; the old Ozone Action group was Greenpeace’s source of the scans. But for anyone who doubts it, what’s missing from UCS’ scan page of the “reposition global warming” memo phrase? The official logo of the actual ICE campaign. What’s seen on UCS’ just-prior page scan? The never-used ICE name variation. The two pages with the suggested strategy and alternative ICE name variant plus other audience targeting suggestions were all part of the memo proposal which the ICE administrators rejected outright.
Always the irony about the enviro-activists’ psychological projection problem, when they clamor about an industry using disinformation to deceive the public while they are the ones actually deceiving the public.
“As climate lawsuits advance, the oil industry enters ‘panic mode’,” proclaimed a June 24 article at the Grist environmentalist website where the article writer framed it around the news that a Washington state judge was allowing Leon v Exxon to proceed. The article also quoted a person working at the Center for Climate Integrity saying this development is what may cause the energy industry to start panicking.
The Grist article writer probably should have kept that detail to herself. Over at the Energy in Depth website’s July 21 report about the judge’s decision, readers are reminded via links to reports by the New York Times and the Washington Free Beacon that it was the Center for Climate Integrity who approached Misti Leon with the idea of suing Exxon, and that it was the Center for Climate Integrity which apparently drafted Ms Leon’s lawsuit.
I’ll remind readers here that the person heading the Center for Climate Integrity’s ‘investigate Exxon’ arm is Kert Davies, who traces back to the origins of the first major promulgations of the accusation about the worthless “reposition global warming” memo. But as I noted in my blog post dissection of Leon, that lawsuit was very oddly omitting the accusation about the “reposition global warming” memo, begging the question of whether that was an inept oversight or if some attorney spotted a problem with the accusation.
Questions abound everywhere in the climate lawsuit litigation lawfare effort.
Where the real panic might begin is when a person like Aaron Regunberg here is put under oath at a congressional hearing facing a relentless inquisitor the caliber of Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, who might ask a question similar to,
“If the evidence you have proving the fossil fuel industry intentionally ran a particular disinformation campaign is a very specific ‘leaked industry memo,’ and it is ironclad proof …… why would you see any need whatsoever to doctor that memo to make it look more compelling?”
Anthropogenic global warming / climate change etc, is gradually repositioning itself as a
scientifically baseless conjecture or maybe a vague, unsubstantiated suggestion.
Certainly NOT a “fact”.
What else do you expect from climate alarmists? They have consistently lied for decades and will not stop lying ever.
The ‘global warming’ cult is predicated towards destroying the global economy, bringing capitalist economies to their knees by any means necessary.
Those behind the scenes who manipulate public opinion have an agenda that is inimical to representative government, and they cannot succeed while capitalist economic principles provide the global population with cheap energy.
Remember how we defeated Germany and Japan during WWII? We destroyed their energy industries. At the end, Germany was producing jet fighters we could not match, but did not have the fuel to train pilots. Japan sent their biggest and most powerful warship on a suicide mission, with near empty fuel tanks.
This is the strategy of the socialist cabal that is behind “global warming”.
Anybody with a shred of honesty and a halfway decent knowledge of how science works would be asking “What is the problem with repositioning global warming as a theory, not fact.
The whole AGW scam isn’t even a theory, it’s a busted hypothesis, as demonstrated that no predictions based on the hypothesis have come to fruition.
Science is not a book of revelation. In science there are no such things as facts, only accepted temporary theories. All theories remain temporary no matter for how long they have been accepted, because it is understood that one day it is possible a new theory might displace it – as has happened many times in the past.
The Earth was flat… until it wasn’t.
It has been the wisdom of ages that there are no absolute truths (Protagoras) and even if there were/are, none can be proven in absolute terms (Plato). This is embedded in the scientific method and in court litigation.
A draft is not the same thing as a policy, and a proposal is not the same thing as implementation.
And yet, the repeated bloody failures of communism still have rabid support among the “intelligentsia” who have infiltrated and occupied academia, poisoning the minds of generations of students.
When the BBC aired a radio broadcast featuring an enviro-activist guest who said the [unsolicited / never implemented] “reposition global warming” memo proposal was smoking gun evidence of energy company disinformation campaigns, my official complaint to the BBC and the UK’s Ofcom broadcast regulatory agency included a descriptive illustration comparison of exactly how a rejected proposal cannot be evidence proving specific action was a result of guidance from the rejected memo. My illustration apparently sailed right over their heads …. or else they had to pretend not to understand it, lest it undermine the collective reporting credibility of the BBC.
Even if some Big Oil company said that- it doesn’t mean it thinks it’s a fact, only that some people think it’s a fact. Interpreting that statement to mean the oil company thinks it’s a fact is just dumb.
Keep in mind that joseph goebbels studied the propaganda techniques of woodrow wilson’s department of propaganda.
Truth is the first casualty when unaccountable government manipulators have an agenda.
I understand the reason for the focus on the validity of this “reposition” memo, but if the plaintiffs are sure that they have a case, where is the litany of fossil fuel industry annual reports, white papers, public presentations, and paid advertisements across multiple media that demonstrates a continued and concerted industry” misinformation” campaign?
I spent the first 23 years of my professional career as an environmental consultant to multiple private, governmental and industrial clients. I regularly read environmental news. I saw print and video ads of all kinds just like everyone else. I do not recall ever hearing and oil and gas industry client suggest a misinformation campaign, and I do not recall seeing editorials and advertisements sponsored by industry claiming that global warming or the underlying physics are a complete hoax. Has anyone endeavored to compile such a list if indeed such a list even could be compiled? If I were a juror, I might find an evidence list supporting the assertion of the plaintiffs more compelling than a poorly manufactured conspiracy charge based on a 50 year-old memo.
Exactly. I say this often over at my GelbspanFiles blog (ever so glad to have WUWT reproduce another of my posts here!), this particular never-implemented memo set is the literal best the enviro-activists have ever had in their entire accusation arsenal as ‘evidence’ of energy company disinformation. It’s a one-trick pony for them, along with the three other less-effective (and equally worthless) accusation elements they are enslaved to.
Imagine what happens if one of the major plaintiffs prominently announces bailing out of their lawsuit after they discover they’ve been duped about the veracity of the “crooked skeptic climate scientists employed in industry disinfo campaigns” ‘evidence.’
Yep, if someone who worked for a Big Oil Company published a paper or their own Opinion that fossil fuel emissions were causing global warming, back when many were worried about the coming ice age, they would have become a hero and we would awarded them great honors and they would be well known and no one would be bringing lawsuits against them.
Oil Companies have not stated harmful warming from fossil fuel emissions as a fact, they have been accused of knowing that as a fact and hiding the fact, I live in Houston, this is a major fossil fuel center, I know many retired oil people who have no reason to lie, someone would tell a friend, someone would write a book, many would write many books, where are the books, there are books, written by politicians, but not oil people. The Vikings grew crops in Greenland that do not grow there now and we have more CO2 now that would make crops grow better there.
Unfortunately the UK press is still full on climate doom. Here’s today’s front page of the Independent:
https://www.independent.co.uk/?CMP=ILC-refresh
“Five alarming charts that reveal a planet in peril.”
Just following orders…
“still full on climate
doomdumb”See JZ’s post above.
Yes. Big Oil, and especially Big Bad Exxon had some sort of “secret knowledge” about “global warming” being “a fact” that no one else in the world had, not even “scientists”, but then went ahead and sold their “evil products” anyway.
Riiiiiight. Uh-huh. Do they even hear themselves?
Yeah – those companies already knew about global warming when mainstream science was desperately promoting the (of course)man made ice age scare.
How comes a handful of scientists who knew about this miracle all happened to work for big oil, while legions of mainstream scientists got it so wrong.(an interesting statistical Anomaly)
Then mainstream science switched to AGW (without crediting Big Oil 🙂
and claimed later that Big Oil knew.
And if Big Oil was so right back then – why are all of their claims wrong now?
Not merely the MSM discussing the idea in a way giving it every appearance of being a credible concern. Also discussed by a prominent scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research — back when he had more hair on his head — who suggested geoengineering to stop the cooling might not be a good idea.
Without Big Oil, we would have lost World War Two and none of this would matter, we need it for our very survival. Try to imagine fighting Germany and Japan and Italy with Sailing Ships and no Airplanes. Just pretend we could even be a Country without Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Natural Gas. The Plaintiffs used Fossil Fuel Transportation to bring themselves to the Court Rooms, they are just as Guilty, they should have come to court in Horse Drawn Buggies. The roads and bridges and airports they used to get to Court would not exist without Fossil Fuels. Many of those Plaintiffs have offices in huge skyscrapers, those buildings could not have been built without Fossil Fuels. The Plaintiffs would not be wealthy and powerful enough to even bring a Lawsuit without Fossil Fuels. China, India, Russia, would have taken us over already if we did not have Fossil Fuels. The Soviet Union would not have collapsed if we did not have Fossil Fuels, because the Soviet Union did have Fossil Fuels. In order to bring a Lawsuit that penalizes a Fossil Fuel Company, you must demonstrate how we could have lived without the Fossil Fuels.
Without Fossil Fuels, we could not even have the Wind and Solar and Power Grids that we have today.
Wind and Solar cannot generate enough energy to build wind and solar.
Nor can they provide one single gram of the materials needed.
Those without sin can throw the first stone. Those who have have never depended on Fossil Fuels can Mount the First Lawsuit. The Judge and Jury must come from peers, so they must be people who have benefited from fossil fuels, we do not know of anyone who has not. Can anyone else add to this list? Does anyone know anyone who has not benefited from use of fossil fuels?
The King has no clothes on, everyone knows the King has no clothes on, most are very very afraid to say that the King has no clothes on.
If we go a generation without using fossil fuels, we will be taken over by those countries that did increase their use of fossil fuels, then, they will develop our fossil fuels.
Conversely, had Germany implemented the energy strategy then that they are implementing today, we would have won the war a hell of a lot sooner.
Phil R, you make a good point, but I go a step more, if Germany implemented the energy strategy they have today, they would not have started a war, or the war would have been settled without England or the US being involved.
Divestiture of petroleum would have us naked, starving, and suffering disease, but the high priests of the anthropogenic global warming cult ignore truth and they will exempt themselves from the suffering delivered to the global population by their policies.
A better defense for “Big Oil” is motivation.
Big oil doesn’t own much in the way of oil reserves, those are owned by governments. However, “big oil” own lots of natural gas reserves and when climate activists started getting traction, the first power plants to close were coal fired and these were replaced by much cleaner natural gas fired plants. The fracking revolution coupled with alarmist forcing the closure of coal plants has been very profitable for big oil.
And let’s not forget environmental activists fought hard to make carbon free nuclear power very expensive with lawsuits for the last 50 years making coal fired power generation the predominant choice between the Three Mike Island melt down and cheap fracked gas.
YES! I often describe the history of the nuclear industry, its rapid growth and then flatlining, largely attributable to environmental advocacy groups. If nuclear had maintained its growth trajectory along with its continued efficiency improvements, our greenhouse gas emissions today would be at 1970 levels. So if anyone is to blame for “global warming”, it is the environmentalists themselves. It is we who should be suing the environmentalist NGOs.
What a novel idea!
– – – Except …… ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ are almost entirely carbon dioxide, an essential plant nutrient enabling better crop growth and tree growth. We do not want GHG emissions to plateau at 1970s, we want more CO2 in the atmosphere, an absolute benefit for all life on Earth.
I have asked Microsoft’s Copilot to provide me with details on alleged funding supplied by fossil fuel companies to any and all organizations that might be antagonistic to the claims of anthropogenic global warming. I specifically asked for amounts, dates, and names of recipients. It was unable to provide even one instance. It would appear that there is no public record of such claims having taken place.
Initially, Copilot attempted to impugn fossil fuel companies by innuendo and suggesting guilt by association with the tobacco industry behavior. When I reminded it that it was not answering the question that I asked, it backed down and acknowledged that it was not able provide proof that any fossil fuel company had contributed money for efforts to distribute misinformation or propagandize the climate issues.
It is worth repeating the fact that when Hubert Lamb left the UK Met Office to set up the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia the University agreed to match the sum of money he had already raised for the CRU.
That money had been donated by the oil company Shell.
Dave, thank you for the information. I was unaware. However, at issue is whether fossil fuel companies have been promoting disinformation or propaganda with money given to support such activities. Supporting what was reasonably expected to be a legitimate, objective research activity does not have the nefarious objectives that Shell and others have been accused of.
The bottom line for Big oil is they need no protection. The day they are prosecuted for hiding their so called Sins is the day your gas bill, your heating bill, and your electricity prices all start accelerating; to the point the economy sinks, and recession takes control of the economy. Don’t believe it; guess why it hasn’t happened yet? And will not! Fossil fuel is the life blood that keeps this world pulsing.
Crude oil by itself is useless black tar, unless you build a multi-billion-dollar refinery to break it down to produce various types of transportation fuels like, jet fuel for planes, diesel fuel for trucks, gasoline fuel for cars, and bunker fuel for ships, and the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil that are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our materialistic world.
The world populated from 1 to 8 billion in less than 200 years, NOT from that black tar we call crude oil, but FROM the more than 6,000 products and transportation fuels MADE from fossil fuels, the same products and transportation fuels that wind and solar CANNOT make.
Today, we’re a materialistic society that continues to demand those refineries remain operational to meet the supply chain demands of the 8 billion on this planet for transportation fuels, and the more than 6,000 products made from the oil derivatives manufactured from that raw crude oil.
In summary, if the 8 billion on planet earth did not demand the “products and transportation fuels” made from oil, there would be no need for refineries, and thus, no need to explore for that black tar!
And yet, here in California, the populace (electorate) seems content to have refineries closing down.
Think about this, who has the most at stake, who would benefit the most from having the best understanding of Climate Change? The Fossil Fuel Companies would benefit the most from having the best understanding of the influence of Fossil Fuel Emissions on Climate Change, they would have the most qualified people, and a lot of them, working on that. If they learned anything significant about the influence of Fossil Fuel Emissions on Climate Change, too many would know and they would not be able to conceal it. In fact, if there was a serious harm to the Climate from Fossil Fuel Emissions, they would have found it and we all would know. The influence on Climate from CO2 Emissions are so small that the influence cannot be identified and measured. Things that are well known can be explained in terms that most of us can understand, no one on any side has done that, the questions are not how much, the questions are still if. They do not have some genius hidden who has identified the harm and kept it locked away from us for many decades. In all the court cases where Fossil Fuel Companies have been successfully punished, no proper answer has ever been reveled as the details of what harm there has been, Climate Temperature is the primary indicator and that has not exceeded the high temperatures of the recent ten thousand years, sea levels are another major indicator and Length of Day is less than in 1972, when multiple leap seconds were added each decade, sea levels have gone down. Food supplies have increased. All the alarmists have is a King with no clothes on and biased Judges.
Isnt that whole legal discussion beating a completely dead horse?
Pat Franks summed it up many years ago and many times, for example here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/17/what-i-learned-about-what-exxon-knew/
Let me paraphrase:
Any time a model is improved and climate models have been continuously improved massively for decades (with major improvements in physics and resolution in particular between CMIP5 and CMIP6), it leaves the old results outdated and incorrect.
After all, these improvements are all vetted and tested to be necessary. It is already clear that even CMIP7 models will have significant gaps, for example in their treatment of solid water (ice and snow) in the atmosphere.
Looking at statements made from old models needs to incooperate this new knowledge or it becomes outdated and uncertain.
Franks sums this up in a very easy to understand graph, which conclusively ends the debate if Exxon of anybody knew anything from their old and outdated models from 50 years ago once you figure in the certain knowledge about flaws we found along the way:
“””
?resize=816%2C359&quality=75&ssl=1
Figure 1: Left, Figure 2 from (2023) Supran-Rahmstorf-Oreskes. The original legend is: “Summary of all global warming projections (nominal scenarios) reported by ExxonMobil scientists in internal documents and peer-reviewed publications (gray lines), superimposed on historically observed temperature change (red).” The projections date from 1977 to 2003. Right: S-R-O (2023) Figure 2 with all the projection uncertainty bars expressing model cloud calibration error added in and plotted together.
“””
Plaintiffs shall pay the defendants’ legal and court costs is only fair.
Sometime back, within the past quarter century, I became interested in the climatology controversy. I read an article in which 2 oil company scientists issued their research report debunking CO2 as the cause of global warming.
What caught my attention was the reaction to the publication.
Those 2 scientist suffered a tsunami of hostile responses.
Hundreds accused them of doing fake research just because they worked for an oil company.
Hundreds more DEMANDED they be fired.
This has been ongoing for a very long time.
I no longer have the link. I can thank MicroSoft updates for that.
It’s the enviros’ one-trick pony. It’s all they got, when they are incapable of offering a superior science-based / fact-based argument. A pure distraction tactic designed to evoke an emotional response. Dr Willie Soon offered me an example over a decade ago where the person probably got lots of praise from her fellow enviros over her confrontation with him, but if she and her pals were put up on a national stage and were forced to answer his direct question, they would fold like cheap suits.
Dr. Willie Soon Guest Comment: “Is What I Say Beyond the Boundaries of Reasonable Discussion?”
But the emotional response may be a way where the climate issue could ultimate collapse: imagine the response from true believers when they all fully comprehend how they’ve been duped this whole time by leaders who only sought to line their own pockets while promulgating disinformation as they sought to gain dictatorial power from this issue.
All true.
Looking back it is clear it was simply a tactic to distract from the report and silence the researchers all the while gaining notoriety (and false credibility) for those posting those hostile messages.