The inept handlers of City & County Of Honolulu & Honolulu Board Of Water Supply v. Sunoco Lp point arrows the size of Texas at where the real conspiracy efforts to deceive the public can be found in the climate issue.
I would have preferred to have known about this October 5 story back in mid-June, when the subpoena to API was delivered, because I could have showed back then where the Texas-size arrows are within it. The handlers behind the original March 2020-filed Honolulu lawsuit – it was merely another in a lineage of Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits as I detailed here – and behind this months-old subpoena effort hope nobody digs deep to see and realize where the real conspiracy is.
So, what are those gifts handed on a silver platter to API within the 6/12/26 subpoena? For new readers of my GelbspanFiles blog who haven’t yet read my dissections of the boilerplate copy Sher Edling filings, the leaked memos / ‘newspaper ads’ / Smithsonian press release evidence which that law firm uses in these copy ‘n paste lawsuits across the country to support their claim that ‘industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns‘ occurred can be summarized this way, on how the industry sinisterly 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.”
That is the literal best Sher Edling has as evidence to prove the claim, and it really is just that simple. This is the literal best ‘smoking gun evidence’ that all of the enviro-left has ever had in their arsenal to support their 30 year+ accusation about ‘industry disinfo campaigns.’ Everything else offered in support of those four accusation elements consists of weak ancillary quasi-related accusations which pathetically fail to show any actual sinister intent on the part of industry executives. And they continue to regurgitate this trash unimpeded because nobody with major authority and influential power counters this trash with, “Tell us, did you ever check the veracity of the accusations about those two memos and the “Chicken Little” advertorial, and whether at the end of the Smithsonian investigation they implicated Dr Soon with funding disclosure violations?”
No joke:
- the “reposition global warming as theory” memo strategy (unsolicited, including its alternate name suggestion) with its equally unsolicited and fundamentally illogical public relations audience targeting goal – all falsely attributed to the “Information Council for the Environment” “ICE” PR campaign – was never implemented anywhere.
- the “victory will be achieved” 1998 American Petroleum Institute memo was never implemented by anybody. Even a 2005-era Mother Jones article was able to spot that accusation problem. Steve Milloy – quoted in the above Oct 5 news report about this subpoena situation – can additionally attest to how the memo was never implemented.
- the “Chicken Little” / “Doomsday is canceled” newspaper advertorials falsely attributed to the ICE campaign were each, respectively, never published anywhere; Sher Edling crops the text out of the 3rd one that was actually published, likely because the missing text contains no disinformation (zoom in on the published text here).
- the accusation against Dr Willie Soon is so egregiously false that it may be epic-level defamation – Dr Soon clearly identified the fatal fault about the 2015 Smithsonian press release which Sher Edling is enslaved to for ‘evidence’ to this day.
The only thing the 6/12/26 subpoena to API does is reinforce the enslavement the handlers behind this new angle of climate litigation lawfare have to the above-noted pile of main and quasi-related ancillary accusations. Watch this, first in the order of the four main accusation elements:
1) “Email from Joe Walker to Global Climate Science Team, Draft Global Climate Science Communications Plan (Apr. 3, 1998), https://perma.cc/3M7L-MLWS;”
That one is Item “z” within the subpoena PDF file’s overarching heading section of “Documents To Be Produced” which starts on PDF file page 8, Item “z” is more narrowly seen within the Number 8 “All of the Documents listed below” section, PDF file page 11, print page 7. The requested doc there is none other than the notorious 1998 API “victory will be achieved” memo – complete with an unforced error perhaps committed by a hapless intern working for the main handlers of this whole Hawaii situation.
Click on the perma 3M7L-MLWS link right above. It first leads to the basic Perma page copy having the horribly degraded, essentially largely unreadable old photocopy images of the “victory memo.” Watch what happens when people click on the “View the live page” link up in the page’s menu bar – it takes you to an innocuous-looking “s3 documentcloud” file page, with no other identifier of where these scratchy images come from. Don’t stop there, however – swap out the particular url items in the page address this way –
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/784572/api-global-climate-science-communications-plan.pdf
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/784572–api-global-climate-science-communications-plan/
– and then proceed to the resulting page that is not the PDF file version, and what do you see?
“Contributed by Kert Davies (Greenpeace ).” As I’ve showed in many of my dissections of the Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits, they’ve routinely done that in an apparent effort to hide that name and that organization from court document viewers. I’d wager API has never seen that memo before and will say they don’t have any such memo in their files, which will only prompt the handlers of this Hawaii situation to say API destroyed their copy. But hold that thought about that name and that organization in my screencapture above for just a moment …. they come up in the next accusation element.
2) The 1 – 2 punch of item “bb” (just two places below the prior above item “z”). “Willie Soon & Sallie Baliunas, Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years, Climate Research (Jan. 31, 2003), https://perma.cc/TTV2-393B” and “109. Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a/k/a Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory” on PDF file page 20, print page 18, within the long “Appendix A” list which is first referenced on PDF file page 9 print page 7 regarding the subpoena demand for all correspondences with “Agencies, Trade Associations, Think Tanks, consulting firms, industry coalitions, non-profit organizations, or non-governmental organizations listed in Appendix A.
This is the identical 1 – 2 punch seen within all of Sher Edling’s boilerplate copy lawsuits pertaining to the [egregiously false] accusation that Dr Willie Soon was paid $1.2 million by Exxon to spread disinformation. Sher Edling’s citation of the 2003 Soon & Baliunas science paper is meaningless since nobody in that firm has the science expertise to dispute what’s in the paper. From the 2017 beginning of their lawsuit filings (San Mateo v Chevron) up until their Sept 9 2020 Charleston v Brabham Oil filing, Sher Edling linked straight to the 2015 Smithsonian press release concerning that Institution’s start of their inquiry into Dr Soon’s funding disclosures. However, starting with their Sept 10, 2020 Delaware v BP filing, they needed to link to the Internet Archive version of the press release …. because the Smithsonian Institution had taken the press release offline; it was no longer viewable to the public. No matter its status online or off, the press release was in no way evidence that Dr Soon had failed to disclose his funders, it only showed that his employer had just begun its inquiry into the matter. As noted in the link above to Dr Soon’s short video on this matter, Smithsonian took the press release offline after five years because their inquiry turned up nothing wrong.
What was the impetus for the Smithsonian to start their inquiry in February 2015? The international ‘breaking news’ about it at the time, where the source of the news was – here’s that name and that organization again – Greenpeace’s Kert Davies. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg there. Revealed within New York State Freedom of Information – Law (FOIL)-released documents which the Energy Policy Advocates watchdog site received in 2023, the 2015 New York AG office had an upcoming meeting with Kert Davies and his former Greenpeace / former Ozone Action boss John Passacantando who were teased to the office attorneys as being ready to break the ‘news’ of Dr Willie Soon’s ‘industry corruption.’ As I detailed in my list of climate damages lawsuits after 2015 which utilize that accusation against Dr Soon, Davies’ infatuation with that [false] accusation actually dates back to 2009 when he was just guessing it might be true. But hold the thought about the Davies and Passacantando names for just a moment …. they come up in the next pair of accusation element.
3) “89. Edison Electric Institute”
That entry is seen on the very same page as the #109 entry for the above-noted “Smithsonian Institute. “Edison – who?” is probably the reaction the readers at API said when they got that far down into this subpoena. What that organization means in the context of the subpoena is quite literally only the unsolicited, never implemented “reposition global warming as theory” memo. I noted this just briefly in my bulletpoints paragraph above, and I will elaborate here: the late Washington Examiner columnist / “Undue Influence” book author writer Ron Arnold described in his June 2016 LeftExposed piece how the ‘leaked memo directive’ containing that memo phrase was part of a rejected proposal sent by the Edison Electric Institute to the Western Fuels Association’s ICE campaign. WFA’s copy of the proposal ended up in the trash, thus there was no way it would have been shared with API years later as a template on how to ‘achieve victory’ in efforts to deceive the public.
4) “Audience/Advertising Testing”
This phrase is seen in three places within the subpoena, twice in the “Produce all Documents and Communications Relating To Your Public Climate Change Communications” section and one more time in the Glossary section. Notice in particular the related words I highlight in those screencaptures, “audience profile” and “identifying subgroups.”
Meaning nothing short of the infamous “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women” audience profile subgroups proposed in the rejected Edison Electric Institute proposal to the Western Fuels Association’s ICE campaign. It’s a fishing exercise where API will turn up nothing, which will only prompt the handlers of this Hawaii situation to say API destroyed their copy of the EEI proposal.
The above 4 problems for the handlers of this Hawaii situation – again, opportunities handed on a silver platter for API to flip 180° – don’t stop there.
Consider what’s going on about the ancillary accusations that “Exxon knew the science was settled for decades.” Notwithstanding that the accusation all by itself is ludicrous in the face of how it was never possible for Exxon et al. to know with any certainty the use of their products caused global warming as far back as the ’70s when uncounted numbers of reports spoke of the dim prospect of global cooling. Thus the following ancillary accusation instances are disingenuous at best, because the handlers of this Hawaii situation never show the contradicting evidence about the uncertainty of climate science.
“Memorandum from J.F. Black” / “Memorandum from Henry Shaw” / “Memorandum from M.B. Glaser” / “Memorandum from Joseph M. Carlson”
I’ve used these evidence’ items before in my dissections of the Sher Edling boilerplate copy filings as additional proof that the fillings are indeed not much more than copy ‘n paste efforts from ones of plaintiffs to the next set. Here, these items are all on the same page and in the same section as the above-noted “victory” memo / Soon & Baliunas science paper. But look who the sources for these ‘evidence’ items are. Not only does this subpoena directly spell out the source – singular – Kert Davies’ Climate Investigations / Climate Files, the clickable links also lead straight his Climate Files uploads, e.g. the J.F. Black memo – no need to do any switcheroo alterations of the url address to reveal that.
Begs the question, if the handlers of this whole Hawaii situation have no fear of sourcing Kert Davies directly, why do they choose to hide his Greenpeace upload of the “victory” memo behind an innocuous link when they could link straight to his Climate Files upload version?
This whole Hawaii subpoena situation is like a reverse of the court tactics Tom Cruise’s character voiced in the 1992 movie “A Few Good Men”:
Prosecuting attorney Lt Dave Spradling: “I’m going gonna charge him with possession …you plead guilty i’ll recommend 30 days in the brig …”
Lt Kaffe: If you ask for jail time, i’m gonna file a motion to dismiss … and if the MTD is denied, I’ll file a motion In limine seeking to obtain an evidentiary ruling in advance, and after that i’m gonna file against pre-trial confinement, and you’re gonna spend the next three months going blind on paperwork …
Spradling: “B misdemeanor 20 days in the brig.”
Kaffe: “C misdemeanor,15 days restrictive duty.”
Spradling: “I don’t know why i’m agreeing with this.”
Kaffe: “You have wisdom beyond your years.”
It’s the handlers of this whole Hawaii situation who want API to go blind on paperwork. They want API – or any other handy defendant with less money and fewer attorneys to plead out. But neither API nor any of the other defendants ever possessed any illegal material, and they most certainly never declared any victory on repositioning a political issue by publishing disinformation or paying shill ‘experts’ to lie.
On PDF file page 17, the very last item #31 under the “Documents To Be Produced” order is for API to turn over “Documents and Communications You have produced, that were produced on Your behalf, that You made available for inspection, or that were made available for inspection on Your behalf, in any Climate Change litigation or investigations into Climate Change deception.”
That right there is an order API can turn 180° in the opposition against Sher Edling, on how Sher Edling was apparently supplied with the basically bogus ‘evidence’ they rely on and exactly who the suppliers were under what conditions.
And this very same order is one API and/or the other defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits and/or U.S. House / Senate / Department of Justice investigators can aim squarely at the main promulgators of the ‘industry disinfo campaigns’ accusation and at the ‘weak link subordinates / associates‘ of those promulgators.
I am thankful that Russell Cook has had the fortitude to persist in unmasking the foolishness of the climate change lawfare industry. Unfortunately, as he repeatedly and tediously describes matters in detail, I can no longer stomach reading his articles, although I agree with his findings. What appears to be missing in all of this, both his narrowly focused explanations and the alleged legal basis for the lawfare, is that I have never seen evidence of a fossil fuel conspiracy in their advertising or in general culture. The coal, oil and gas industries provide a badly needed energy source for a price. Society demands it, and so they supply it. I rarely ever even see an advertisement for an oil and gas company, and when I do, it never says anything about CO2 or climate. If this were such a dangerous and pervasive industry collusion, we have had over 30 years for it to emerge and show itself in many forms and in many places.
And as I have said, if a plaintiff (youth group, city, county, state or NGO) doesn’t like coal, oil and gas, or if they think there really is a CO2 induced climate emergency, then they themselves are in fact the culprits and should immediately cease using all such products and their derivatives.
No obligation for you to do so. But keep this in mind: The blog posts I write at my GelbspanFiles blog (which are sometimes very helpfully offered to much wider audiences at WUWT and other places like ClimateDepot and EIKE) have never been intended for general ordinary reading audiences. The basic articles I occasionally write are for that. My blog posts are intended for the detail-demanding investigators and potential prosecutors who require bulletproof evidence before taking important action. Generalities for general reading audiences won’t cut it. In this instance, I directly notified the American Petroleum Institute before I wrote this blog post to briefly alert them to how the Hawaii subpoena was a crock and advised them of my upcoming analysis of the Hawaii subpoena. Yes, I can be repetitive on spelling out particular details, but that’s because of the ever-increasing numbers of people arriving at my blog who may not be aware of how I covered the details previously. That might now include API’s legal department. Instead of such new readers – some might also be congressional staffers or tips-processing DoJ personnel – left wondering “What does he mean by ‘the memo was never implemented,’ and who is that ‘Kert’ guy?”, they know right away, or they know where to see the answers via my page links / screencapture link images.
People have criticized my ‘in-the-weeds’ / lousily-worded guest posts, I understand that. Hey, I resemble that remark! But in the decade+ span I’ve been doing this, nobody has said I’ve gotten a solitary detail dead wrong, not even the detractors over on the other side. That’s the important bit. When ultimately somebody with major influence – assisted by my bulletproof details plus corroborating additional new evidence arising from my work which is beyond my reach to dig out – nails the tiny clique of climate mobsters to the wall who’ve promulgating the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation . . . . . . , well, you’re welcome! In the meantime, if by some random chance you run across an energy company official who laments how he and his pals don’t readily see a way to fight against the climate litigation lawfare efforts aimed in their direction, you can respond with, “You’re in luck, I know of a guy who has guest posts at WUWT which ………”
I am grateful for your hard work to continually shine a spotlight on these scum lawyers and their minions.
Thanks for that. But you do now understand from my above reply to you why there is a need for me to repeat what I’ve said previously in my blog posts. Yes? The visit counter at my little blog doubled yesterday by some 300+ visitors, very likely largely resulting from WUWT reproducing my day-previous Oct 12 blog post as a guest post, and from the auto-generated shares of the guest post elsewhere. WUWT has a heckuva reach that way. It’s plausible that a sizable amount of those people seeing it have never read my blog before and didn’t even know there was a smear effort by specific enviros against skeptic scientists and fossil fuel execs that actually dates back to the 1990s. It’s also possible that a few people in the legal profession or in the energy industry might have done internet searches for “Hawaii” / “API” / “subpoena,” and then landed at my blog.
Again, no need to read my material if you spot repetitions of details. Naomi Oreskes loves to point to a 1991 coal association memo as something ‘sinister’ because the executive said “Our industry cannot sit on the sidelines in this debate.” But funny thing there is how the industry is doing exactly that right now across the board, and she and her pals are counting on the rest of the public to be doing that. So, the next question is, do you have a conservative House and/or Senate politician or other influential person with political ties you can directly contact to ask what their position is on the climate issue? A couple years back, by way of example, I talked firsthand with one of the top three advisors for a major conservative gubernatorial candidate, about the opportunity for the candidate to speak with a major internationally recognized person on our side.The advisor had neither heard of the person nor demonstrated any familiarity with the collective climate issue, beyond that it somehow ‘excessively costly’ to mitigate. Regretfully, I could make no further inroads into that campaign, and the candidate lost by a slim margin when the opponent was massively vulnerable on the climate issue. Knowing more on where the climate issue implodes might’ve been the winning ticket for that candidate.
I’ll repeat, no need to read my repetitions if you find that bothersome – but are you sitting on the sidelines here, or could you relay it to influential people who’d see it for the very first time how the entire angle of the climate issue dismissing skeptic scientists as ‘cartel-aligned bribery recipients‘ is a total crock?
Russell,
Who was the first person or group that claimed that the activities of the oil and gas companies cause global warming, climate change environmental damage and severe events of weather? What was their motive?
There is no justification for these lawfare attacks on the oil and gas companies which are chemical companies not energy companies. They make and sell chemicals such as fuels for transportation, agriculure, space and water heating and feedstock for the petrochemical industries.
FYI Files, you should go to the late the late John L. Day’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at:
http://www.john-daly.com.
From home page, go to end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map” click on “Australia”. There is shown a list of stations. Click on “Adelaide”.
There is shown a plot of annual mean temperature form 1857 to 1999. In 1857 the concentration of CO2 in dry air was 280 ppmv (0.55 g CO2 per cu. m. of air), and by 1999 it had increased to 368 ppmv (0.72 g CO2 per cu. m. of air), but there was no increase in annual mean temperature. Instead, there was slight cooling which began in 1940. In 1857 annual mean temperature was 17.4° C and by 1999 it had declined to 16.7° C.
For recent Adelaide temperature data I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year.
Displayed in a table are the Thi and Tlo data from 1887 to 2025. The computed Tav for 2025 was 17.2° C. Since measurement error is +/-0.1 C, it is concluded that there has been no warming in Adelaide for 168 years.
In 2025 concentration of CO2 in dry air at the MLO in Hawaii was ca. 429 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has a mass of 1,290 g and contains a mere 0.84 g CO2 at STP. The reason the increasing concentration of CO2 in air had no effect on air temperature in this port city is quite simple: There is too little CO2 to have any effect on large mass of air.
John Daly found over 200 weather stations that had no warming up to 2002. I believe that if everyone learned of John Daly’s website where his empirical temperature data showed CO2 caused no warming air, there would be none of the climate lawfare.
Lastly, do think the oil and gas companies could above information to fight lawfare suits?
PS: If you have the chart for Adelaide on screen, click on the back arrow to display the list of stations. Click on the back arrow again to display the “World Map”.
In response to your two questions of who said oil companies cause (I’ll simplify it to) ‘climate change’ / can the defendant companies use science data to fight and win the climate litigation lawfare battle:
First, the initial enviros blaming Big Oil & Coal would have been the folks back in at least the 1960s complaining about particulate emissions driving global cooling. The suspicious switch to blaming industry for warming happened sometime around the early ’80s. WUWT reproduced one of my blog posts three years ago about my discovery of Al Gore’s complaining about global warming in his appearance on a 1983 PBS Nova program, back when he was only a congressman.
Second, yes the defendant companies can use John Daly’s science facts and that of other skeptic scientists across the board. But they need to first stop wasting time pursuing kick-the-can-down-the-road efforts over esoteric legal technicalities on court jurisdiction or if climate policy needs to be restricted to state legislatures. Then they must first be fully prepared to deal with the inevitable “don’t listen to skeptic scientists on the payroll of Big Oil” accusations That accusation tactic is the emotion-based thing the plaintiffs and the enviros rely on to steer the public, and potential judges / juries away from the ho-hom minutiae of highly detailed science data. Killer as Daly’s Adelaide chart may be, the battle is lost if any judge / jury has the concept already planted in their mind that a tiny handful of scientists were bribed by industry money to concoct disinformation. Daly’s chart is automatically dismissed that way before it is even seen. However, get it in the judge’s / jury’s minds how it is provable that a tiny clique of enviros have apparently pushed libel/slander material against skeptic scientists / industry execs to possibly a criminal level, then the tide will turn in our favor. Our side will never win on science alone in the face of every effort being made by zealots on the other side who try to say their side is the only side to consider.
Thank you for your reply and info. Were you aware of Australian John Daly’s website? He was on a crusade to prevent the Australian government from implicating a draconian climate agenda. Unfortunately he died before he could complete is goal. Since then, look what has happened to the Australian economy and to that of the UK and Germany.
Hopefully, the Supreme Court in Boulder vs Suncor et al will dismiss the law suit. Do you know when the decision will ne announced?
Yes, I was, the late John Daly was an absolute treasure for science-based opposition to the Al Gore side of the issue. He was one of the first I ran across when I first started looking in 2008-’09 into the depth of that opposition which the legacy news media and pro-CAGW politicians could not be troubled to go find for themselves. I illustrated that particular problem much later in my March 2022 Part 2 dissection of the US PBS Frontline hit piece against Big Oil, where they featured former US Congressman Bob Inglis first saying he relied on his teenage son to point to the CAGW ‘crisis’ and then saying he went down to Antarctica to witness ice core drilling. Five paragraphs from the bottom of my blog post, I showed how a person does not need to be a rocket scientist or a climate scientist or even a congressman to find science-based opposition to conclusions about ‘ice cores confirming current CO2-driven CAGW,’ by linking to the John Daly page of Zbigniew Jaworowski’s statement to the US Senate about the “False Low Pre-industrial CO2 in the Atmosphere.” Rep Inglis and the Frontline program people apparently could not have found that if it was two feet in front of their faces. Along with myriad other faults in the climate issue.
Regarding the SCOTUS ultimate decision, the maddening thing about their examinations is how long it takes before they announce their decision, usually six to eight months later. In the meantime, it might become a moot effort for SCOTUS to dismiss by saying states / counties / cities not having the authority to mandate climate policy, which doesn’t even take the science assertions into consideration. I’m hoping one of the energy company defendants finally grows a spine and focuses on the two totally fatal faults in these lawsuits and file Motions to Dismiss on those grounds: First, no possible way the companies could have ‘known’ with certainty as far back as the ’50s – ’70s that use of their products cause global warming when all of the reports back then were all about global cooling; and second; the bogus accusations that the industry ran disinfo campaigns cannot support the accusation about the existence of such campaigns, thus the lawsuits should be dismissed on that alone. Exxon et al. didn’t know and didn’t deceive the public.
Troughers gotta try to take more money …..
hope they starve.
Well done.