It’s deja vu all over again
CBS News has teamed up with the Climate Litigation Industry to push an emerging anti-plastics advocacy campaign. That’s curious enough, although consistent with a new pattern and practice in media to rely on outside activist funding and other resources to churn out content. This most recent entry is in service of a campaign that has all the appearances of being a Plan D by “climate” plaintiffs and the progressive foundations who love them.
Specifically, CBS partnered with Inside Climate News for the package taking the line that plastics recycling “is a sham” and, of course, the beneficiary of “alleged deceptive public messaging.”
Ah, disinformation cops walking the beat. But notice the ‘tell’ in the activist publication’s involvement (not to mention its very name).
ICN previously teamed up with the Los Angeles Times to launch the climate litigation campaign that has now waged for about eight years, as gently detailed in an otherwise supportive—CLW is willing to posit, ‘arranged’—Wall Street Journal piece on the Rockefeller heirs’ “war” on the source of their wealth, ExxonMobil. One of the Rockefeller foundations gave to ICN for the project and another to Columbia Journalism School and viola, attorneys general had their prop to wave around in outrage vowing to get to the bottom of it.
Of course, as CLW has detailed, here and elsewhere, those AGs were working in tandem and (literally) behind closed doors with the Rockefeller-financed advocates and plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Back to their new angle. The WSJ brings to our attention today a piece by Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine, reciting for his readers some of the new liturgy as espoused by the Climate Industry:
“Plastics are the new coal,” declares Beyond Plastics. “Pollution from the plastics industry is a major force behind the heating of the planet,” reports The Hill. The Natural Resources Defense Council says “reducing plastic production is critical to combatting climate change.”
Yes, surely this rhetoric is in service of the fact that, as Bailey notes, “The United Nations is currently negotiating a global plastic pollution treaty. One option being considered is a global ban on “short-lived and single-use plastic products”.
Which aspect CBS also cites. Seeking supranational governance structure is de rigueur. But there does seem to be a bigger play going on.
EID Climate opines on one point that stands out, that being CBS News deploying the ardent campaigners’ language, claiming “Plastic is made from oil, a fossil fuel. Exxon is one of the biggest oil and plastic producers on the planet.”
As EID corrects, “The statement is reductive and somewhat inaccurate—United States plastic production relies on ethane, which is primarily derived from natural gas—but it links plastics to the same “oil companies” ICN and the Rockefeller philanthropies have repeatedly attacked.”
So the campaign continues, and adapts. And CLW thinks this running of the ol’ playbook may have something to do with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose Office, public records reveal, has worked closely with the outside climate industry. (Other records which that Office has withheld are presently the subject of litigation under the California Public Records Act by Government Accountability & Oversight (previously noted by CLW, here).)
Bonta announced an investigation into petrochemical plastics producers on April 28, 2022, rhetorically grounded in allegations similar to those underpinning his climate lawsuit (in short, alleged “deception” around the viability of plastics recycling. Helpfully, in February 2024, the Rockefeller Family Foundation project called the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI, well-covered by CLW here, and especially here and here), published a plastics research report for aspiring plastics plaintiffs.)
The word on the street this past Spring was that Bonta was preparing anti-plastics legal action against his “climate” targets. He told Reuters on April 23 that he would be wrapping up his investigation within weeks. Since then Bonta has remained publicly noncommittal on whether CA will file a plastics suit, but leading Politico to report that he “could be bringing another suit forward by the end of summer.” (checks watch).
CLW is putting its chips on the obvious conclusion that the CBS News/ICN joint is a curtain-raiser for the latest gambit by the same actors going after their same litigation targets. It is “climate”, dressed up as something else, quite possibly rebranded to bring along other state AGs who have to date passed on the Rockefeller’s climate litigation campaign.