Willy Sutton, why do you rob banks?
“Because that’s where the money is.”
Naomi Oreskes, why did you create a climate litigation company?
“I’ve been advised by counsel not to answer that question.”
In April, 2025, Naomi Oreskes set up a single-person litigation advisory company called Grenville Science Consulting (Limited Liability Company, New York State Dos ID: 7587207). She declares that her business “provides consulting services, including expert witness testimony, to law firms”. With the rise in climate lawfare cases, following from her La Jolla Playbook strategy, the time was ripe for Oreskes to cash in.
And good for Naomi; she deserves a nice payout. She has worked hard her whole life and has campaigned relentlessly ... against special interest funding of research. It is such hypocrisy that makes this story so rich. Her discrediting of private-funded research, her campaigns to tobacconize the energy, chemical and food industries, her unsubstantiated accusations and her efforts to retract papers whose conclusions go against her political interests have been so legendary that she has become one of the most hated academics in America.
Now that Oreskes has become a corporate consultant, while using her work to publish papers, I hope she appreciates how others can put her under the same scrutiny (and with the same degree of empathy).
Naomi’s foray into the business world has been anything but polished. Her website, 18 months on, is merely a wallpaper. Her main page promoting her special skillsets, on the Climate Reality Project, is not accessible to mere mortals like myself. There are only a few titbits about Grenville Consulting in article acknowledgements, so I had to resort to AI to gather enough information about Oreskes’ venture into the consulting world.
And Naomi knows a thing or two about using AI to replace actual research.
A Grenville Consulting Performance Review
While Naomi does not have to publish her financial accounts for the first two years of operations (watch this space next April), we can see the results from her first consulting contract, and it was not pretty.
Oreskes served as an expert witness / litigation consultant testifying for the plaintiff in Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Shell Oil Company, et al. The firm that hired her, Conservation Law Foundation, is a strategic litigation non-profit receiving $12 million in annual support from foundations like the Rockefeller, Park, Barr, Grantham… The lawfare NGO alleges that Shell failed to adequately prepare its New Haven fuel storage terminal for extreme weather and the foreseeable impacts of climate change. This is just one more chapter in the relentless climate lawfare onslaught, a strategy orchestrated by Oreskes in La Jolla in 2012 to overwhelm and bankrupt the fossil fuel industry.
But something unusual happened in this case that made it come up in my litigation newsfeed. It was discovered in cross-examination that special expert Oreskes had used AI to prepare her review of the case. So the defense asked the witness to reveal the AI prompts that she had used to come to the conclusions in her review. Using AI in this manner was a violation of the court’s Standing Protective Order.
It then emerged that Oreskes had not even prepared the review herself but rather, the work was done by her research assistant and as they could not produce the AI prompts, that part of the case is at an impasse. As Grenville Science Consulting is a single-person LLC., we can only assume this assistant was a Harvard-paid intern.
For this anti-capitalist activist, campaigning against greed and unethical behavior in the corporate world, Naomi seems to be a natural at manipulation and exploitation.
At a $600-700 hourly wage, litigation consulting contracts that involve preparing briefs, depositions and court appearances can easily clear six figures so I have to wonder whether the plaintiff got its money’s worth.
And I really hope Professor Oreskes didn’t fail this poor Harvard intern. On the question of research integrity, I suppose Harvard doesn’t conduct ethics investigations on its pool of prima donna professors.
Pot, Kettle, Grenville
Naomi Oreskes has been very outspoken against researchers who take industry funding but somehow she thinks that the litigation industry is not an industry. I suspect Naomi is oblivious to the hypocritical chasm between her word and her deed. Almost a year after she set up Grenville Science Consulting, she published yet another paper criticizing private sector funding of research.
She has set up an operation to retract any papers that had industry involvement, including the Williams et al paper on glyphosate. It is curious that she only went after scholars and papers supporting industries she did not like, namely energy and pesticides companies. What if Oreskes had read The Firebreak and discovered the amount of special interest funding secretly coming from the US litigation industry to produce research and papers that would be beneficial to ... the US litigation industry? If she had looked at our exposé of the Heartland Health Research Alliance, she would have found at least a dozen papers that would need to be retracted.
Why do I doubt that she would have the objectivity to even entertain such a thought? I suppose it is just an integrity thing.
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Why then is this outspoken critic of private funding of research taking money from the litigation industry, and why did she create a company to bank the profits?
Given the smoke and mirrors of Grenville Science Consulting, one reason could be to hide the revenue she is accruing from working as a litigation consultant. She got a lot of grief from critics, including yours truly, when she was forced to disclose under oath that she had been directly receiving consulting fees from three law firms, including the notorious Sher Edling. A financial pass-through company would cleanse Naomi’s direct association with lucrative litigation invoices.
Perhaps Harvard demanded that she separate her consulting work from her academic research. Academics pocketing lucrative litigation consulting fees have never benefited their university’s reputations, especially when their testimonies or court briefs get torn apart in cross examination.
Oreskes created Grenville Science Consulting a month before testifying as a litigation consultant in the case of Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Shell Oil Co., et al. The law firm for the plaintiff may have demanded that consulting fees be paid to an external company rather than to a professor (although they could still splash her title around).
Maybe Oreskes is transitioning to a post-academic retirement life where padding her pension becomes an important strategy. I’m sure she has had a lot of advice from her activist science friends shilling for Predatorts. Maybe she should have lunch with Chuck Benbrook or Philip Landrigan.
One thing is certain. Oreskes did not create her company to reinforce her argument why researchers and scientists should not take industry funding, as that is clearly what this hypocrite is doing. She needs to come clean and apologize to all of the researchers and academics whose reputations she has viciously destroyed over her entire bilious career.
Or maybe I should devote the next five years getting all of her papers retracted for undeclared conflicts of interest. (I can also hire a student intern to use AI to do the work for me.) I may be a mean person … but not as mean as Naomi is.