The Plagiarism Problem Plaguing the “ExxonKnew” Lawfare Lawsuits — Summary for Policymakers – Watts Up With That?

From the Gelbspan Files

Russell Cook

Nice that someone big finally noticed the plagiarism problem going on. It just wasn’t an individual I was expecting. 

I’ve only been trying to alert reporters and legal scholars to this problem for the last several years, including the Washington Free Beacon‘s Thomas Catenacci (and when he previously was reporting for Fox News and The Daily Caller). Catenacci did ultimately report about the basic problem on April 16, 2025 in his “Plagiarism Accusations Threaten To Upend Democrats’ Climate Lawsuit Against Oil Companies” article, but his news source was not me, it was no less than U.S. district court judge in Puerto Rico, Aida Delgado-Colon, who called out the David Efron PC law firm representing San Juan v Exxon for fundamentally violating ‘Rule 11(b), by submitting any filing in federal court, an attorney certifies the filing is truthful and presented in good faith.’ The article did not say how Judge Delgado-Colon found out that the Efron Law firm had copied pretty much its entire filing out of the Milberg Coleman Municipalities of Puerto Rico v Exxon filing. I myself could have told the judge that right after I finished writing my dissection of San Juan back on February 29, 2024.

Since the climate lawfare plagiarism problem is now being mentioned in a much more widespread way as the result of that story, this is a good time to review which filings in the climate lawfare pile contain essentially identical wording found in prior filings by law offices supposedly unrelated to the ones filing their own ‘unique’ lawsuit. Plus, one of myriad people I’ve alerted over the last few years using the same screencapture images below might see that Free Beacon plagiarism report and say, “wasn’t there a blogger who told me this already? Gelb–something?”

The problem here, as I’ve said many times now, is not simply that we have instances of law firms / Attorneys General law offices seemingly lazily ‘copying somebody else’s homework,’ we instead have a solidifying appearance of some kind of common template being distributed to these offices on what to write in their “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, possibly supplied by, shall we say, “the same advisors.” The elemental accusations in such a template — which I simplified into a single sentence and further explained numerous times here at GelbspanFiles regarding its individual elements, “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” — are all blatantly false. That’s where the Rule 11(b) problem is enough to kill every single one of these lawsuits, on whether any one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys / prosecuting AG offices undertook the most basic kind of due diligence to find out if the accusations – again, apparently in a template supplied to them – actually had any merit.

Let’s establish something first: by ‘instances of apparent plagiarism,’ what I mean is where a law firm / government law office certainly appears to have lifted major sections or accusations out of another law firm’s / government law office’s lawsuit filing that is either outright identical or only slightly altered from a few changes of specific words or adding/subtracting words where the paragraphs are still readily identifiable as coming from some other prior law firm’s / government law office’s filing. Such an effort always looks highly suspect, and not accidental. I’m not talking about a single law office – in this overall situation, the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling – filing multiple lawsuits in court where they reuse their own material from one place to the next. Is that kind of boilerplate copy filing effort still a Rule 11(b) violation when the firm can’t prove their particular accusations true if their reputation depended on it? I’ll leave that to judges and legal scholars to debate.

Sher Edling was the first to launch the current generation of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits in September 2017 (notwithstanding the ‘prior generation trio’ in 2004 / 2006 / 2008). In order of earliest filing appearance after 2017 are the lawsuits I’m aware of which have every appearance from reasonable analysis of ‘copying somebody else’s homework’:

1) Boulder County / San Miguel County v. Suncor (4/17/18) compared to California v BP (9/19/17) — Boulder‘s paragraph 398 and the first bit in 399, as I first described in my April 2018 dissection of it, mirrors what’s seen in CA v BP‘s paragraph 71. I’ve color-coded the blocks to show the similar wording. Is the similarity purely coincidental, or were the folks writing Boulder particularly artful in masking that? Same for these filings’ paragraphs 401 / 73. in their accusations against former Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist Dr Willie Soon.

2) “Washington, D.C.’s complaint [ 6/25/20 ] against ExxonMobil … included background paragraphs that were nearly verbatim copies of paragraphs in Minnesota’s [ 6/24/20 ] complaint” — that line comes from the above Free Beacon report, which cited a June 25, 2020 Energy in Depth piece by William Allison featuring side-by-side comparisons from each filing. The EiD comparisons aren’t especially remarkable beyond the identical wording, but what was remarkable was how the two filings with that degree of shared wording were filed by two supposedly separate Attorneys General offices only one day apart.

• I can’t say that I remember reading Allison’s 6/25/20 piece, so the plagiarism shown in it doesn’t stick out in my mind. My 6/26/20 dissection of MN v API is here, where at the very top I later added a late December 2020 note saying I’d switched the filing from “Independently-led” to “Sher Edling assistance.” My 6/30/20 dissection of D.C. v Exxon is here, where at the very top I later added a mid-October 2020 note saying I’d switched the filing from “Independently-led” to “Sher Edling assistance.” MN hurled the false accusations about both the “reposition global warming” memo set and the “victory will be achieved” memo set, but my dissection of D.C. told how it oddly chose to hurl only the less effective “victory will be achieved” memo set accusation. I re-checked – D.C. clearly did not lift their “victory” memo set out of MN . . . which makes what William Allison’s piece illustrates even more problematic. What explains the D.C. office not copying that accusation  paragraph when it seemingly did so with the others? Meanwhile, regarding D.C., on July 1, 2020, I emailed another of EiD‘s (now former) reporters, Spencer Walrath, to point out that I’d just discovered what follows in the next plagiarism entry immediately below.

3) D.C. v Exxon (6/25/20) compared to Boulder County / San Miguel County v. Suncor (4/17/18) — D.C.‘s paragraph 68 is almost word-for-word identical to Boulder‘s paragraph 400. The identical words are red / orange-underlined in my comparison, and the blue underlines are for the slight variations. In Sept 2023, as explained here, I switched Boulder from my label of “Independently-led” to “Sher Edling assistance.” Interesting switch pattern there, yes? But that’s not the end of the problem with D.C. My March 31, 2025 blog post pointed out a significant apparent plagiarism example – D.C. compared to CA v BP (9/19/17).

4) City of Hoboken v Exxon (9/2/20) compared to the variety of Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits — in my dissection of Hoboken, I suggested readers to compare it to, say, the most recently-filed Sher Edling lawsuit boilerplate copy at the time, with regard to its “reposition global warming” memos accusation. Hoboken compared to Honolulu v Sunoco (3/9/20).

5) Vermont v Exxon (9/14/21) compared to the variety of Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits — in my dissection of this one, I pointed out how it shares especially similar traits with D.C. v Exxon: no footnotes at all, it relies solely on the “victory” memo set for evidence of industry-led disinfo campaigns, and – look more closely – its paragraph about ‘Defendants bankrolling skeptic scientists’ is really similar to D.C.‘s.

6) Municipalities of Puerto Rico v. Exxon (11/22/22) compared to the variety of Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuits. Compare Puerto Rico‘s ‘disinfo advertorials’ accusation to the month-earlier-filed Platkin v Exxon (10/18/22). Same for the “bankroll scientists” accusation, Puerto Rico‘s version compared to Charleston v Brabham Oil (9/9/20). Those examples, and more, as I showed in my Part 1 dissection.

7) County of Multnomah v. Exxon (6/22/23) compared to Puerto Rico v. Exxon (11/22/22) — My dissection of this one showed just how obvious the situation was. Somebody in the Puerto Rico law office misread the name “Bill Brier” as being “E Erie” in one of the old Greenpeace scan pages used as ‘evidence’ . . . Multnomah copied that mishap. When the handlers for the Puerto Rico filing repeated the ‘Exxon bribery’ accusation of Dr Willie Soon out of the Sher Edling filings, they strangely decided to ditch Sher Edling’s citation source and used a different archive link source. Multnomah dutifully copied that bizarre citation source choice.

8) State of California v. Exxon (9/15/23) compared to Platkin v Exxon (10/18/22) — in this filing, as I showed in my dissection of it, CA AG Rob Bonta’s office basically plagiarized its accusation against Dr Willie Soon out of the Sher Edling filings, but with a twist similar to the above Puerto Rico / Multnomah filings; Bonta’s office didn’t use Sher Edling’s citation source, a new source never seen before in these lawsuits was substituted.

9) Municipality of San Juan v. Exxon (12/13/23) compared to Puerto Rico v. Exxon (11/22/22) — The April 16, 2025 Washington Free Beacon article I linked to at the very top of this blog post covered the plagiarism of this filing very well, as did the same-day “Federal Judge Accuses San Juan’s Climate Lawsuit of ‘Astonishing Plagiarism’.” And to repeat what I said at the top, I could have told the Puerto Rico judge about this in February 2024.

10) Chicago v. BP (2/20/2024) compared to California v. Exxon (9/15/23) — Let’s be clear right here, this one is the 19th boilerplate copy lawsuit Sher Edling has filed (my dissections of them are collected in this tag category), and they have all the right in the world to copy their own material from one court location to the next. But as I showed in my dissection of Chicago, what then explains their copy ’n paste of the same new citation source that CA AG Rob Bonta substituted in his copy of Sher Edling’s accusation against Dr Willie Soon?

11) Bucks County v. BP (3/25/2024) compared to Chicago v. BP (2/20/2024) — My dissection of that one showed that while the Chicago filing gave the Chicago-based law firm DiCello Levitt LLP top billing for that filing, Chicago nevertheless had all the hallmarks of being yet another pure Sher Edling boilerplate copy lawsuit. However, Bucks County appeared to be nothing more than – similar to the San Juan / Puerto Rico news situation – a plagiarized copy of Chicago. DiCello Levitt is the handler of Bucks County . . . with zero mention of Sher Edling input anywhere.

12) Maine v. BP (11/26/2024) compared to CA v BP (9/19/17) — the first ‘California,’ not the later one by CA AG Bonta against Exxon. Again, with this Maine filing being the latest in Sher Edling’s lineage, they can copy their own material all they want. But the question I emphasized in my dissection of Maine, was: what then explains their copy ’n paste of their egregiously false accusation against the late Dr S Fred Singer out of CA v BP?

This cannot be pure coincidence. The hapless law firm that’s caught the ire of district court judge Aida Delgado-Colon just happened to be the easiest of all the loose threads in the climate lawfare effort to pull on since it was so obvious. I’ve suggested to the reporters at the Washington Free Beacon and others to make full use of any available plagiarism detection/illustrating software available to compare all of the 2017-to-present “ExxonKnew” lawsuits to each other and to any other kind of online content. It is plausible that someone behind the scenes in this whole mess was clumsy enough to share the possible central template – if there is one – that’s used to assemble these lawsuits.

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