steve coll pvt empire

i have notes? mostly on for policy?

see CJR

----

IV. BIG OIL HAS TRIED TO AVOID ACCOUNTABILITY BY BULLYING

JOURNALISTS AND OBSTRUCTING THE COMMITTEE’S INVESTIGATION

A. Bullying Journalists Who Expose the Truth

Emails obtained by the Committee show Exxon privately pressured journalists about

unfavorable news stories implicating the industry. In October 2015, the Los Angeles Times

published two articles written by students as part of the Energy and Environmental Reporting

Project at the Columbia Journalism School. The articles, which drew on historic documents and

more recent interviews and statements from current and former Exxon employees, showed that

Exxon’s work to prepare its facilities for climate change belied its public statements

downplaying or denying climate science.89

Documents uncovered by the Committee suggest that Exxon baselessly accused a

Columbia Journalism instructor and a post-graduate fellow of wrongdoing in connection with

these stories. On November 20, 2015, Exxon sent a letter to Columbia University’s President

Lee Bollinger, criticizing the articles and alleging ethics violations by the students and the

instructor. Exxon claimed that the journalists were made aware of “significant factual errors” in

the articles and gave the company “less than 24 hours” to respond to a request to comment on the

second story, published on October 23, 2015. 90

The letter singled out the team’s instructor

Susanne Rust for alleged inaccuracies and for not giving the company ample time to respond.

However, internal emails indicate that Exxon was given approximately a month to

comment on essential questions and facts of the story prior to the October 23, 2015, publication,

and that the company had resisted multiple requests by the team of journalists to provide detailed

responses.

Exxon also accused a post-graduate fellow, Sara Jerving, of “misrepresenting herself as a

Columbia Arctic researcher and [making] no mention of the fact that she was affiliated with the

89 Columbia Journalism School, Two-Year Long Investigation: What Exxon Knew About Climate Change

(online at https://journalism.columbia.edu/two-year-long-investigation-what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change)

(accessed Nov. 22, 2022). The first two articles in the series were published in October 2015. The first article,

What Exxon Knew About the Earth’s Melting Arctic, details how between 1986 and 1992 Exxon was already

planning for the impacts that global warming would have on its operations in the Artic, for example by hardening

infrastructure. The second article, How Exxon Went from Leader to Skeptic on Climate Change Research, reveals

how the company, contrary to its own research, “poured millions” into a public messaging campaign to sow doubt

about the science of climate change. The article asserted that, despite being a leader in climate research, the

company was publicly skeptical of climate change because it “feared a growing public consensus would lead to

financially burdensome policies.”

School of Journalism or that the research might eventually be published in a newspaper.”93

Internal Exxon emails contradict these claims as well. These emails show that the company

knew that Ms. Jerving had represented herself accurately as a journalism student at Columbia

University to the people she interviewed for the stories. 94

These exchanges also show industry insiders communicating with Exxon employees

about their skepticism and denial of the science of climate change. For example, Peter Noble, a

longtime oil and gas industry executive and consultant, wrote to Ken Croasdale, a former Exxon

employee and then-consultant for Exxon:

I see nothing inconsistent twitch [sic] your quote from 1991 when we didn’t knw [sic]

much about global climate change to Exxon’s current position in 2015 when we still

don’t know much about climate change even if our politicians claim it is “settled

science.” This is a cross we have to bear for our oil industry connections I guess? 95

Another oil and gas industry insider,Dan Masterson wrote to Mr. Croasdale:

The murky part of global warming and climate change seems to be whether it is

anthropogenic or related to other very long term [sic] changes not related to human

activity. I think the latter is the case and that the Exxon executives were correct in stating

that the science was “murky.”96

Shell’s internal documents similarly display a marked discomfort with press inquiries

into the company’s past and present climate efforts, even with journalists from whom they

expect positive coverage. In October 2016, David Hone, Shell’s Chief Climate Change Adviser,

and Curtis Smith, Media Manager for Shell, discussed how to deal with a damaging story about

climate denialism in the oil industry. Mr. Smith suggested reaching out to Paul Barrett from

Bloomberg Businessweek, describing him as “the fellow who wanted to do a deep dive in our

archives to prove Shell was a good actor in the climate space for a long time.” However, Mr.

93 Letter from Mr. Kenneth Cohen, Vice President, ExxonMobil, to Lee Bollinger, President, Columbia

University (Nov. 20, 2015) (online at www.politico.com/f/?id=00000151-5a8a-d6a2-a155-dbca213c0000).

94 In a series of emails, Exxon consultant Ken Croasdale asked his contacts about their interactions with

Ms. Jerving. In response, his contacts indicated they knew she was a journalist. For example, in an email from

Peter Noble to Ken Croasdale on October 14, 2015, Mr. Noble confirmed meeting with Ms. Jerving and that she

“[s]eemed like a nice young lady, a student of journalism at Columbia, I think she said but that just shows that I am

a poor predictor of character?” EM-HCOR3-00943385-90. Moreover, in emails from October 15, 2015, from Anne

Barker and Bob Frederking, a current employee and retired employee at the National Research Council of Canada,

both acknowledged they knew Ms. Jerving was affiliated with Columbia and that their interviews with her came

through the National Research Council’s communications group. EM-HCOR3-00943393-94. In an email from

October 15, 2015, Dan Masterson, another oil and gas industry contact of Mr. Croasdale’s, wrote that, according to

his diary entry, he “Met with Sara Jerving, a post-grad student in journalism at Colombia [sic] University. We

talked for about 1.5 hours re what I did in my career and what took place in the 1970’s, 1980’s and thru the 90’s to

now.” EM-HCOR3-00943410-11.

95 EM-HCOR3-00943388.

96 EM-HCOR3-00943411; see also BPA_HCOR_00029193-94 for BP’s treatment of later reporting from

the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project.

Smith ultimately explained that the deep dive never happened because “we sort of chickened

out” and chose not to give him access. 97

Despite an extensive public relations campaign detailing their clean energy strategy, Shell

executives were reluctant to engage with press questions comparing their investments in clean

energy to continued investments in fossil fuels. On October 8, 2021, Mr. Smith received an

inquiry from a Teen Vogue reporter who asked for comment on an op-ed “criticizing

publications for working with fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups.” The journalist

explained the disconnect between marketing and the fact that “fossil fuel companies’ clean

energy investments account for a small percentage of their total capital expenditure, compared to

investments into finding new pockets of oil and gas.” Mr. Smith responded internally to other

Shell employees, “Not with a ten foot pole.”98

B. Obstructing the Committee’s Investigation

The Committee launched its investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long

climate disinformation and greenwashing campaign in September 2021, requesting documents

from Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell, API, and the Chamber of Commerce.99

3 vids

rev guk

npr

In Private Empire, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Steve Coll investigates how ExxonMobil has used its money and power to wield significant influence in Washington, D.C., particularly during the Bush administration.

Executives at the company maintained close personal connections with members of the Bush administration — but Coll says the "cliched idea that Exxon-Mobil was just an instrument of the Bush administration's foreign policy — a kind of extension of the American government during the Bush years — is just wrong."

Coll has written extensively about Afghanistan and Pakistan and the uses of government power. But in Private Empire, he turns his attention to ExxonMobil, one of the largest private corporations in the United States.

Exxon, which merged with Mobil in 1999, descends from John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co. and has ranked as one of the country's most profitable companies for the past 60 years. Each year ExxonMobil makes about $450 billion in revenue, exceeding the great majority of countries.

Coll says ExxonMobil executives "see themselves — ExxonMobil — as an independent sovereign with their own foreign policy," he says. "Sometimes their interests ally with the United States government, sometimes they find themselves in opposition to the United States — and sometimes they try to stay out of the way."

ExxonMobil And Climate Change

Until 2005, ExxonMobil was run by Lee "Iron Ass" Raymond, a close friend of Vice President Dick Cheney and a skeptic of climate change. During Raymond's tenure, Exxon funded campaigns to challenge the validity of emerging science about climate change — specifically the findings that a global warming trend existed.

Steve Coll was a managing editor at The Washington Post and a staff writer for The New Yorker. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for reporting about the Securities and Exchange Commission and in 2004 for his book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

Courtesy of the author]

"This not only borrowed from some of the tactics that the tobacco industry had used to delay public understanding of the dangers of smoking; in some cases there were even overlaps of individuals and groups that were engaged in this communications campaign," Coll tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "A lot of corporate America opposed the Kyoto Accords. But only a small set of companies did what Exxon did, which was to really go after the science as aggressively as they did."

Coll says the campaign helped manufacture confusion and perpetual controversy about climate change.

"It created an impression in the media and the public that there was a raging, deep controversy among scientists, and there wasn't a controversy, at least after 2002, when the doubts fell away in the face of evidence," he says. "It was the evidence and the modeling and the very science that ExxonMobil was calling into doubt that gradually became more and more alarming and attracted more and more support within the scientific community."

But as the company attacked global warming publicly, Coll says, geologists working within ExxonMobil were examining how a warmer Earth — resulting from global warming — could create new business opportunities for ExxonMobil.

"One of the big deals that ExxonMobil has announced in the past year involves access to the Russian Arctic, where it is partnered with a Russian firm to access many billions of dollars worth of reserves involving big investments ExxonMobil would make north of the Arctic Circle," he says. "Why is that oil accessible? It's because sea ice is melting in the Arctic. Global warming may, in fact, unlock enormous opportunities for oil companies."

no lnx nyt

Adam Hochschild

June 8, 2012

In the great reach for colonies that Europe began hundreds of years ago, at center stage were several curious entities that wielded more power than many governments. The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (commonly known as the East India Company) and its counterpart, the Dutch East India Company, fielded their own warships and armies, coined money and ruled territory eventually taken over by Britain and the Netherlands. Later, the seizure of land by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company also preceded the spread of British pink across the map.

Centuries from now, historians sweltering away on an overheated planet and looking back to our own times will surely see multinational oil companies as similar players. The way they’re reshaping today’s world, however, is not by carving out future colonies, but by searching for the oil and gas we’re so hungry for in ever more risky places: beneath oceans, in Canadian tar sands, in underground rock formations that require “fracking” and in the environmentally fragile Arctic waters newly accessible as the polar ice cap shrinks — thanks, of course, to our addiction to fossil fuels. That addiction is likely to change the very level of the seas the East India Company’s ships sailed in their hunt for cloth and spices, and the floods and droughts ahead may set in motion desperate migrations dwarfing those of colonial times.

Steve Coll’s mammoth portrait of Exxon Mobil, “Private Empire,” abounds in empire-size figures. In the first half of last year alone, the company’s profits were $21.3 billion. When the chief executive Lee Raymond stepped down a few years ago, his retirement package was worth $398 million. If revenue were counted as gross domestic product, the corporation would rank among the top 30 countries. Unsurprisingly, Exxon Mobil runs one of Washington’s biggest lobbying operations, with not only a well-staffed office on K Street (where a Democratic director was smoothly brought in to replace a Republican after the 2008 elections) but some 20 additional former senators, representatives, legislative aides and others under contract.

Yet this book isn’t so much a story of Exxon Mobil’s influence over the American government. Rather, it’s a picture of a corporation so large and powerful — operating in some 200 nations and territories — that it really has its own foreign policy.

Coll quotes a 1999 cable from the United States Embassy in Chad noting that Exxon was ignoring American diplomats there. He then asks: “And why should it be otherwise? Exxon Mobil’s investments in the Chad-Cameroon oil project would amount to $4.2 billion. Annual aid to Chad from the United States was only about $3 million.”

Exxon Mobil’s foreign policy, orchestrated by a political division including National Security Council and State Department alumni, sometimes coincides with that of the United States, and sometimes diverges. For example, the corporation had no enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Yes, Iraq has all that oil, but with most remaining reserves ever harder to get at, oil executives knew that whoever ran Iraq would ultimately depend on the technology and capital of the Exxon Mobils of the world. And yes, it might have been nice to own Iraqi oil wells outright, but long-term stability and security mattered more.

Today, although the company has billions invested in tearing up wetlands and forests to extract oil from Alberta’s tar sands, it doesn’t much care whether an expanded pipeline system that would stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast gets the go-ahead from the Obama administration. If Exxon Mobil can’t send that oil to the United States, it can easily sell it to Japan or China.

Just like the British South Africa Company, which pioneered the use of Hiram Maxim’s machine gun during the Matabele War, Exxon Mobil has its own armies— and, in these days of outsourcing, also hires those of others. In Chad, its 2,500 security men patrolled the countryside in white radio-equipped S.U.V.’s, watching for guerrillas as the company set up an intelligence operation bigger and better than the local C.I.A. station. In the war-racked Niger Delta, it gave boats to the Nigerian Navy, deployed its own vessels at sea to scout for pirates and “recruited, paid, supplied and managed sections of the Nigerian military and police.”On their uniforms, the Nigerian police sported Mobil’s familiar red flying horse. In Aceh, Indonesia, Mobil paid the salaries of Indonesian counterinsurgency forces who tortured and murdered prisoners on company property. Payments kept flowing even after the American government cut off aid to the Indonesian military because of such abuses.

Like other journalists before him, Coll points out that Exxon Mobil’s lobbying has not been confined to keeping oil and gas taxes low and regulations lax.It has also shaped what people think on the biggest issue of our time. For some years, the company claimed that human contributions to global warming were negligible and gave millions of dollars to organizations that churned out studies accordingly. In the last few years, the corporation has subtly, gradually pulled its head out of the sand on this issue, not admitting earlier errors but simply stressing that the world’s economies still demand huge amounts of oil and gas — which is, alas, true.

Exxon Mobil executives care less about Americans’ belief in climate change, Coll suggests, than they do about Americans’ belief in punitive damages from lawsuits. After the next Exxon Valdez spill, or the next Jacksonville spill (in which an Exxon service station leaked 24,000 gallons of gasoline into a Maryland community’s water supply), what a jury decides could subtract billions from the bottom line. Small wonder that after the Valdez, a company representative quietly called a University of Wisconsin professor to offer money if he would write an article for a “respectable academic journal,” arguing against punitive damages. This man spoke up, but we don’t know how many other scholars received and may have acted on the same offer and said nothing.

“Private Empire” is not as original and absorbing as Coll’s excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ghost Wars,” about the C.I.A.’s arrogant bungling in pre-2001 Afghanistan. Oil company executives trained and shielded by public relations staffers are inherently bland compared with the earlier volume’s C.I.A. cowboys and Afghan sheiks. Long a correspondent and editor at The Washington Post and now a staff writer for The New Yorker, Coll is a careful reporter but sometimes doesn’t know when to stop. “Private Empire” could easily afford to shed 150 of its nearly 700 pages. Do we really need to know where all the major Exxon Mobil figures grew up and went to college? Or do we really need half a page listing all the names and amounts involved when over a dozen executives gave to the campaign of an oil-friendly Texas congressman?

Despite these quibbles, the book assuredly does what it sets out to do: show the inner workings of one of the Western world’s most significant concentrations of unelected power. And just how that power is wielded matters enormously because oil companies play such a crucial role in the carbon economy to which we are so fatefully attached.

https://www.eenews.net/articles/exxon-sting-ensnares-think-tanks-with-climate-credentials/

Exxon sting ensnares think tanks with climate credentials

By Corbin Hiar | 07/29/2021

In May 2018, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on the geopolitical implications of oil and gas production in the United States. The four witnesses who testified all had one thing in common: Their institutions each had received money that year from Exxon Mobil Corp.

The event could hardly have gone better for Exxon, the largest U.S. oil and gas company.

The witnesses, including highly credentialed experts from the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, extolled the economic and political benefits of the U.S. drilling boom. The Brookings scholar mentioned climate change in passing; the CSIS expert didn’t bring it up at all.

Now some experts and congressional investigators are wondering why.

The May 2018 hearing before the Republican-led Foreign Affairs Committee — and other recent scholarships from CSIS and Brookings — has come under new scrutiny following the release last month of a secretly recorded video in which Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy touted the company’s connections to the centrist research groups.

“Brookings and CSIS are the two big think tanks that we work with and that we’re actively involved in,” McCoy said in May to an environmental activist posing as corporate headhunter.

Exxon has donated $600,000 to Brookings since 2018 and nearly $2.1 million to CSIS over the same period, according to contributions disclosed by the $240 billion company, some of which were first reported by The New Republic.

The think tanks have acknowledged their support from Exxon but say it has no influence over their climate and energy research. Furthermore, they have no control over how the oil company, or anyone else, uses their research once it’s published.

Yet some experts think their relationship should be more closely examined. Exxon is one of several oil and gas companies that belong to an exclusive club at Brookings that promises top donors access to the think tank’s leadership and scholars, and CSIS solicits similar entrée to its “corporate partners,” documents show.

That’s one reason to look deeper, said Steve Coll, the author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power” and dean of Columbia Journalism School.

“It creates an appearance of a conflict of interest that warrants investigation into the facts of how the money and the research related to one another,” Coll said. “It’s important because it goes to credibility of research that is being brought to public hearings to influence public understanding and policy.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, the chairman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment, is planning to look into Exxon’s ties to think tanks during a broader probe into fossil fuel industry misinformation efforts.

“That’s exactly part of the investigation that our committee is launching,” the California Democrat told E&E News shortly before he invited Exxon’s lobbyist in for a transcribed interview with Oversight staffers (Climatewire, July 26).

“It would be wrong to impugn a think tank like Brookings just on the basis of one sting operation,” Khanna added. “That said, it raises troubling allegations, and we have to get to the bottom of it. And I think that what McCoy would say under oath probably has much more credibility than what McCoy was saying on the phone conversation.”

Exxon’s senior director for federal affairs told the Greenpeace official that the company relies on think tanks to help steer climate policy discussions in Washington.

“You control the debate if you have the paper. So if they produce the paper, you can control the debate,” McCoy said in an interview for what he believed was a job with a Middle East oil and gas investment fund (Climatewire, July 2).

“You can start to say ‘This is how we think this legislation should look. And that bill that you have over there, here’s our paper of why that won’t work,'” he said, according to an unpublished transcript of the interview obtained by E&E News. “It’s extremely effective in terms of pushing away bad legislation.”

Exxon deployed that tactic to help defeat the only major climate legislation that’s ever passed the House, according to Coll’s award-winning book. Proposed by then-Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in the midst of the Great Recession, the bill would’ve capped greenhouse gas emissions and created a trading system for emission credits.

Exxon lobbyists told “fence-sitting congresspeople and senators” that the cap-and-trade legislation would “destroy jobs and growth,” Coll reported.

The paper they wielded was “a Brookings Institution study that showed the proposal might take about 2.5 percent out of American gross domestic product during the next forty years — the equivalent of one year’s economic growth,” the book said. “That was not a daunting price if climate change was accepted as a grave national danger, but among congresspeople whose constituents in 2009 suffered from personal bankruptcies, mortgage defaults, and even homelessness, it was not an easy trade-off to accept.”

While the Brookings study found the Waxman-Markey bill would have virtually no effect on employment outside the fossil fuel industry, “ExxonMobil emphasized those forecasted job losses to members of the Senate from the oil and coal states that would be hardest hit,” Coll wrote.

The landmark climate legislation ultimately died in the Senate after Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority and no Republicans were willing to support it (Climatewire, Nov. 27, 2019).

“It’s not enough for a company to hire a lobbyist in D.C. to attempt to influence public policy,” said Brooke Williams, a Boston University journalism professor who co-authored a 2016 New York Times series that highlighted corporate influence at Brookings, CSIS and other Washington research institutions. “A company needs a think tank.”

‘Seeds of reality’

In the years since the defeat of the cap-and-trade bill, Brookings and CSIS scholars have delivered testimony and research that could redound to Exxon’s benefit.

At the 2018 hearing on the geopolitical implications of U.S. oil and gas production, for instance, Samantha Gross, the director of Brookings’ energy security and climate initiative, focused most of her comments on the advantages of expanded natural gas use.

“Natural gas exports provide clear environmental benefits,” Gross, who Democrats had invited to testify, said in her prepared testimony. “Natural gas has the lowest carbon emissions of any fossil fuel and creates much less local air pollution than coal. When used to generate power, natural gas also complements renewable power sources like wind and solar.”

Later in the hearing, former Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee that hosted the event, asked all four witnesses about whether they supported the “free trade” of U.S. energy.

Sarah Ladislaw, who at the time was the director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at CSIS, said “yes” and then made the case for expanding natural gas infrastructure in the northeastern United States, which many environmentalists fear would lock the region into decades of reliance on the planet-warming fuel.

Gross added: “It’s really also a no-brainer. It’s a no-brainer from a trade and economic perspective. It’s also a no-brainer from an environmental perspective.”

The other witnesses at the hearing were from the Gas Technology Institute and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. In 2018, GTI launched an industry-led collaborative to study methane leaks, which is partially funded by Exxon. The oil company also gave $40,000 to the Baker Institutethat year, its annual report of charitable contributions shows.

The CSIS and Brookings scholars’ comments at that Foreign Affairs panel three years ago mirror remarks that Exxon CEO Darren Woods made to investors on an earnings call in April. He argued exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which some studies have shown can in the short term have a carbon footprint roughly equivalent to coal, will be key to the company and global energy system in the coming decades.

“I think gas is going to continue to be a really important part as societies and economies grow, and as we move into a lower-carbon future,” Woods said. “The LNG opportunities remain an important part of the portfolio, and we continue to work very closely with the governments around progressing discussions on how we continue to build on the portfolio that we have and expand those opportunities.”

The comments that Gross and Ladislaw made at the oil and gas geopolitics hearing “aren’t flat-out wrong,” said Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University research associate studying the history of global warming politics. “They contain seeds of reality. But they have the overall effect of constructing what we call a ‘fossil fuel savior’ framing of the climate crisis.”

In that narrative, Exxon and other fossil fuel companies are cast as “trustworthy reliable innovators who we need to look to for solutions,” he said. “And nice and slowly — nothing too drastic.”

That’s significant because the views of experts from Brookings and CSIS matter to policymakers. Scholars from those prestigious think tanks have testified or produced work that’s been cited in dozens of congressional hearings over the last three years.

Lawmakers have leaned on Brookings’ research on the growth potential for clean energy jobs in the country and heard a CSIS expert warn about the threat sea-level rise poses to U.S. ports and national security.

But other Brookings experts have criticized the Obama administration’s move to force federal agencies to use an internal carbon price in their decisionmaking. And during the 2018 Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing, Ladislaw touted U.S. coal reserves and said if domestic supplies of natural gas stay “in the ground,” then “it doesn’t do anybody any good.”

Ladislaw is now a managing director at RMI, a clean energy-focused think tank formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute. She denied that her testimony was influenced by Exxon’s financial support for CSIS.

“As the body of my work shows, I have dedicated much of my career to the issue of climate change,” she said in a statement from RMI. “Even in this instance, my written testimony, which was submitted for the record to the committee, spoke to the competitive advantage for the U.S. of renewables and advanced technologies, and how the U.S. should not promote oil and gas over carbon-free energy sources.”

Think tank experts have “a disproportionate impact” on climate policy, according to a Senate aide, who asked not to be identified to speak candidly. “Even the freshest Hill staffer knows to look at what Exxon is telling them with a little bit of a jaundiced eye. But in contrast, a more seasoned Hill staffer, and member, has a different view when something is from Brookings.”

The aide said organizations are viewed on a spectrum, with Congress’ Government Accountability Office on one end and Exxon on the other.

“So if GAO is a 10/10 and Exxon is a 1/10, then organizations like Brookings are a 6 or a 7 out of 10, when it comes to having a good reputation,” the Senate staffer said.

‘Donor privileges’ at Brookings

At Brookings,Gross has examined a variety of climate and energy issues.

In January 2020, Gross wrote a paper on local opposition to renewable energy. “There is no perfect way to produce electricity on an industrial scale,” she wrote. “Policymakers must recognize these challenges and face them head-on as the nation transitions to a lower-carbon energy system.”

And that June, Gross penned an essay on why fossil fuels are “so hard to quit.” The piece mainly focused on the technical and political challenges associated with the energy transition.

“Those pushing to end fossil fuel production now are missing the point that fossil fuels will still be needed for some time in certain sectors,” she wrote. “I fear that magical thinking and purity tests are taking hold in parts of the left end of the American political spectrum, while parts of the political right are guilty of outright denialism around the climate problem. In the face of such stark polarization, the focus on practical solutions can get lost — and practicality and ingenuity are the renewable resources humanity needs to meet the climate challenge.”

Meanwhile, Exxon’s lobbyists have been trying to sell lawmakers on the need to keep fossil fuels in the U.S. energy mix.

“You can’t completely change the electric grid from coal and gas into wind, and here’s why,” McCoy said, describing his recent conversations on the Hill. “You can’t run the United States off of wind solar and batteries, you just can’t.”

McCoy added: “We think natural gas would play a key role in anything — and not just as a bridge fuel. We think it’s a low-emission energy source.”

Gross denied that Exxon had steered her energy and climate analyses.

“No organization, corporation, or donor influences the integrity of my research or my commitment to finding practical solutions to the climate crisis,” she said in an email. “My work is my own and I stand behind it.”

Brookings also pushed back strongly on the notion that Exxon had any direct involvement in shaping the work of Gross or its other scholars.

“Brookings categorically denies that its research and policy recommendations are tied to the interests of any individual or corporation,” spokeswoman Andrea Risotto wrote in an email. “The institution and its personnel are governed by robust guidelines on research independence that do not permit any outside parties to undermine or compromise the independence of our research or its recommendations.”

Regarding Exxon in particular, the company “has provided general support to Brookings’s Foreign Policy program, which has as its mission scholarship exploring major challenges to international peace and security, and to the institution as a whole through its participation in our Corporate Council,” she said. “Exxon has made no direct contributions to support specific scholars or specific research projects, and its funding is not directed toward any Brookings activity or research related to energy or climate change.”

Exxon’s yearly six-figure contributions also make up a relatively small share of the think tank’s annual funding.

In 2019, Brookings reported nearly $79.4 million in revenue. That total included gifts exceeding $100,000 from Tom Steyer, who was running for president at the time on a platform that included aggressive action on climate change, and two Rockefeller charities, which have supported climate liability litigation targeting Exxon (Climatewire, May 4).

Yet the company’s financial support for Brookings opened doors at the agenda-setting think tank.

Exxon is one of four oil and gas companies that have donated at least $100,000 to Brookings in each of the last three years, the think tank’s annual reports show. The others are Royal Dutch Shell PLC, France’s TotalEnergies SE and Equinor ASA of Norway.

That level of giving has secured Exxon a place on Brookings’ Corporate Council. The think tank’s website doesn’t explain what the council is, and Risotto didn’t respond to questions about the membership, structure and purposes of the group.

But a 2016 menu of “Corporate Council Donor Privileges” promised companies that give Brookings $100,000 or more would receive “a customized program of benefits designed in collaboration with the Senior Director of Corporate & Foundation Relations.”

Brookings deleted the document from its website after E&E News asked about it.

Other perks include “a private meeting” with the think tank’s president, “opportunities to request briefings with Brookings scholars” and invitations to a series of exclusive Brookings receptions, an archived version of the menu says.

Risotto said the document “was removed because it has not reflected the institution’s current practices for some years.”

CSIS promotes gas, and Exxon

[ pixAbdallah Jum'ah, then CEO of Saudi Aramco has a laugh with Rex Tillerson, then president of Exxon Mobil, left, during a conference on the United States and Saudi Arabia relationship and their interests in energy security, on April 27, 2004, in Washington]

At CSIS, Exxon’s millions have gone mainly to general support, building the think tank’s endowment, and regional initiatives focused on Africa and the Americas, according to the oil major’s last three charitable contribution reports.

CSIS scholars have followed with a series of high-octane commentaries.

In September 2018, Judd Devermont, the director of the CSIS Africa Program, co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs calling on U.S. policymakers to support the construction of new natural gas power plants as part of a broader push for additional energy infrastructure in Nigeria.

“Nigeria will require a sensible mix of energy drawing on all of its potential for large-scale solar, wind farms, hydroelectric dams, and natural gas,” wrote Devermont and Todd Moss, who was at the time a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

“It is tempting to envision the future as a solar panel on every roof,” they said. “But the promise of small-scale energy solutions for Nigerian households does not replace the need for a modern grid system that can deliver reliable, affordable power at scale, supporting businesses, industry, and job creation.”

That year, the Center for Global Development received $800,000 from Exxon’s foundation to work on “women’s economic empowerment,” according to the think tank’s website.

Devermont didn’t respond to a request for comment. But Moss, the article’s lead author, said in an email that the piece aimed “to raise awareness among the US foreign policy community about the impact of energy poverty on Nigeria and how the US might reasonably respond. I never spoke with anyone at the foundation or the company about that article.”

Moss, who now leads the Energy for Growth Hub research group, added: “If you are looking for examples of Exxon’s influence at think tanks, this isn’t it.”

Last August, Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at CSIS, wrote a commentary about the difficulties Guyana’s new government would face if it sought to renegotiate the previous government’s offshore revenue-sharing agreement with Exxon and its partners. The deal was inked only days before Exxon disclosed an increased estimate for the size of its 8-billion-barrel find, which led some politicians to accuse the oil giant of taking advantage of the new South American petrostate (Energywire, March 25, 2020).

“By necessity, frontier countries offer friendly contract terms to attract investment, but things tend to change quickly when companies make large discoveries. When citizens and policymakers become aware of the economic resources at stake, they often call for a reassessment of contracts to better reflect risks and rewards for investors,” said Cahill, who spent more than a decade as an adviser to oil and gas companies before joining CSIS in 2020.

“Governments must balance public expectations and the desire for more revenues on the one hand against concerns over contract sanctity and future investment on the other,” he wrote.

In an email, Cahill described his Guyana commentary as “a balanced piece of analysis” and said his contact with Exxon at CSIS and his previous jobs was “pretty limited,” aside from events and conference.

“The same is true for many other companies,” he added. “I’m an analyst, not an advocate, and I strive to be analytical and unbiased in my writing and other work for CSIS.”

Like Brookings and many other think tanks, CSIS offers major corporate donors access to its fellows and leadership. Exxon is one of more than 150 companies that have contributed to CSIS, according to its corporate donor webpage. CSIS reported roughly $45.5 million in revenue in 2019, its most recent publicly available tax filing shows.

“Corporate partners are frequently invited to CSIS for private and off-the-record conversations about current affairs and how they relate to their business,” the donor page says. “Members are also invited to monthly briefings to hear from CSIS scholars on current affairs and have the opportunity to schedule private briefings with the Center’s experts to dive deeper on areas of interest.”

CSIS didn’t directly respond to questions about the perks it advertises to potential business supporters. But spokesman Andrew Schwartz accused E&E News of “cherry picking pieces of information” and of being similarly conflicted because Exxon is a longtime subscriber.

“You are clearly insinuating that CSIS is a shill for ExxonMobil’s interests and nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote in an email. “Exxon funding is not earmarked for specific scholars, reports, or research. CSIS maintains complete independence over our research, findings, and recommendations.”

‘Shadow groups’ to centrist think tanks

McCoy, the Exxon lobbyist, described the company’s embrace of Brookings and CSIS as part of an evolution in its effort to thwart climate action.

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” he said during Greenpeace UK’s sting. “Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that.”

Now, McCoy said, “the science has gotten better [and] we’ve gotten smarter.”

He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Exxon spokesman Casey Norton said McCoy’s think tank comments “in no way represent the company’s position.” The oil giant similarly has distanced itself from its lobbyist’s remarks on a carbon tax, which he said Exxon only supported as a “talking point” (Energywire, July 6).

Exxon also defended the work of Brookings and CSIS, and said it intends to continue supporting them.

“We value access to the reports and assessments made by world-class researchers and experts who consider and evaluate public policy alternatives on issues of importance to the energy industries,” Norton said in a statement.

But some experts dispute the notion that groups such as CSIS and Brookings can take money from Exxon and not be influenced by the company. Even if the oil company’s contributions are relatively small compared with the think tanks’ annual budgets, they could make up a substantial portion of the salaries of certain scholars.

Furthermore, many well-meaning think tank fellows may not fully understand how their climate work is being shaped and weaponized by the oil industry to thwart the actions needed to address the problem, according to Supran, the Harvard history researcher.

“People who don’t appear to be intentionally peddling climate denial and delay, I essentially would see them as pawns in Exxon’s propaganda campaign,” he said. “They are essentially being used by the fossil fuel industry to perpetuate a narrative that protects the status quo.”

Reporters Nick Sobcyzk and Mike Lee contributed.