Oreskes’ Embrace of the “Victory Will Be Achieved” Memos, Redux, in Honolulu v Sunoco – Big, big mistake.
Posted on August 1, 2025
The widely shared Associated Press news on July 28th was that a hearing in Hawaii was scheduled to take place the next day on whether the Honolulu v Sunoco global warming damages lawsuit should be tossed out because the ‘statute of limitations’ on the case had somehow run out. The defendants’ law firms legal technicality minutiae maneuvers from all their prior 8+ months of effort to get it out of state court and into Federal court didn’t work, so it appears they are trying a different maneuver … but in ABC News’ July 28 regurgitation of the AP story, which I fortuitously screencaptured on July 29th, showed how Naomi Oreskes’ name just could not stay out of the overall situation. I say “fortuitous” because one day later when I reopened both the ABC “Honolulu’s lawsuit against fossil fuel companies leads climate change legal fight” story and the AP original version to copy words out of them – poof – Oreskes has vanished from both. But what’s seen in the internet cannot be unseen. What’s going on right there with that erasure? Luckily, someone smarter than me preserved an Internet Archive version of the original AP story, with the two Oreskes paragraphs intact.
Not an especially bright idea for the AP to say Oreskes had submitted an Opposition filing against the defendants’ ‘statute of limitations’ maneuver; dumber yet is to bury that fact like it never happened. However, that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg in this particular new situation.
Pure “Streisand Effect” for me. Readers here at GelbspanFiles will remember we are talking about that Naomi Oreskes, she of her self-proclaimed ‘expertise’ – be sure to click on this screencapture image here on that – concerning ‘particular smoking gun evidence’ of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to deceive the public. I already detailed the fatal problem within her 2021 Friend of the Court brief for Honolulu, so upon reading that she’d very recently filed something new on this case, I wanted to see how she spoke of ye olde “reposition global warming” memos, the set that basically helped to launch her ‘industry accuser’ speaking career back in late 2007-2008.
Uhhh … Houston, we have a problem.
https://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=18795
