By Russell Cook
Big, big, big mistake. Basically all of the other Friends of the Court briefs on either side of this big lawsuit protest filed by Suncor Energy at the Supreme Court – against plaintiffs suing them for climate damages in City / County of Boulder / San Miguel County v. Suncor – tend to dwell on the esoteric discussions of whether the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits are a state or Federal matter or if climate policy should be left to state legislatures, while apparently overlooking the deal killer that can wipe out all of these lawsuits and imperil the climate issue itself. Naomi Oreskes’ amici curiae here and all her previous similar ones point an arrow the size of Texas at that fatal fault. I’ll explain in this blog post.
I should first note that – concerning her prior court briefs, I’ll need to add two more in a future blog post within my Oreskes amici post series, which I just ran across after rummaging through her ‘weak link’ associate Ben Franta’s LinkedIn resumé – namely the 2022 Delaware brief and the 2019 Oakland & San Francisco brief.
What’s important about those two and and her other briefs – all prior to this latest brief to the Supreme Court – is the question arising from them as it concerns this latest effort: if a particular accusation in those is backed by (supposedly) verified evidence proving the existence of industry-led disinformation campaigns, then why has Oreskes et al. decided not to tell the Supreme Court Justices about it?
I’m speaking of the memo sent by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) to the Western Fuels Association (WFA) for use in the WFA’s short-lived May-June 1991 “Information Council for the Environment” “(ICE)” public relations campaign, where EEI proposed the strategy of “reposition[ing] global warming as theory (not fact)” via efforts aimed at “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women.” It’s not actually difficult to understand why the WFA / ICE administrators rejected the proposal, including the audience-targeting suggestion, and ultimately relegated it to the trash. The awkwardly worded strategy itself – offered along with a name change variant that was unsolicited – was incomprehensibly weird, and the idea of aiming the PR campaign at such a narrowly targeted audience was simply illogical, considering how the goal was to inform the entire public of the skeptic side of the issue, which they were not receiving from the legacy news media in any appreciable amount.
Her accusation about that worthless memo was a key part to her very first amici on behalf of the plaintiffs in Sher Edling’s first bunch of California filings:
ICE’s primary strategy was to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact),” a clear acknowledgement that global warming had previously been positioned and accepted as fact within the scientific community.
Since neither the ICE PR campaign nor anybody else in the fossil fuel industry operated under that rejected, tossed-out directive, it absolutely does not prove the industry acknowledged man-caused global warming as positioned/accepted as established science ‘fact.’
Nevertheless, that memo was a key part in her subsequent briefs submitted on behalf of plaintiffs in ….
• Oakland & San Francisco, her second-ever brief, PDF file page 38, second paragraph, which I’ll cover further in a future blog post;
• Delaware, PDF file page 37 on to 38, second paragraph, which I’ll also cover further in a future blog post consolidated with the above Oakland & San Francisco version I’d missed;
• Baltimore, PDF file page 38, first paragraph;
• Minnesota –– almost, but not quite. As I detailed in my dissection of that one, some kind of inept mishandling of the accusation by the law office working for Oreskes omitted it, while including the citation source for the memos in the same way as the Baltimore brief and the one for the Sher Edling California plaintiffs;
• Honolulu & Maui – as I detailed in my dissection of that one, Oreskes’ attorney handlers put the accusation in properly with its supporting reference / citation source, the way it was supposed to appear in her Minnesota brief;
• Washington DC, PDF file page 36 on to 37;
• And, while it is not an amicus brief, Oreskes’ ‘expert opinion offered to the plaintiffs in Conservation Law Foundation v Shell is the same basic false accusation.
She’s been quite consistent that way, a one-trick pony with that memo set in Friends of the Court briefs and elsewhere, going all the way back to her 2008 college presentations where her accusation about the memo set was a cornerstone of those. It would not surprise me at all if she’s directly mentioned that memo set in some way in other video presentations which I have not had time to watch.
Now, however, have a look for yourselves within her brief submitted to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Boulder v. Suncor plaintiffs.
Her mainstay accusation after all these years about the “reposition global warming” memos is literally nowhere to be seen within it. Not even some kind of tangential reference to them, or the Western Fuels Association, or 1991 – the year the actual brief ICE PR campaign was run. Zip, zero, nada.
“Well,” astute people with thorough understanding of her amici briefs and the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits themselves might say, “but the Boulder case itself never mentions the ‘reposition global warming’ memo set.”
True, as I detailed in my April 26, 2018 dissection of Boulder, where I noted that it just barely fit my definition of an ExxonKnew” lawsuit by virtue of its dicey associations with others who did hurl accusations about that memo set elsewhere. However, that ‘it’s-not-in-the-main-lawsuit’ excuse goes out the window because the Oakland & San Francisco lawsuits pair didn’t bring up the “reposition global warming” memo set, either, despite the main handler of them (as I noted in my dissection of those here) featuring the accusation in his ‘groundbreaking’ 2008 Kivalina v Exxon lawsuit. Then there is also the way the Boulder filing only tangentially brought up the notorious (but still never-implemented – never-implemented!) – API “victory will be achieved” memo by quoting other much less recognizable phrases from the memo.
Can’t miss the money quote in the actual API memo, sandwiched between Boulder‘s two quotes, though …
… where Boulder‘s second quote essentially changes the meaning of the sentence in the actual [never-implemented] memo:
Unless “climate change” becomes a non-issue, meaning that the Kyoto proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts.
Quite a difference between “to make” and “unless,” where the rest of the memo sentence says no victory will happen if the public doesn’t become fully aware of all aspects of the climate issue – including the skeptic scientists’ side.
Oreskes brief to the Supreme Court cuts straight to the chase and quotes the “victory” phrase directly.
Twice, in fact. In ironic fashion for her second instance, she compares it to the famous “Doubt is our product” tobacco industry memo, which indeed concerned deceiving the public. In Al Gore’s 2006 “An inconvenient Truth” movie, he compared the “reposition global warming” memo to the “Doubt is our product” memo. By pulling this switch and not mentioning Gore’s favorite (favorite!) killer memo at all … is she perhaps afraid that there is something wrong with Al Gore’s comparison?
This is a strange situation with her latest amici brief. Actually, from having seen the 2007-2019 time span of Oreskes being apparently solely enslaved to the “reposition global warming” memos accusation, I was somewhat taken aback upon seeing her mention of the “victory” memo in her first court brief, and I detailed that odd situation in my “Oreskes’ Embrace of the “Naomi Oreskes’ Embracing of the ‘Victory Will Be Achieved’ memos” blog post.
There’s a sort of questionable ‘two degrees of separation’ between this SCOTUS brief, however, and the “reposition global warming” memo set – Naomi Oreskes cites the Climate Files website 18 times for other documents’ sources, including the worthless “victory will be achieved” memo. The Climate Files/Climate Investigations Center was run by Kert Davies, who hurls his accusations about the memo set there, and who traces back to the old forgotten Ozone Action organization which got the sustained media traction going for the accusation back in the late 1990s. Davies’ #2 mainstay accusation about industry disinfo campaigns has been the “victory will be achieved” memo, as detailed in my Background post on him.
Oreskes digs a deeper hole for herself by having her SCOTUS brief cite the Union of Concerned Scientists organization – a co-participant in this SCOTUS brief – to back up her false accusation against skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon, via their 2015 “Climate Deception Dossiers.” Same two degrees of separation problem right there. Oreskes digs one increment deeper by adding a zinger reference to the 2015 NYT hit piece against Dr Soon in her footnote – the NYT article, as I detailed here right after that article came out, cites Kert Davies as its source. Who does the UCS cite as their source for the ‘$1.2 million accusation against Dr Soon? Greenpeace / Climate Investigations Center – meaning Kert Davies. UCS essentially acknowledges that directly in their Dossiers report.
That ‘two degrees of separation’ problem also applies to Oreskes’ other SCOTUS brief co-participants. I’d already covered them in my prior dissections of her earlier briefs, and additionally concerning Ben Franta and Geoffrey Supran, in my just-prior blog post about the ‘weak links people’ in the whole accusation effort.
But Naomi Oreskes has added a new participant to her SCOTUS brief here, which is not a new name to me at all: Brown University professor / Executive Director of the Climate Social Science Network Dr J Timmons Roberts, who I detailed in my April 2020 blog post as being outright enslaved to Kert Davies’ disinformation about industry disinfo campaigns. The professor ought to be embarrassed by this – his Brown University “Climate and Development Lab” students’ report did one of those standard ‘citation cascade’ fumbles where, despite hosting Kert Davies to hear about his ‘evidence,’ their report cited the Union of Concerned Scientists for the “reposition global warming” memo, which of course itself cited Kert Davies’ old former workplace.
Oreskes cites none of Prof Roberts work in her SCOTUS brief. While not a participant in this brief, Amy Westervelt’s work is cited. As I’ve shown before at GelbspanFiles, she is that Amy Westervelt, enslaved to Kert Davies as a provider of documents to her.
All of that is the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ problem with Oreskes’ latest Friend of the Court’ brief, going to the biggest court of them all. When all of her prior briefs on behalf of the climate damages lawsuits plaintiffs rely on the ‘smoking gun’ evidence of the “reposition global warming” memo to prove the existence of industry disinformation campaigns – variants of “disinformation,” “deception,” “deceptive strategies” come up many times in this brief – why would she opt not to tell the Supreme Court Justices about this memo set?
Unlike all of the other briefs to SCOTUS on this Boulder case which concentrate on jurisdictional debate, Oreskes et al. launches straight into the accusation about deception campaigns ……. but fails completely to cite the most ‘devastating’ evidence she and the rest of the enviro-activists have in their accusation arsenal.
Imagine how this outlier brief of hers might capture Justice Clarence Thomas’ attention enough that he sets aside all those other briefs, and instead dispatches his court clerks to figure out who Dr Soon is and whether there’s any veracity to Boulder’s accusation about a ‘$1.2 million Exxon bribe.’ Imagine if he then tasks his clerks to find out more about not only Naomi Oreskes, but also her 18 times-cited “Climate Files” source. Imagine if he broadens the inquiry to find out if there is any merit in any one of the other “ExxonKnew” cases on their claims about ‘industry disinfo campaigns.’ And then tells the other Justices on the conservative majority about what he found.
The reason why the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits haven’t collapsed yet is because nobody of major political influence has torpedoed the false claims in those cases about industry disinfo campaigns and “crooked skeptic climate scientists.” I’ll take what I said just over two years back about Naomi Oreskes skating on thin ice, and apply it to the whole climate litigation lawfare effort; her Friend of the Court brief pushing false accusations has added a ton more weight to the problem.
