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?”
