These are the chain of people one increment back from the main promulgators who’ve pushed the false accusation about ‘shill skeptic scientist on Big Oil’s payroll who were directed to reposition global warming as theory‘ ever since the 1990s. I’ve mentioned their names on many occasions in prior blog posts on the way these individuals could fold like cheap suits while under oath at investigative hearings, when hit with any inquiries on how they support their accusations and who exactly their sources are for the specific accusations they were taught to dutifully regurgitate. I’ve even made a humorous meme image to convey how lame they are and how willing they might be to turn ‘states evidence’ under tough prosecutorial proceedings simply to reduce the jail time or civil court penalties they’d be facing.
It’s likely that U.S. Senate and House congressional investigators / Department of Justice investigators / energy company defendants’ law firms / objective news reporters may not recognize many of the names below and thus would not be aware of the benefits of hitting these weak links people with the toughest possible questions, in order to get to the absolute bottom of where the utterly false accusation originates about ‘skeptic climate scientists being paid to lie in disinformation campaigns.’ The whole accusation, 1991 to the present day, is a house of cards, a Jenga tower on the edge of total collapse. The top-most promulgators of the accusation may likely plead the 5th, and thus forestall the collapse. All it will take to bring it all down is for any one of the weak links to cave into pressure on what they actually know.
First, who are the top-most main promulgators of the overarching plan to distract the public away from listening to skeptic climate scientists, via character assassination accusations of them being paid industry money to ‘reposition global warming as theory’? Arguably the top people are, in order of sheer public prominence and international influence, Al Gore (my SPM on him is here); the two top administrators of the old Ozone Action environmental group which got merged into Greenpeace USA, John Passacantando (more on his highly suspect dark money funding here; he never told where or how his group got the memo set) and Kert Davies (Backgrounder on him here); and the late Ross Gelbspan, the namesake of my blog. Unfortunately for hard-nosed investigators who could have dug devastating potentially self-incriminating information out of Gelbspan, he took his secrets to his grave on how he possessed / obtained / gathered and got the notorious – and literally worthless from never being implemented – “reposition global warming” memos. The unanswered question there is: did he get the memo set from Al Gore? That arises out of the inexplicable situation of Al Gore quoting specific phrases from the rejected memo set years before Gelbspan ever mentioned them, yet Gore specifically credited Gelbspan with the ‘discovery’ of the main memo strategy phrase. It seems acutely odd that, despite all the accolades heaped on Gelbspan from 1997 to his death in 2024 about ‘finding’ those memos, he himself never detailed how he accomplished that … as though the process was some kind of state secret.
Then there is the gray area of Naomi Oreskes (SPM here), a johnny-come-lately to the ‘merchants of smear’ effort more then a decade after it started. She’s both a main promulgator in personal presentations (plural) / news outlet articles / and Friends of the Court briefs, …. and she’s potentially a very weak link back to the origin of the smear. As I detailed in my SPM on her, she claims to have been alerted to the memo set at a place where they were not actually archived, by a person separated by only one degree from Al Gore who should have alerted the news media to such ‘smoking gun’ damaging material instead of a ‘science historian’ having no national prominence ….. and she claims to be on a first-name basis with Gore, when there is no readily obvious reason why she should be above all of the rest of the information providers to Gore’s 2006 movie.
The heart of the problem is not the exact origin of the memo set itself, it is instead whether any of the biggest promulgators of the accusation surrounding made their accusation knowing what they were saying was totally false, or if they put out the accusation with reckless disregard to whether it was true or not. I’d suggest they are in a world of hurt on either situation.
How do investigators / prosecutors get to the bottom of this? I suggest it is via the path through the weak links – place those people under oath and/or file charges against them, and it is quite probable they would quickly roll on whoever their supervisors were, in order to avoid severe punishment for themselves.
No matter where they start, the problem of a “citation cascade” erupts – they cite a source which itself cites an another source. I have a tag category for blog posts where I specifically called out that problem when it happened. Problem is, any one of these citation paths always leads back to Oreskes, or Passacantando / Davies, or Gelbspan, or Gore. Always.
• The Sher Edling law firm in San Francisco – their out-of-the-blue entry into the climate lawfare litigation angle in 2017 with a trio of lawsuits was highly suspicious, owing to them repeating the same basic four accusation elements throughout their ‘boilerplate copy lawsuits, which Kert Davies has long had direct associations with. They went so far as to cite Kert Davies’ Climate Files at their own website as their source for one of those (worthless, as it turns out) accusation elements. Who does Sher Edling cite for the source of the “reposition global warming” memos and for the newspaper advertorials falsely attributed to that memo set? The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), for both of those accusation narratives. Who does the UCS cite? Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action’s degraded photocopy scans collection.
• Attorney Matt Pawa – his pair of nearly identically State of California v. BP lawsuits, filed in Alameda County and San Fransisco County came barely two months after Sher Edling’s filings, and he was described at the time as “the legal brains behind the campaign against the industry.” But neither of these two mention the “reposition global warming” memo set. However, Pawa’s groundbreaking 2008 Kivalina v Exxon lawsuit unmistakably did, along with two other accusation elements routinely seen in Sher Edling’s boilerplate copy lawsuits. But as I showed in my blog post here, he did a strange dance around attributing the memo set to Ross Gelbspan, when everyone else in that 2008 time frame in the news media and elsewhere were doing so. The question here is: when did Pawa figure out minimally that there might be a problem if his Kivalina lawsuit pinned the memos incorrectly to Gelbspan ‘discovering’ them, and when did Pawa figure it out? This has repercussions for the Sher Edling law firm, because as I detailed in my dissection of their November 2024 Maine v BP filing, they apparently plagiarized accusation material out of Pawa’s twin 2017 filings.
• Geoffrey Supran (tag category for significant mentions of him here) – mentored under Naomi Oreskes / owes a debt of gratitude to her, written testimony to the U.S. Senate included a reference to the “reposition global warming” memos … where his citation source for the (never used) ICE campaign name and the memo set was Kert Davies’ Climate Files website. Supran was the co-author of Oreskes’ UK Guardian article which also featured the never-used name for the ICE campaign and the particular pair of never-published newspaper advertorial images – ultimately stemming from the old Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action three-image scans.
• Dr Justin Lancaster – the late Dr S Fred Singer’s account of his libel suit against Dr Lancaster included a reference of Dr Lancaster being essentially only one step away from being associated with Al Gore, where the implication was that Gore directed Dr Lancaster to pressure Dr Singer into removing Gore’s ‘college mentor’ Dr Roger Revelle from a magazine article authored by Dr Singer, Dr Revelle and one other science expert, which concluded that carbon dioxide was not a primary driver of global warming. That whole dicey situation with its Lancaster/Gore connections is a whole other story by itself. In my own 2013 chance online encounter with Dr Lancaster, he ultimately revealed that Ross Gelbspan had approached him for information about Dr Singer more than a year before Gelbspan’s widespread claims of 1995 being the time when he started of his ‘investigations’ into industry-paid skeptic climate scientists. Assuming Dr Lancaster was being truthful there, the question then is: why would Gelbspan fabricate a story for the actual start date of his ‘investigations’?
• Erik Conway – Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” book co-author, who supposedly – according to Oreskes herself – alerted her to who exactly Dr S Fred Singer was. As I detailed here, Conway would have needed a time machine to travel back in time to accomplish this. His own story version of the situation undercuts her narrative on the timeline. Assuming Conway was being truthful there, the question then is: why would Oreskes fabricate a story for the actual date of when she started looking into the ‘climate issue doubt merchants’?
• Dave Anderson, of the Energy and Policy Institute (EPI), the pusher of the Twitter hashtag “#UtilitiesKnew” as an alternative to the “#ExxonKnew” tag – despite having his prior workplace being the Union of Concerned Scientists – which by default was enslaved to the Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action accusation about the “reposition global warming” memos being created by the Western Fuels Association, and despite the UCS naming him as the top contributor to their “Climate Deception Dossiers” which included one on the “reposition global warming” memos, and despite the UCS Dossiers acknowledging the “thoughtful comments” on the draft version of the dossiers coming from Kert Davies – Anderson subsequently departed from that angle at his new EPI job and instead pinned the memos on the Edison Electric Institute. In one sense, as I detailed here, his position was actually correct. The problem was that the EEI-authored memo set was still nevertheless never implemented anywhere, and thus was worthless to use as accusation evidence to support a claim that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. Significantly complicating this situation, the [now dismissed] Town of Carrboro v. Duke Energy (an electric utility provider) lawsuit was seemingly based on Anderson’s EPI “Utilities Knew” report …. except that Carrboro departed from both Anderson’s reliance on worthless Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action photocopy scans and Sher Edling’s routine of using those as evidence of ‘industry disinfo campaigns,’ and instead featured genuine ads that were indeed published by the Information Council for the Environment. I detailed that switch here. The question here is: when did Anderson figure out minimally that there was something wrong with Davies pinning the memos incorrectly to Western Fuels, and when did the attorney handlers of Carrboro v. Duke figure out there was something wrong with Anderson’s pinning the memos to the worthless never-published Chicken Little advertorial?
• Amy Westervelt – of various ‘authority’ podcasts about ‘climate disinformation’ who relies on Kert Davies as a source (on more than one never-implemented ‘leaked industry memos’ set. She’s described by Naomi Oreskes as a “good friend and colleague” … who just coincidentally tagged along with one of the main lawyers behind the [renamed but later dismissed] Puerto Rico v Exxon lawsuit … which, as I detailed here, apparently plagiarized Sher Edling accusation content.
• Dr Ben Franta – at first glance in too-simplistic of internet searches for his name, he appears to be a qualified go-expert on climate litigation, “cited * in the US Congressional Record,” no less. He actually is not any such expert, he professed to have learned about the climate issue only just in 2010, coincidentally the same time when Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” was published (he revealed that during his minor supporting role in the April 2022 Frontline “The Power of Big Oil” series, which itself more prominently featured John Passacantando and Kert Davies back-to-back without ever disclosing the longtime working association between that duo); he’s a co-participant in Oreskes’ Friend of the Court briefs on behalf of plaintiffs in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits; and he had a guest star role in a video against fossil fuel companies which starred Kert Davies. As I detailed at considerable depth here, Franta’s alleged ‘climate litigation expertise’ provided to plaintiffs in the Oregon County of Multnomah v Exxon lawsuit doesn’t actually help that case at all, it is instead one more angle that undermines it. As I detailed at considerable depth here about Franta’s August 2022 Doctor of Philosophy thesis, the names he claims he built his work on regarding fossil fuel industry disinformation are all a case study on how ‘citation cascades’ work. He could have eliminated all of those extra names and simply said his work is built on Naomi Oreskes’ and Ross Gelbspan’s work.
( *cited where and how? By Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) on March 5, 2019 in reference to Franta’s participation in Naomi Oreskes amicus on behalf of Sher Edling’s first California “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Where is Franta’s name seen right next to a fatally faulty accusation? On the next page, by the worthless “reposition global warming” memos accusation. That’s something Franta should not brag about.)
• David Arkush / Aaron Regunberg, d.b.a “Public Citizen” – the political advocacy group behind the climate lawfare litigation angle that fossil fuel executives can be jailed for ‘climate homicide’ / ‘reckless climate endangerment.’ In their ludicrous ‘climate homicide’ proposal regarding fossil fuel companies (FCCs) operating disinformation campaigns, they – predictably – cited the Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Dossiers.” But elsewhere in their proposal regarding “FCCs spread disinformation,” they cite a paper written by Ben Franta. In Franta’s own paper, in support of that basic accusation, he cites ….. wait for it ……. Naomi Oreskes. In a 2020 Tweet, he flatly stated that Kert Davies and Ross Gelbspan documented that problem, when they actually did no such thing, because the core of their accusation was literally worthless.
Keep an eye here for more additions. I’ll repeat what I routinely include in my email tips to reporters and investigators: The “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation has never been just some omnipresent untraceable one. Trace its ‘core evidence’ back to the small group of people at the epicenter of whole effort, and the whole climate issue is in peril of total collapse as a result.
