Ok, that was an utterly predictable development. This news was announced at the Energy in Depth site in their July 1, “Connecticut Joins the Club: State Quietly Enlists Sher Edling in National Climate Lawfare Campaign” article. I dissected the ‘indeptendently-led’ Connecticut v Exxon in my October 24, 2020 blog post, pointing out how it was only half as effective as the pile of Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits because it relied on the second best accusation material the enviro-activists have in their arsenal about ‘industry-led disinformation campaigns.’ An accusation based on a never implemented – (never implemented!) industry memo, by the way.
Maybe now, the San Francisco-based Sher Edling law firm can show how the most effective way of committing climate issue political suicide is done, since they rely on that worthless memo evidence and another worthless, never-implemented memo in their boilerplate copy series of lawsuits across the U.S. Plus, there is one other possible problem which perhaps might indicate this co-counsel situation was somehow already in the works maybe on an informal basis back in 2020.
The Connecticut lawsuit effort joining forces with Sher Edling is not unprecedented. The Colorado case that’s headed for a hearing at the Supreme Court later this year got itself adopted by Sher Edling in 2023, which I described here after the Energy in Depth site put out that news at that time. Three years earlier, the supposedly independent Minnesota v API lawsuit jumped onto the Sher Edling Assistance bandwagon, as I detailed here. While there is no obvious connection of California Attorney General Rob Bonta to the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm, how coincidental is it that when AG Bonta filed his CA v Exxon lawsuit, his office apparently plagiarized accusation material out of the Sher Edling-handled New Jersey AG’s Platkin v Exxon filing? For some odd reason, however, AG Bonta’s filing elected not to use a citation source which Sher Edling had long used over the course of many filings, it instead substituted an entirely new source. But how significantly more coincidental is it that when Sher Edling filed their Chicago v BP, they apparently plagiarized not only AG Bonta’s accusation word-for-word (it was easier for me to drop in a translucent box where the identical wording ended), but also his new citation source?
Basic point is, the interconnectedness of these lawsuits becomes ever more apparent the deeper anyone examines these.
This is where the “one other problem” I mentioned up above comes in: back in 2022, CBS Morning News decided to seemingly out-of-the-blue do a broadcast piece titled “Suing over climate change: Taking fossil fuel companies to court.” I went through its fatal faults in my April 2022 blog post, noting how it was prominently interviewing two people, most notably Connecticut Attorney General William Tong. Readers can follow along in the online transcript via the broadcast video box to the right of the transcript – they quote AG Tong five times, but what I thought was particularly problematic was how both in the broadcast video and in the online transcript, they featured images they attributed to the 1991 “Information Council for the Environment” newspaper advertorial public relations campaign immediately before having AG Tong say,
“I’m suing ExxonMobil because they lied to us.”
Whether inadvertently or deliberately, CBS News Morning was implying that AG Tong was speaking about the lies in the newspaper advertorials, along with the other specific documents mentioned in the broadcast / transcript which are described as being in AG Tong’s lawsuit filing.
Those two newspaper advertorials are not mentioned in any way within AG Tong’s Connecticut v Exxon. Both are a mainstay in the Sher Edling firm’s accusations (e.g. in their Hawaii v BP filing) that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. The “Chicken Little” advertorial, however, was never published anywhere, nor was the “Doomsday is Canceled” ad which Sher Edling loves to show. But as I noted in my April 2022 blog post about this CBS broadcast, the other newspaper advertorial in their video is one that was actually published. Except the surprise to me was that it was not the murky degraded photocopy version seen in the Sher Edling filings (and identically in Greenpeace USA’s scans collection), it was a version which had clear-looking text below the main caption. Where else – as I asked in my April 2022 blog post – had I seen that new-to-viewing-audiences far more clear “Most Serious” newspaper advertorial?
In a BBC online news article. Which prominently relied on Naomi Oreskes.
Naomi Oreskes is on retainer with Sher Edling. And now Sher Edling is assisting Connecticut AG Tong.
