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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.