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Raymond, Lee ceo 1985-2005

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Raymond

Lee R. Raymond (born August 13, 1938) is an American businessman and thechief executive officer (CEO) and chairman of ExxonMobil from 1999 to 2005. He had previously been the CEO of Exxon since 1993. He joined the company in 1963 and served as president from 1987 and a director beginning in 1984.

Early life and education[

Lee Raymond was born in Watertown, South Dakota on August 13, 1938. He graduated from Watertown High School in 1956. Raymond received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960. Raymond went on to earn his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the same university in 2001. Raymond met his wife, Charlene née Hocevar, while studying at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; she was pursuing and later earned a degree in journalism.

Career[

Raymond began working for Exxon in 1963. Raymond became a director of Exxon in 1984 and in 1987 he became the President of the company. 

In 1993, he became CEO succeeding Lawrence G. Rawl and held this post until 2005. He negotiated the merger with Mobil that became effective on January 1, 2000 and gave birth to the new ExxonMobil company. In 2003, when approaching the age of 65, the mandatory retirement age for executives at ExxonMobil, the board of directors requested him to stay in his position two more years, in order to prepare his succession, after the post-merger reorganisation period. 

On August 14, 2005, Raymond announced that he would retire at the end of 2005 as ExxonMobil's Chairman and CEO, two years later than the usual mandatory retirement age of 65 for the company executives. ExxonMobil president Rex W. Tillerson succeeded Raymond on 1 January 2006. 

On April 14,2006, it was reported that Raymond's retirement package was worth about $400 million, the largest in history for a U.S. public company.[2] However, the majority of that sum consisted of retirement-independent salary, bonuses, stock options, and restricted stock awards from his final year and prior years that, while high, are not unprecedented among major American CEOs. 

Retirement-specific payments in accordance with the standard pension plan provided to all ExxonMobil employees totaled around $100 million, calculated based on his over forty years of service and his salary upon retirement. Raymond was also chair of the National Petroleum Council (NPC), when it was asked to produce a report on the future of oil supply and demand.[3] Raymond was one of the most outspoken executives in the United States against regulation to curtail global warming.[4]

Legacy[

Steve Coll describes Raymond as "notoriously skeptical about climate change and disliked government interference at any level".[5]

Lee Raymond was at the helm of Exxon while it remained one of the last large companies to omit gay employees in its anti-discrimination policy. He was also at the helm during the takeover of Mobil, when the new Exxon-Mobil corporation rescinded Mobil's pre-existing anti-discrimination policy.[6] HR policy was eventually updated in 2015 to include a prohibition on discrimination against gay employees, but from 1999-2014 the board annually rejected a resolution brought by shareholders to compel the company to implement a non-discrimination policy.[7]

His son, John T. Raymond, is active in the oil and gas industry. John partnered with the Jim Flores and Paul Allen-backed Vulcan Capital in the buyout of Plains Resources.[8]

Lee Raymond received the Woodrow Wilson Award from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution for Corporate Citizenship during a dinner held in his honor in Dallas, Texas in early 2003.[citation ^needed]

Awards and Honors[

:{References

  1.  "Lee R. Raymond". ReferenceForBusiness.com. Retrieved August 14, 2015.
  2.  "Kamala Harris grew up idolizing lawyers". ABC News. April 14, 2006.
  3.  David J. Lynch (November 24, 2005). "Can oil production satisfy rising demand?". USA Today.
  4.  Thaddeus Herrick (August 29, 2001). "Exxon CEO Lee Raymond's Stance On Global Warming Causes a Stir". The Wall Street Journal.
  5.  Ian Thompson (July 30, 2012). "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power". The Telegraph. London.
  6.  James B. Stewart (July 1, 2015). "Exxon Lumbers Along to Catch Up With Gay Rights". The New York Times.
  7.  Wright, John. "ExxonMobil shareholders vote down LGBT protections". Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  8.  http://www.petroleumnews.com/pnnew/363756239.html Petroleum News
  9.  "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  10.  "Texas Business Hall of Fame honors Lee Raymond, retired chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp". San Antonio Business Journal.
  11.  "Exxon Mobil Corporation Endows Scholarship Awards to Honor Lee R. Raymond, Retired Exxon Mobil Corporation Chairman & CEO; $2.5 Million Gift Will Endow Scholarship Fund Within the Teagle Foundation". Business Wire.
  12.  "Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award for the Advancement of International Energy Policy & Diplomacy". THE ABDULLAH BIN HAMAD AL-ATTIYAH INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR ENERGY & SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.

External links[

Article: World Energy Magazine - The Future of Energy in Emerging AsiaArticles by Lee Raymond

Other

Business positionsBusiness positionsBusiness positions

Preceded by

position created

CEO of ExxonMobil

November 30, 1999–December 31, 2005

Succeeded by

Rex Tillerson

Preceded by

Lawrence G. Rawl

CEO of Exxon

1993–November 30, 1999

Succeeded by

Continued as head of ExxonMobil

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/2210**2015**/Exxon-Sowed-Doubt-about-Climate-Science-for-Decades-by-Stressing-Uncertainty

as he wrapped up nine years as the federal government's chief scientist for global warming research, Michael MacCracken lashed out at ExxonMobil for opposing the advance of climate science.

His own great-grandfather, he told the Exxon board, had been John D. Rockefeller's legal counsel a century earlier. "What I rather imagine he would say is that you are on the wrong side of history, and you need to find a way to change your position," he wrote.

Addressed to chairman Lee Raymond on the letterhead of the United States Global Change Research Program, his:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{ September 2002 letter was not just forceful, but unusually personal.

No wonder: in the opening days of the oil-friendly Bush-Cheney administration, Exxon's chief lobbyist had written the new head of the White House environmental council demanding that MacCracken be fired for "political and scientific bias."

Exxon was also attacking other officials in the U.S. government and at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), MacCracken wrote, interfering with their work behind the scenes and distorting it in public.

Exxon wanted scientists who disputed the mainstream science on climate change to oversee Washington's work with the IPCC, the authoritative body that defines the scientific consensus on global warming, documents written by an Exxon lobbyist and one of its scientists show. The company persuaded the White House to block the reappointment of the IPCC chairman,[ROBERT ----] a World Bank scientist. Exxon's top climate researcher, Brian Flannery, was pushing the White House for a wholesale revision of federal climate science. The company wanted a new strategy to focus on the uncertainties.

MacCracken had a long history of collaboration with Exxon researchers. He knew that during the 1970s and 1980s, well before the general public understood the risks of global warming, the company's researchers had worked at the cutting edge of climate change science. He had edited and even co-authored some of their reports. So he found it galling that Exxon was now leading a concerted effort to sow confusionabout fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect."To call ExxonMobil's position out of the mainstream is thus a gross understatement," MacCracken wrote. "To be in opposition to the key scientific findings is rather appalling for such an established and scientific organization."

Exxon had turned a colleague into its enemy.

It was a vivid example of Exxon's undermining of mainstream science and embrace of denial and misinformation, which became most pronounced after President George W. Bush took office. The campaign climaxed when Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.Taking the U.S. out of the international climate change treaty was Exxon's key goal, and the reason for its persistent emphasis on the uncertainty of climate science.

This in-depth series by InsideClimate News has explored Exxon's early engagement with climate research more than 35 years ago – and its subsequent use of scientific uncertainty as a shield against forceful action on global warming. The series is based on Exxon documents, interviews, and other evidence from an eight-month investigation.

"What happened was an incredible disconnect in people trained in physical science and engineering," recalled Martin Hoffert, a New York University professor who collaborated with Exxon's team as its early computer modeling confirmed the emerging scientific consensus on global warming. "It's an untold story of how we got to the point where climate change has become a threat to the world."

The Uncertainty Agenda

As the Bush-Cheney administration arrived in the White House in 2001, ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) now had partners for a climate uncertainty strategy.

Just weeks after Bush was sworn in, Exxon's top lobbyist Randy Randol sent the White House a memo complaining that "Clinton/Gore carry-overs with aggressive agendas" were still playing a role at the IPCC as it prepared its next assessment of the climate science consensus.

MacCracken and three colleagues should be replaced, or at least kept out of "any decisional activities," he wrote. Meanwhile, U.S. input to the IPCC should be delayed.

Further, two scientists highly critical of the prevailing consensus should be enlisted: John Christy of the University of Alabama should take the science lead and Richard Lindzen of MIT should review U.S. submissions to the IPCC.

Exxon had been circulating a proposal to fundamentally overhaul MacCracken's global change research program, by emphasizing the uncertainties of climate science.

The timing was not coincidental because the administration, as required by law, was about to lay out a new federal climate research strategy. Exxon and its allies wanted the work done during the Clinton-Gore years to be marginalized.

In March 2002, Flannery, Exxon's science strategy and programs manager, contacted John H. Marburger, the president's incoming assistant for science and technology, to pitch the company's favored approach of emphasizing the uncertainty. Earlier discussions, he asserted, "have not sought to place the uncertainty in the context of why it is important to public policy."

Exxon's position paper, attached to his letter, took a dig at the work of the IPCC.

"A major frustration to many is the all-too-apparent bias of IPCC to downplay the significance of scientific uncertainty and gaps," the memo said.

A Seat at the Table

Exxon had not always been so at odds with the prevailing science.

Since the late 1970s, Exxon scientists had been telling top executives that the most likely cause of climate change was carbon pollution from the combustion of fossil fuels, and that it was important to get a grip on the problem quickly. Exxon Research & Engineering had launched innovative ocean research from aboard the company's biggest supertanker, the Esso Atlantic.ER&E's modeling experts, by the early 1980s, had confirmed the consensus among outside scientists about the climate's sensitivity to carbon dioxide.

"The facts are that we identified the potential risks of climate change and have taken the issue very seriously," said Ken Cohen, Exxon's vice president of public and government affairs, in a press release on October 21 addressing the ICN reports. "We embarked on decades of research in collaboration with many parties."

Exxon has declined to answer specific questions from InsideClimate News.

[grfx dialogue]

A 1980 memo proposed an ambitious public-relations plan aimed at "achieving national recognition of our CO2 Greenhouse research program."

"It is significant to Exxon since future public decisions aimed at controlling the build-up of atmospheric CO2 could impose limits on fossil fuel combustion," said the memo. "It is significant to all humanity since, although the CO2 Greenhouse Effect is not today widely perceived as a threat, the popular media are giving increased attention to doom-saying theories about dramatic climate changes and melting polar icecaps."

Most of all, Exxon wanted a seat at the policy-making table, and the credibility of its research had earned that. In 1979, David Slade, manager of carbon dioxide research at the Energy Department, called it "a model for research contributions from the corporate sector."

Sen. Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat, invited Henry Shaw, an early Exxon scientist, to join the policy deliberations. He was the only industry representative invited to an October 1980 conference of the National Commission on Air Quality, newly set up by Congress, to discuss "whether potential consequences of increased carbon dioxide levels warrant development of policies to mitigate adverse effects."

Shaw's bosses agreed that he should attend, "both to be informed as to what actions or proposals that result and to bring objective thinking and information to the meeting," Harold Weinberg, Shaw's boss in Exxon Research and Engineering, wrote in a memo. But first, he said, Shaw needed to be briefed by public affairs executives "on possible hidden agenda and individual biases of which we may not already be aware."

When Shaw gave feedback to the commission in December, he noted the uncertainties about carbon dioxide and climate change.At the same time, he wrote that it was "important" to place CO2 on the nation's public policy agenda,as the commission was recommending, and supported the panel's suggestion that it was "timely to consider ways of reducing CO2 emissions now."

He also backed a recommendation that the U.S. "seek to develop discussions on national and international policies."

In late spring of 1981, Flannery was one of the few industry representatives at a large gathering of accomplished scientists at Harper's Ferry, W. Va., for a Department of Energy "Workshop on First Detection of Carbon Dioxide Effects." He sat on a panel with NASA's James Hansen, who was about to publish a landmark study in Science magazine warning of significant warming even if controls were placed on carbon emissions.

The workshop's proceedings would declare that "scientists are agreed" that carbon dioxide was building up in the atmosphere, that the effects "are well known" and "will bring about an increase in the mean global temperature," and that it is "commonly accepted" that warming "will affect the biosphere through a change in climate."

Working with Hoffert, Flannery wrote a highly technical 50-page chapter to a 1985 Energy Department report. Their modeling projected up to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the 21st century unless emissions of greenhouse gases were curtailed.[grfx]

the influential government report said the models provided a "firm basis" for this kind of projection, and that "we are already committed to some of this warming as a result of emissions over the last several decades."

The Harper's Ferry conference was chaired by MacCracken; he also edited the warming report. He recalled recently that "the underlying push was for a level of understanding that was convincing enough to let policymakers become aware of what the issue was that society faced."

As Hoffert put it in a recent interview, in those days at Exxon "there were no divisions, no agendas. We were coming together as scientists to address issues of vital importance to the world."

Fork in the Road

In 1988, James Hansen told Congress that there was now enough warming to declare that the greenhouse effect had arrived. Also that year, the United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It was a moment that Exxon's climate experts had been forecasting for a decade: that as warming became unmistakable, governments would move to control it.

Looking backward, one Exxon document from the early 1990s reflects a trail of research into global warming stretching back "long before the issue achieved its current prominence."

An internal compendium of the company's environmental record, on file in the official ExxonMobil historical archives at the University of Texas-Austin, acknowledged the uncertainties that have always faced climate researchers, but it didn't downplay the risks.

"Fossil fuel use dominates as the source of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide," said one section of the encyclopedic review. "Current scientific understanding demonstrates the potential for climate change to produce serious impacts."

"For Exxon and the petroleum industry, potential enhancement of the greenhouse effect and the possibility of adverse climate are of particular and fundamental concern," it said.

Drilling for Uncertainty

The IPCC published its first report in 1990. Despite the scientific gaps, the panel warned that unrestrained emissions from burning fossil fuels would surely warm the planet in the century ahead. The conclusion, the IPCC said after intense deliberations, was "certain." It prescribed deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to stave off a crisis in the coming decades.

At this crucial juncture, Exxon pivoted toward uncertainty and away from the global scientific consensus.

At the IPCC's final session to draft its summary for policymakers, Exxon's Flannery was in the room as an observer. He took the microphone to challenge both the certainty and the remedy. None of the other scientists agreed with Flannery, and the IPCC brushed off Exxon's advice to water down the report, according to Jeremy Leggett's eyewitness account in his book, The Carbon War.

At a conference in June 1991, MacCracken joined a panel chaired by Flannery to work together on a climate change project involving geo-engineering.

The contact, according to MacCracken, led to an unexpected solicitation from the oil lobby in Washington. Will Ollison, a science adviser at the American Petroleum Institute, in a fax marked urgent, asked MacCracken, then at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to write a paper highlighting the scientific uncertainties surrounding global warming.

The API, where Exxon held enormous sway, wanted him to write up the complex nuances in plain English – with an emphasis on the unknown, not the known.

Ollison said the IPCC's 1990 report "may not have adequately addressed alternative views."

"A review of these alternative projections would be useful in illustrating the uncertainties inherent in the 'consensus' views expressed in the IPCC report," Ollison wrote.

MacCracken rejected the task as "fruitless."

"I would caution you about too readily accepting whatever the naysayers put forth as a means of achieving balance," MacCracken wrote back.

Flannery, for his part, continued to emphasize uncertainty. And so did Exxon's new chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, who spoke of it repeatedly in public.

"Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate," Raymond claimed in a speech delivered in 1996 to the Economic Club of Detroit.

"Many people, politicians and the public alike, believe that global warming is a rock-solid certainty," he said the next year in a speech in Beijing."But it's not."

Addressing the World Petroleum Congress, which was meeting just before the conclusion of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, Raymond even disputed that the planet was warming at all. "The earth is cooler today than it was 20 years ago," he said.

That was false. Authoritative climate agencies declared 1997 the warmest year ever measured. Decade by decade, the warming has continued, in line with the climate models.

But Raymond, turning his back on Exxon researchers and their state-of-the-art work, mocked those climate models.

"1990's models were predicting temperature increases of two to five degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Last year's models say one to three degrees. Where to next year?"

"It is highly unlikely," he said, "that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

The Doubt Industry

Exxon and its allies had been working hard to spread this dilatory message.

First, they set up the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying partnership of leading oil and automobile companies dedicated to defeating controls on carbon pollution.

"As major corporations with a high level of internal scientific and technical expertise, they were aware of and in a position to understand the available scientific data," recounts an essay on corporate responsibility for climate change published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change.

[grfx]

"From 1989 to 2002, the GCC led an aggressive lobbying and advertising campaign aimed at achieving these goals by sowing doubt about the integrity of the IPCC and the scientific evidence that heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels drive global warming," says the article, by Harvard climate science historian Naomi Oreskes and two co-authors.

Then, in 1998 Exxon also helped create the Global Climate Science Team, an effort involving Randy Randol, the company's top lobbyist, and Joe Walker, a public relations representative for API.

Their memo, leaked to The New York Times, asserted that it is "not known for sure whether (a) climate change actually is occurring, or (b) if it is, whether humans really have any influence on it." Opponents of the Kyoto treaty, it complained, "have done little to build a case against precipitous action on climate change based on the scientific uncertainty."

The memo declared: "Victory will be achieved when average citizens 'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science," and when "recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom.'"

Exxon wholeheartedly embraced that theme. For example, an advertisement called "Unsettled Science" that ran in major papers in the spring of 2000, prompted one scientist to complain that it had distorted his work by suggesting it supported the notion that global warming was just a natural cycle. "It's a shame," Lloyd Keigwin later told the Wall Street Journal. "The implication is that these data show that we don't need to worry about global warming."

Another ad, one of a series placed in The New York Times, cast aspersions on scientists who "believe they can predict changes in climate decades from now."

Then, in the heat of the 2000 presidential race between climate champion Al Gore and erstwhile oilman George W. Bush, Exxon placed an ad in the Washington Post accusing MacCracken's office of putting the "political cart before a scientific horse."

Blowing the Whistle

The collaboration between Exxon, its surrogates, and the Bush administration to emphasize uncertainty and stave off action came to light in 2005. A whistleblower named Rick Piltz disclosed that Philip Cooney, an oil lobbyist who had become chief of staff at the White House environmental council, had been heavily editing the work of government researchers. Cooney resigned, and was hired by Exxon.

But the clashes continued between the scientific establishment and Exxon's purveyors of uncertainty.

The Royal Society of the United Kingdom, for centuries a renowned arbiter of science, harshly criticized Exxon in 2006 for publishing "very misleading" statements about the IPCC's Third Assessment Report. The IPCC found that most of the observed warming of the planet in the late 20th century was probably caused by humans.[CEI ebell ctr-slap?]

The Society's communications manager Bob Wardreminded Exxon pointedly that one of its own scientists had contributed to the IPCC chapter in question.

The Royal Society said it had no problem with Exxon funding scientific research, but "we do have concerns about ExxonMobil's funding of lobby groups that seek to misrepresent the scientific evidence relating to climate change."

Ward said Exxon was funding at least 39 organizations "featuring information on their websites that misrepresented the science on climate change, by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge."

appendix b]

exxon's uncertainty campaign was detailed in three exhaustive reports published in 2007 by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project.

At a Congressional hearing in 2007, Harvard scientist James McCarthy, who was a member of the UCS board and the newly elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, declared: "The Bush administration and a network of Exxon-funded, ExxonMobil funded organizations have sought to distort, manipulate and suppress climate science so as to confuse the American public about the urgency of the global warming problem, and thus, forestall a strong policy response."

==

12/1 Donald Trump is considering Lee Raymond and ExxonMobil's Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state- CNBC, citing NBC

==

srcwtch

AEI Casting Doubt on Global Warming

In February 2007, The Guardian (UK) reported that AEI was offering scientists and economists $10,000 each, "to undermine a major climate change report" from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). AEI asked for "articles that emphasise the shortcomings" of the IPCC report, which "is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science." AEI visiting scholar Kenneth Green made the $10,000 offer "to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere," in a letter describing the IPCC as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent."[19]

The Guardian reported further that AEI "has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil, and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees," added The Guardian.[19]

Since the time of that report, AEI has continued to receive money from Exxon Mobil — a total of at least $1,520,000.[20]

AEI and the head of its energy studies department, Benjamin Zycher, have faced criticism for distorting scientific findings on global warming from Jeffrey Sachs, a leading environmental studies scholar, Columbia University professor, economist, and UN advisor. Zycher had once criticized Sachs for misconstruing the IPCC conclusions on global warming; however, Sachs responded, "It is Zycher who distorts, misrepresents, or simply ignores the IPCC conclusions."[21]

Sachs went on to write:

"It is time for Zycher and, indeed, the American Enterprise Institute, to come clean. The AEI, despite its roster of distinguished academics, has failed to be constructive in the climate debate. It's time that the AEI puts forward a strategy to achieve the globally agreed objective of avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."[21]

Support for "Regime Change" in Iraq

busted kert d grnpeace:

Another thing the ICN stories had me reflecting on wasLee Raymond's intransigence and bombast, something I personally witnessed and cataloged in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  I always considered him a true science denier, head in the sand, stubborn to the end, believing what he said and maybe just misled or selectively grabbing misinformation to validate his own denial.  To know now that he must have been briefed by Exxon scientists, his own staff, means he chose the path of willful ignorance and makes him even more the villain.  I can't wait to see him deposed.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/25012016/years-after-exxon-secrets-kert-davies-applauds-new-spotlight-old-nemesis

==

desmog

DeSmog UKepic history post portrays Lee Raymond, the Texan captain who steered the Exxon ship against the rising tide of climate science.

In 1997, BP’s British boss, John Brown, stunned the world by endorsing the science of climate change and calling for government regulation to reduce carbon emissions. Exxon’s Lee Raymond (pictured), however, was an entirely different beast: brash, bullish and brutal.

This real life J.R. Ewing came from working class stock all the way from the Great Plains and fought his way to the top of the oil giant Exxon.

Raymond lived in a 8,642-square-foot, five-bedroom brick-façade home in Dallas, had around-the-clock access to the Exxon fleet of nine corporate planes for personal and work trips, and enjoyed the protection of an armed bodyguard and chauffeur who was a former New York police officer.

‘Oil and Gas Purist’

According to Steve Coll, the author of the award-winning *Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power*, Raymond ruled the company with a “drill sergeant-inspired ethos” and he “considered himself unabashedly to be a ‘free-market capitalist’ and resisted government intervention and regulation instinctively.”

Raymond was also an “oil and gas purist” and, in taking over the company, ended the brief flirtation with environmentalism that had taken place under the former chairman Clifton Garvin, who had installed solar panels to heat his home's swimming pool.

“It seemed the worst thing an Exxon manager could be in Raymond’s eyes was dishonest, but the second-worst thing was to be stupid,” according to one senior colleague. “‘Stupid shits’ was one of the direct phrases by which he conveyed his judgements.”

Raymond simply believed that “the scientists on the other side are wrong”. This formed the core of his speech before theFifteenth World Petroleum Congress hosted in Beijing by the People's Republic of China in October 1997. This took place just six months after BP’s Browne declared his conversion to the climate cause.

Fossil Fuel Development

The captain steering the Exxon ship, however, refused to see danger ahead and defiantly told the international delegates that climate change was not, in fact, taking place.

He used the speech to express his sincere concerns about the poorest in society and concerns that developing countries would be denied the opportunity to experience wealth and growth if they were not allowed to use fossil fuels unabatedly.

“Energy use and economic growth are inextricably linked,” he told the people of China. “The countries with the highest economic growth and the highest standards of living are also those with the highest energy use per capita. Today, most of that energy, both in Asia and the world as a whole comes from fossil fuels – about 85 percent.

“I know there are some people who argue that we should drastically curtail our use of fossil fuels for environmental reasons … my belief is that such proposals are neither prudent or practical … their use is essential both for economic growth and for the elimination of poverty, which is itself a worse polluter.”

Climate Science

Much of the speech was dedicated to attacking the climate science as often holding up straw men such as apparent claims of certainty about the impacts of and threat from global warming.

Raymond relied on many of the attacks first set out by the climate deniers du jour, including FredSinger, Patrick Michaelsand Richard Lindzen, along with other coal and oil-funded scientists. “Many people, politicians and public alike, believe that global warming is a rock-solid certainty, but it’s not,” he said.

He argued that changes in the climate were merely natural variability, that human-produced carbon makes only a small contribution to the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and thatclimate models are “notoriously inaccurate”.

“The case for so called global warming is far from airtight,” he argued. “You might think that all this uncertainty would give political leaders pause. Unfortunately, it hasn't.”

Free Market Approach

The American business leader called on China to follow “the free market approach”. He said climate mitigation would inevitably involve taxation and regulation, and “all of us would suffer from these proposals … I hope the governments of this region will work with us to resist policies that could strangle economic growth”.

The speech drew to a close with a quote from the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu: “Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish – do not overdo it.”

The Beijing speech was perfectly timed to undermine the Clinton administration and its negotiating position at Kyoto. It also provided the hymn sheet for Exxon-funded sceptics to sing from during the next 20 years.

Next up, theDeSmog UKepic history series recalls the moment when leaders from around the globe agreed to limit emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

@brendanmontague

history: [http://www.desmog.uk/2015/04/16/how-exxonmobil-reacted-when-environmentalists-crashed-its-first-annual-meeting-18-years-ago](===

history:%20http://www.desmog.uk/2015/04/16/how-exxonmobil-reacted-when-environmentalists-crashed-its-first-annual-meeting-18-years-ago)

The Guardian reported that after the IPCC released its February 2007 report, the American Enterprise Institute offered British, American and other scientists $10,000, plus travel expenses to publish articles critical of the assessment. The institute, which had received more than $US 1.6 million from Exxon and whose vice-chairman of trustees was former head of Exxon Lee Raymond,sent letters that The Guardian said "attack theUN's panel as 'resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work' and ask for essays that 'thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs'." More than 20 AEI employees worked as consultants to theGeorge W. Bush administration.[45] Despite her initial conviction that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered," Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer said that when she learned of the AEI's offer, "I realized there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."[10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

For a decade, now, I’ve been a reporter on climate science. And one of my earliest stories was a Mother Jones cover, exposing ExxonMobil’s funding of think tanks that support climate denialism. The piece was actually nominated for a National Magazine Award. It got around.

With this article and others, I contributed a great deal to a narrative that others, notably Greenpeace and this blog, were also forging: Climate science was under attack by corporate interests; leading the charge was ExxonMobil.

As it turns out, if anything that story now appears more accurate than we knew at the time. But there’s a crucial caveat to it—it may not be so accurate any longer, due to changes at the top of the company.

How do we know this? Simple: We read New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Steve Coll’s new book *Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power*. I just reviewed this lengthy work in the journal Democracy. You can read the full review here, but I want to summarize the key salient points regarding climate change (the book covers much more than that) below.

Throughout the First Half of the 2000s, ExxonMobil Was Perhaps Even Worse than We Knew.

Coll paints an ExxonMobil run by a domineering climate denier, CEO Lee Raymond, who was in tight with Dick Cheney and quite sure he was right about the issue. Moreover, Coll reports,Raymond felt extremely burned by environmentalists over the ExxonValdez, and that carried over into his approach to the climate issue. As I write in my review:

In 1997, as the Kyoto Protocol loomed, Raymond spent “thirty-three paragraphs of [a] seventy-eight-paragraph speech” in Beijing denying global warming. Trained as a chemist, Raymond was that paradoxical but statistically common phenomenon: a highly intelligent conservative whose intellectual gifts seemed to make him even more dogged and inflexible than conservatives who are less knowledgeable or educated. At a 2000 shareholder meeting, Raymond even cited an oft-debunked “petition,” allegedly signed by 17,000 scientists skeptical of global warming, to back up his case. Just one tiny problem: The petition’s signatures “included those of pop musicians such as the Spice Girls and James Brown,” notes Coll wryly.

And Raymond enforced his denialist view throughout the corporation. “They had come to the conclusion that the whole debate around global warming was kind of ahoax,” says one of Coll’s inside sources. “Nobody inside Exxon dared question that.”

Coll goes on to depict ExxonMobil’s funding of a climate denial echo chamber as one of its most problematic actions.Of the oil majors, no company was so steadfast on this as ExxonMobil, and from Coll, we learn that much of this must be traced to Raymond.

But Rex Tillerson Isn’t Lee Raymond.But here’s the thing. Coll suggests that within ExxonMobil, not everybody liked being known as such an environmental bad guy. Eventually, and for many reasons, the company's board wanted a change of leadership. And Raymond’s successor Rex Tillerson, in Coll’s account, comes off as a very different dude. As I write:

Enter Rex Tillerson, a man who, in comparison to Raymond, comes across as a milquetoast. About the most interesting thing that Coll has to tell us about him (and it doesn’t at all seem like Coll’s fault) is that he was an Eagle Scout, and fond of drawing not-so-deep lessons from the scouting view of the world. Tillerson had distinguished himself making overseas deals for the company. Like Raymond, he was born a Christian in the heartland; his youthful reading of Atlas Shruggedfurther suggests an ideology similar to Raymond’s. Yet Tillerson lacked Raymond’s fire and domineering nature—and his flair.

But that’s exactly what ExxonMobil needed; it was time for a change. “We never set out for the company to be public enemy number one,” Tillerson tells Coll.

Tillerson, Coll reports, came in in 2006 and ordered a review of the company’s entire position on climate change, including its funding of controversial think tanks. There was never a stark shift of position, apparently because nobody wanted to directly repudiate Raymond. But there were changes nonetheless, Coll reports, writing about a meeting in 2006 with environmental groups:

The nonprofit leaders asked Cohen [head of ExxonMobil’s public affairs] about the funding he had provided to groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and The Heartland Institute that had so stridently attacked the validity of mainstream climate science. Cohen told them that as part of ExxonMobil’s review of its options on climate policy, the corporation had decided to pull funding from the most controversial groups. The disclosure was the beginning of a quiet campaign to clarify that ExxonMobil had altered some of its public policy funding—without quite admitting that what it had done earlier was wrong or misguided. (p. 345-346)

And the slow change progressed from there. A little known fact is that in 2009, Tillerson actually took a public stand in favor of a carbon tax—the same view espoused by James Hansen.

That’s not to say ExxonMobil is not a conservative company, politically. That’s not to say it doesn’t still fund some conservative organizations that may have troubling climate related positions. However, according to Coll, it really has changed substantially under Tillerson.

Do you buy into Coll’s account? If so, then there’s a lesson for those of us who care about combating climate denial. Namely, it seems very important to publicly criticize, as much as possible, corporations that attack science--so that they become very widely known for this behavior. You may not see them change right away, but if there’s enough of an outcry, you can bet that it is being noticed from within--and upsetting some very important, powerful, and pragmatic businessmen.

Tags:

Lee Raymond

steve coll

private empire

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sw stub:

Contents [hide]

Biographical Information

"Mr. Raymond was Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of ExxonMobil from 1999 until he retired in December 2005. ExxonMobil's principal business is energy, involving exploration for and production of crude oil and natural gas, manufacture of petroleum and petrochemical products, and transportation and sale of crude oil, natural gas, petroleum and petrochemical products. He had been Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Exxon Corporation from 1993 until its merger with Mobil Oil Corporation in 1999, having begun his career in 1963 with Exxon. He was a director of Exxon Mobil Corporation (1984-2005).

"Mr. Raymond graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1960 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Chemical Engineering in 1963. He is a director of the Business Council for International Understanding, a Trustee of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, a Trustee of the Mayo Clinic, a member of the Innovations in Medicine Leadership Council of UT Southwestern Medical Center, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member and past Chairman of the National Petroleum Council. Mr. Raymond serves on an advisory panel to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co."[1]

Affiliations

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

References

  1. ↑ JP Morgan Board, organizational web page, accessed September 24, 2012.

Categories: 

===

coll:

raymond blames disaster on refusal/delay in dispersnats  disputed p 10 p 12 not enough or gear to deliver

claims spent 2.1 billion$ in 1989

john browne boho p 16

raymond by the book evokes fear; exxon split up standard oil 1911 (merger later rejoined 2?)

very effective lobby; post cold war, corps gain relative power v state p 20 longer time horizon than pols

big on risk analysis, and had metric so drove safety problems towards zero , hired ex Secret  serv for exec protection p 30

after valdezpop rank drop from 6 to 100; accting operators got therapy b/c of abuse 33 from customers

put up 300M$ to pay off claims, w/o asking legal release paid off nearly all proved claims by 1994 but refused on punitive...

Ch 3 GW:

LR knew cheney 20 yrs, hunt; halli and exxon did deals, AEI retreats lynne

exxon had good access to clinton admin, tho gore pres made nervous; 

secret task forcedid not meet long and results came out fast, which suggests pre-cooked, but output could rapidly be put into action thru exec

order, policy and law 69, one goal open ANWR

LR says exxon not US co thus no obligation to act patriotically  71

Wash DC hq liason to WH, but also embassies and API 72 2001  $6mil lobby, but almost all inhouse? 73

pal of dingell, hillary ok, durbin and schumer not ok; clifton garvin ceo JC era flirted w. solar, seen as mistake now by co 76

144 glaciers mon 1900 to 80, 2 grew) 77 1962 Humble (ur) ad said each day enough power to melt 7 mill tons glacier 77

NAS got exxon attn; hired flannery, got LNC lab guy, published by IPCC 79 LR 1st ceo phd, so thot he could read the sci (plus experts saying

geology is long time and we have only short data?, thus extrap tricky) 79 LR shut down green efforts 80

Rio B1 agreed, not binding but pledge to reduce to 1990 by 2000; 3 yrs later ipcc says likely human, LR re-elected 1995 assess; LR urged dev

countries to oppose US on kyoto incl chinese commie; agw becomes taboo at exxon 85

exxon and api join GCC as barrier; GrP says really effective at blocking legis , ~ and in UK went after BP 85;got API action plan;had spent

millions on disinfo since 60's (who had?) current budget 7.9$M on PR to beat kyoto 85: sow doubt, media coverage balanced; find hacks.

exxon public affairs cheif Kenneth P Cohen worked  w/ Walt Buchholz (PR exxon chem), heartland, CEI (sued BC admin on climate review, claimed sci  

unreliable) p 86 Annapolis, backed bogus books

perhaps learning from tobacco blowback, exxon and api did not create or promulgate ("malic distort inhouse) what they knew to be lies, more  

nuanced doubt? 87

LR used oregon pet

...

LR pal of greenspan, echoes talking pts 201

browne rebrand bp1990's p 224 had a sm solar co drivable from DC for PR foto

LR on bd AEI lynn cheney

don nelsonpal hagel, led fight ~ kyoto 301; LR pal of nelson, LR wanted to be outside chairman of AEI, but nelson warned him that AEI might not

play along with exxon POV both went to WH hubbard mtg, VP energy aid hutto set up exxon brienfings for staffers and even Nat Sec Council 305

(Cohenhad done studies how to give info to elites 305 "informed influentials

all scen said biz as usual (solar only up tp 2%, but regulation cd be black swan 310; predicted co2 up 30% 2005 -30 311

LR plays down anti kytoto $, just gotta speak up so bad errors not made .

...

exxon thinks of dumping gas station b/c they don't make that much $ but offer only way to boycott 316 get low profile like dupont

last yr LR record profit 36.1 billion; mlt cap LR years 1993 to 2005 80 to 360b$ 318

katrina 1800 kia and 11b$

ted stevens AL resisted Boxer call to make ceo's raise hands a la tobacco 320

LR lied to Lautenberg when he asked if exxon in secret task force(he had met f2f to discuss mission w/ DC and spoke w/ spencer abraham during  320-1

after 1999 merger in top 3 but 1; LR retires worth 400m$ 327

omfg:

November 02, 2006Back Issues

Bush Names Exxon Chief to Chart America’s Energy Future

Even for an administration dedicated to putting industry lobbyists in charge of the very agencies they have devoted their careers to undermining (coal and oil lobbyist J. Stephen Griles as Deputy Secretary of the Interior is one of dozens of examples), President Bush has recently outdone himself. He has named Lee Raymond, the retired chief of ExxonMobil, to head a key study to help America chart a cleaner course for our energy needs. Raymond currently chairs the National Petroleum Council (NPC), one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman says the study will address the supply and demand of oil as well as “…assess the potential contribution of conservation, efficiency, alternative energy sources, and technology advances” and determine “the potential long term impact of alternative energies that are plentiful, affordable, reliable and transportable.”

Energy Department Under Secretary David Garman, added that the NPC is “well qualified to provide a balanced and informed perspective on strategies and action affecting the energy future for both the U.S. and for every country on earth.”

Environmentalists are outraged about the appointment of Lee Raymond. During his long tenure at ExxonMobil, the company spent $19 million on front groups designed to discredit the science on global warming. It also resisted funding clean energy alternatives and lobbied aggressively to drill in the Arctic Refuge.

In a Wall Street Journal article on June 14, 2005, Mr. Raymond said, “it’s yet to be shown how much of this [global warming] is really related to the activities of man.”

ExxonMobil is considered a rogue company even among its peers. It vocally opposes U.S. energy independence and presses for deeper reliance on oil producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, where the company has sunk heavy investments. Critics argue that Mr. Raymond’s legacy is todeny that oil dependence is a problem.

ExxonMobil is the only major oil giant callingrenewable energy an “uneconomical” investment. Known for abruptly shutting off the microphone at shareholder’s meetings when opposition is voiced, Mr. Raymond has the reputation of an impatient, authoritarian leader who shows no qualms about publicly belittling those who disagree with him.

The Exxpose Exxon coalition, a collaborative effort of many of the nation’s largest environmental and public advocacy organizations representing millions of Americans, called on Secretary Bodman “to remove the Global Oil and Gas Study from the purview of Raymond and the NPC. “

“This issue is too vital to be handed over to a company and an industry that have demonstrated again and again that they will maximize profits at the expense of our national security, the environment, and U.S. consumers,” they argued. The coalition recommended the study be given to an independent body such as the National Academy of Sciences.

“Putting Lee Raymond in charge of solving U.S. energy problems is like putting Jack Abramoff in charge of solving corruption,” said Shawnee Hoover, campaign director for the Exxpose Exxon Coalition.

Take Action - Tell Secretary Bodman Not to Let Exxon Chart America's Energy Future.

References:

Exxpose Exxon Backgrounder, http://www.ExxposeExxon.com 

Undersecretary Garman, Presentation with notes, 6/21/06,http://www.npc.org

Remarks for Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman, U.S. Department of Energy, 6/21/06. http://www.energy.gov/print/3764.htm

Permanent link to this article

http://web.archive.org/web/20080404151259/http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/mt_archives/000323.php

frontline:?

In some ways, it’s kind of a no-brainer that Exxon would go after climate science on a very superficial level. It’s sort of in their self-interest to keep government away from fossil fuels, right? Is that how it began?

Well, there were a lot of corporations, including oil companies, that objected to the Kyoto accords in 1997. But most of them lobbied against the treaty on economic and fairness grounds that would cost the economy of the United States too much for the benefits promised, and also that it wasn’t fair that developing societies would be left out of the bargain.

But Exxon did something that I think was fairly radical, which was that they chose to go after the science. And I think that was more the results of the personal conviction of the chief executive, Lee Raymond, than it really was an expression of their rational business needs.

After all, ExxonMobil was an oil and gas company. Gas was not problematic under climate change regulation. Oil was not as problematic as coal. They were an enormous corporation with rich profits. They could have survived Kyoto. They could have survived a price cap on carbon. They could survive on that. But they chose not only to oppose the treaty, but to attack the science.

So they could have in a sense written a check for what Kyoto called for, and instead not only went after the treaty but every scientific basis or even thinking about climate change as a threat to the world.

Lee Raymond — who had a doctoral degree in chemical engineering and who had a personal conviction that he understood the science well enough to reach a judgment about it — decided that the science was wrong.

He believed that it was a hoax, in effect, that the earth was not warming at all. … So he not only went after the treaty bargain, but funded, often in the early years surreptitiously, campaigns to attack the science that were carried out by nonscientific groups, often by free-market ideologues, … this out of an organization, ExxonMobil, that is in fact quite dependent on scientists and science. In time, perhaps we will understand what the internal reaction among scientists within ExxonMobil was to this campaigning, because there’s some evidence thatwithin ExxonMobil, there was studygoing on about how global warming could affect oil discovery, for example.

So on the one hand, the chief executive was saying there is no global warming, and on the other hand, scientific departments of ExxonMobil were looking into how, if there was global warming, ExxonMobil could profit from it. …

What sort of tools were at the disposal of Exxon to really go after the science? After all, isn’t science science?

Well, money to fund campaigns raising doubts. I mean, science is science, but science is based on doubts. Science is based on arguments. Science is based on honest dissent. There is hardly a branch of science where you can’t identify a single scientist who doesn’t have an opposing view. In fact, scientists are trained to question and doubt. [perversion)

In the case of climate science in the late 1990s, the consensus was still forming around how confident scientists could be about the cause, the contribution of human industrial activity to warming, what the risks over what period of time would actually turn out to be.

Here in 2012, we have a much clearer sense of what the modeling warns us about than was available in 1997. And so ExxonMobil was able to exploit genuine divisions that were still present in a global scientific community.

Those divisions were narrowing; they were closing. They would vanish within five to seven years. But ExxonMobil drove a wedge into that debate, exploited the dissent that is an aid to science and used this to create doubts in the public mind about whether the science was legitimate.

“ExxonMobil drove a wedge into that debate, exploited the dissent that is an aid to science and used this to create doubts in the public mind about whether the science was legitimate.”

After all, this is a kind of science that is very difficult for any ordinary American to evaluate on his or her [own], and we all know that weather is uncertain. We all watch the weather forecast every night and watch the weathermen who are presumably trained meteorologists and [who] get it wrong over and over and over again.

So here comes a campaign suggesting that this very consequential weather forecast might turn out to be wrong. Well, there’s an intuitive way in which Americans are going to take that up, especially if it’s propounded in a clever way that emphasizes what’s uncertain and what’s unknown. …

And the moment they concede that uncertainty, who’s poised to take advantage of that?

Well, ExxonMobil and the rest of the fossil fuel industry can rightfully say, “Scientists themselves are uncertain about exactly how warming will unfold.” And then you can go further, as Lee Raymond did. …

Lee Raymond, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, said at a shareholders’ meeting around 2000, “I’m not convinced that the earth is warming at all.” In fact, he said publicly that he feared that an ice age was more likely than an age of catastrophic warming.

And called it a hoax?

I’m not sure that he used the word “hoax,” but he in effect said, “I don’t believe there is convincing evidence that the earth’s temperature is going up in a meaningful trend.” At that point, by the late 1990s, there was really no doubt in the scientific community that the earth was warming.

The only remaining controversy at that time in the late 1990s was how confident scientists could be that industrial activity was an important or the most important forcing mechanism in the warming that everyone agreed was occurring. But Lee Raymond didn’t even concede that the warming was occurring. …

Describe this sort of freedom-fighter group that Exxon funded that would basically take on not only the science, but also the politics of what climate science was driving.

The most radical of these groups were free-market advocates, some of them medium-sized by Washington standards, some of them quite small and almost purpose-built to campaign against climate science.

They were often led by non-scientists, economists or public policy advocates. And they were specialists in communicating to members of Congress, to opinion makers, to Republican activists and to the public about matters of public policy.

So they essentially developed a campaign, a kind of multiphase, self-conscious communications campaign to try to put across the arguments that they felt most strongly about. This included tax on the Kyoto accords treaty on economic-unfairness grounds.But they also included campaigning against the science itself.

And how much money are we talking about? What kind of resources did Exxon and others bring to the table?

Well, multimillions of dollars were spent on this. And the records suggest that much of the oil industry’s contribution to this funding was routed through the American Petroleum Institute, which is where the oil companies individually often do the lobbying that’s most likely to be controversial, because then they have the shield of an industrywide group.

Within API, ExxonMobil is by far the biggest player. Dues and in effect voting power are allocated on the basis of corporate size. And so Exxon, as the largest corporation, was the big fish. And also Lee Raymond, the chairman and chief executive, was the one who really drove this agenda. We have minutes and records of the American Petroleum Institute from this period that made clear that Exxon really took over this campaign and drove the funding and the strategy in the years after Kyoto.

In addition, there were other participants from the coal industry and from other ideological and industry groups that supported this work. But the oil industry-led work involved spending millions of dollars per year over a number of years following the enactment of the Kyoto accords, in particular in 1997.

… Did Exxon rely on scientists to make their argument in anything?

Sure. They, like the campaigners, built petitions of various kinds of scientists who agreed with this critique. Now, there was a particular petition that was circulated at this time that turned out to be highly flawed and contained the names of pop singers and other phony signatures that really didn’t have any scientific background.

But there were a handful of credited scientists at mainstream universities and other organizations, some of them qualified in the relevant fields, who expressed doubts about the conventional wisdom at that time in global warming and climate science.

And although they were a very small minority of the total number of scientists working in this area, they were prepared to be forceful in their dissent. And science, of course, has often thrived on the lonely dissenter. So ExxonMobil rallied to these individuals who were, in its mind, bravely defying the United Nations and the conventional wisdom of the liberal environmental elites and called attention and provided funding to these dissidents, and then used their messages, their scientific credentials and their arguments to campaign before the public to raise questions about the credibility of what was becoming more and more a consensus science.

Aside from this handful of dissenters, though, was the argument driven by ExxonMobil made mostly by nonscientists?

A lot of these groups were run by economists, litigators, lawyers and public policy specialists, people who specialized in getting a message out, not people who were scientists. This was a Washington campaign. This was about influencing the media. This was about creating a false controversy really in proportion to the dissent versus the majority.

The effect of the campaign was to persuade many people in the media that this was an even-sided debate; that there were people who thought global warming was going on and an equal number roughly who thought it wasn’t, and that, therefore, by the conventions of impartial journalism, every story that covered legislation or other controversies around global warming should equally quote from both sides of the debate. That was a goal, an explicit goal that was written down as part of this campaign.

Let’s create doubt; let’s create a sense of a balanced debate and make sure that these lines of skepticism and dissent become routinely a part of public discussion about climate science. And, in fact, they succeeded at that.

This group may not have been scientists, but they were really good at this sort of thing.

Well, some of them actually came out of campaigning on behalf of the tobacco industry in the 1960s, which was a campaign that over a period of 10 or 15 years managed to prolong the period in which the American public believed that there might not be much danger in smoking.

Even though the tobacco companies internally knew as long ago as the 1950s that smoking was quite dangerous to human health, it really wasn’t until the 1970s or later that the evidence that this was no longer a debatable subject became part of a political consensus in the United States.

And that delay period before lawsuits and other factors caused the tobacco industry to be held accountable for the misinformation that it had communicated to the smoking public, that was the product of a similar communications campaign. …

So replace human body with climate and carcinogen with carbon, and you pretty much have the tobacco industry debate upgraded for climate science in the 21st century?

These are complex systems. How can we be certain what factors are going on? Even observing change over time is a very complicated endeavor. And listen to the scientists themselves; they’ll tell you they don’t know the answer to every question.

Since there’s so much uncertainty, therefore, we should be very cautious about undertaking costly restrictions or regulations inhibiting human freedom and all of the rest of the arguments that go along with that. Yes, there is a similarity.

When did this success in terms of messaging become a PR problem on some level for Exxon?

Well, environmental groups, scientists and later members of Congress became aware of this campaigning, because it was right out in the open. And some of the groups that were carrying it out looked by their nature to be underqualified to be entering into a politically important debate about science and public policy.

So investigations began. Greenpeace conducted some of them; Union of Concerned Scientists conducted some of them.Other important environmental groups in Washington started looking underneath the hood. …

And gradually, these mostly nonprofit groups and some journalists were able to describe by 2003, 2004, pretty thoroughly before the public, that these groups were certainly well funded by the oil industry, if not in some respect an instrument of oil industry lobbying.

Of course, these groups all said: “Hey, we believe this on our own. We are independent libertarians or free-market groups. We will have these convictions whether ExxonMobil was providing us with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we are not.”

Maybe that’s so. But in any event, they were amplified in their messaging by the amount of resources they could tap from industry during this time.

At ExxonMobil shareholder meetings, some of these activists and dissenters started turning up to protest ExxonMobil’s funding of such groups. And initially, there was just a kind of public argument with Lee Raymond defiantly on the stage putting up his slides of scientists that agreed with him and telling shareholders: “I don’t even think the earth is warning at all. You people are wrong.”

But the more these investigations went on, the more the dissent about ExxonMobil’s fairly radical decision to attack the science began to attract really mainstream dissenters among the shareholder community as well as the environmental community. And now the people turning up at ExxonMobil shareholder meetings were a little bit less predictable.

The Rockefeller family split in half. And members of the Rockefeller family — from which ExxonMobil is descended from the Rockefeller Standard Oil Trust — they turned up at the shareholder meetings to say: “We think you are tarnishing the legacy of our great-great-great-grandfather. We think a respectable American corporation of your size, the largest corporation owned by shareholders headquartered in the United States, ought to act a little more responsively about matters of public science and public safety.” …

So that kind of dissent started to attract attention. And I think it bothered the board of ExxonMobil as the years went on. I think it bothered senior management.

I think they felt that they had been a little bit exposed by Lee Raymond’s personal convictions about this beyond where their business interests lay, because really, if the Congress in the United States in 2004 had imposed a $20-a-ton price on carbon-based fuels as one response to mitigate global warming, … that price, if it had been enacted, would have affected ExxonMobil’s business prospects hardly at all. They were a very profitable, durable oil and gas company. The price on carbon would have advantaged natural gas over coal, just as it would now. Half of ExxonMobil’s oil and gas holdings around the world are natural gas, so in a sense they could even have been winners.

Yes, it would have been a little more expensive for them to sell oil and operate some of their refineries in the United States. But none of that would have damaged ExxonMobil’s business in some existential way, … which made their actions attacking the science, in my judgment, all the more radical.

… What was their perception of the liability at the end of the day?

Well, there are different kinds of liability that I think they feared. I think the most severe liability that they feared — although it never has materialized — was comparable to the liability that ultimately bankrupted many tobacco companies, which was, there was a movement in the environmental industry to litigate against ExxonMobil for funding this campaign against climate science.

The idea was that they might be held liable for essentially undermining the available information to the public and the Congress.

Perpetuating an idea that was, number one, false, and number two, undermined public health?

That’s right. And there was a movement to try to identify victims of global warming who might try to hold ExxonMobil accountable. And of course, if such litigation were permitted to go forward, then lawyers for these victims, whoever they might be — residents of an island that was destined to come underwater if the sea levels rose, for example — they would be able to access internal records of ExxonMobil, much as happened in the tobacco industry. And perhaps that would reveal that ExxonMobil, for example, had internal scientists telling them all along global warming is real even while the corporation was campaigning against the science.

So they were very concerned about those kinds of big-ticket liability lawsuits, the kind that went after the asbestos industry, the kind that went after the tobacco industry, because when those kinds of lawsuits succeed, then an industry and a corporation can be in real peril. …

ExxonMobil’s most profitable business is at the wellhead, where they discover oil, pump it out of the ground, sell it wholesale to some user inside the corporate family or outside. That kind of activity, offshore, Nigeria, in Russia, all around the world, [was] not likely to be so affected by American greenhouse gas regulation.

Where they had some expenses that they would have to [incur] was mostly in the refinery operations, these giant factorylike plants where crude oil is converted into gasoline or precursors for the chemical industry or aviation fuel or other products.

Now, those are polluting, hot-running, very complicated industry plants that would be subject to these either prices in a cap-and-trade system or regulation if the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] declared them to be polluters.

But in truth, ExxonMobil’s profits, circa $40 billion these days, are durable against any such regulation or carbon pricing. First of all, these refining operations represent a small percentage of their profit making. In fact, they are the most difficult aspect of their business, the least profitable.

Secondly, they are, by and large, wholesalers. So even if they have to incur incremental costs in order to comply with these regulations, they’ll be able to pass those prices down to the ultimate consumer. It’s not clear that the rates of profitability are jeopardized at all.

So in a business sense, not only was it to some extent irrational to act so radically on the subject of climate science, but, you know, also as Lee Raymond’s successor, as Chief Executive Rex Tillerson later acknowledged, it actually hurt ExxonMobil, because what they want is price stability. They want a world that is consistent across 20 or 30 or 40 years, because their whole business model is based on very expensive long-term investments. What messes up their business model is volatility, things that are unexpected. And one of the sources of volatility in the future is, they don’t know how climate is going to be regulated.

So there were many other oil companies that thought it would be smarter to get ahead of this problem, create support for a stable system, even if it was a little more expensive for them, that would at least create a degree of certainty over 20 or 30 years about what kind of environment they were operating in. But ExxonMobil went a different way.

So at what point did they get out?

At the end of 2005, Lee Raymond retired, and he was succeeded by a man named Rex Tillerson, who continues to run ExxonMobil today as chairman and chief executive. Now, Tillerson has acknowledged that when he came in he wanted to change ExxonMobil’s communications strategy around climate and other controversial issues. He has acknowledged that he thought the company had a problem.

Now, when he started to change, he did two things. First, they reviewed some of these free-market groups that they had been funding, and they cut funding to the most radical among them, especially the smaller, sort of purpose-built groups that were just concentrating on attacking climate science. And then they tried to recalibrate, reposition ExxonMobil’s thinking about global warming.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/7/exxonmobils_dirty_secrets_from_indonesia_to

Steve Coll, President of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is called, “Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power.” Previously, he was managing editor of the Washington Post and has also been a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor at the paper. He was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for the book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.” He is also author of “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.”

ex ceo  lee raymond is exception pal of dick cheney (both Midwest, neighbors, hunt pals); exxon rel to gov't complex, but exxon sees itself as sovereign w/ own economic and for policy, sorta like france.

Exxon's funding of climate skeptics

Through 2005, under Lee Raymond

A study by the US Union of Concerned Scientists reports that ExxonMobil funded 29 climate change denial groups in 2004 alone. Since 1990, the report says, the company has spent more than $19 million funding groups that promote their views through publications and Web sites that are not peer reviewed by the scientific community. 

[http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2612021&page=1

See exxonsecrets.org for fact-sheets on funding recipients.

Between 1995 and 2005, Exxon Mobil spent $16 million to "bankroll more than 40 groups to quell the claims of global warming." [14]

During 2002, ExxonMobil donated $5.6 million to public policy organizations which share its agenda, either on climate change denial or general extreme free market advocacy. These included: [2]