exxon promise

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document busted, promise , broken

see royal soc CEI] sir david king

see disinfo 2

sedition caucus?

see timeline

see supran and oreskes on pvt vs public

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i thought exxon had promised in congress testimony [might have been snowe and jay rock] to stop funding denial but i can't find 1//22

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kert WSJ inside exxon strat many docs in discovey finder 1988 frank sprow

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-climate-change-documents-e2e9e6af

"Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change" | SEJ

no lnx

WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change

Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era

By Christopher M. Matthews

and Collin Eaton

Sept. 14, 2023

2487 RESPONSES

Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action.

Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives.

Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson, an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus.

The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial.

Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public.

One of the lawsuits is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year.

:{“I know how this information looks—when taken out of context, it seems bad,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in response to the Journal’s inquiry about the documents. “But having worked with some of these colleagues earlier in my career, I have the benefit of knowing they are people of good intent. None of these old emails and notes matter though. All that does is that we’re building an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions—both our own and others—and spending billions of dollars on solutions that have a real, sustainable impact.”}:

Under Woods, who became CEO in 2017, Exxon has committed to spend $17 billion over five years on emissions-reducing technologies. Exxon didn’t address detailed questions sent by the Journal.

WHAT’S NEWS

Exclusive: Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change

Tillerson declined to comment through a representative.

Exxon turned millions of pages of documents over to the New York attorney general during that office’s yearslong investigation, announced in 2015, into whether the company misled investors about the impact of climate regulation on its business. The Journal reviewed summaries of the documents that Exxon’s lawyers had determined were the most significant. After the attorney general narrowed the focus of the case, the documents weren’t made public.

The documents summarize emails between top executives, board meetings and Tillerson’s edits of speeches, among other things.

After a nearly three-week trial in 2019, Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court ruled the New York attorney general failed to prove its case.

“Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve Exxon Mobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change,” Ostrager wrote.

Throughout Tillerson’s tenure between 2006 and 2016, Exxon executives in their internal communications attempted to push back against the notion that humans needed to curtail oil and gas use to help the planet—despite the company’s public statements that action was needed.

In 2012, after the pre-eminent scientific authority on climate change warned of global calamity if carbon emissions continued unabated, Tillerson disagreed and directed Exxon researchers to “influence” the group.

As pressure mounted to stop drilling in the Arctic due to rapid glacial melting and other environmental impacts, Exxon fretted about a key project in Russia’s far north and worked to “de-couple climate change and the Arctic.”

July 2013

Exxon’s deal to explore the Arctic with Russia’s Rosneft came amid

growing public concern about melting polar ice caps. In an email discussion

with other executives about how to protect the project, a corporate issues

adviser wrote:

“

As this shapes up, part of the moral argument for leaving the Arctic alone

will be based on this notion that it is fundamentally unjust for the people

who prompted the ice melt to then profit from development. It’s one reason

I think we will need to push back hard- albeit in a nuanced way- against this

notion that the whole area is ‘pristine’ and untouched by the hand of man.”

“The general perception is that Tillerson was softer and stopped funding the bad guys” that were espousing climate change denial, said Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity that partly focuses on environmental issues. “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.”

The fund has issued grants financing litigation and other support for around two dozen cases against Exxon, whose predecessor, Standard Oil, was founded by family patriarch John D. Rockefeller. The fund has invested millions of dollars in a broader campaign against big oil companies.

Seminal warning

A study published earlier this year in the journal Science determined Exxon’s climate modelers had predicted warming temperatures with precision since the 1970s, in line with the scientific consensus. The study was funded, in part, by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund.

In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen issued what’s now seen as a seminal warning on climate change when he testified before Congress that Earth was warming dangerously and humans were causing it.

Frank Sprow, then Exxon’s head of corporate research, sent a memo to colleagues a few months later articulating what would become a central pillar of Exxon’s strategy.

“If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur,” wrote Sprow. “Any additional R&D efforts within Corporate Research on Greenhouse should have two primary purposes: 1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.”

Sprow’s memo was adopted by Exxon as policy, he said in a recent interview.

Exxon stopped most internal climate research, instead funding it through university and research organizations, Sprow said. Exxon’s corporate research division was redirected from broader scientific study to focus on “science to support our business.”

Sprow said he and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond acknowledged the climate was changing but questioned to what extent human activity was causing it and how serious and rapid the impacts would be. The January study in Science said that Exxon’s climate modelers mostly attributed the changes to humans.

Martin Hoffert, who worked as a consultant to Exxon on climate science in the 1980s, said Sprow’s memo sent another message: “It’s an oblique way of saying we’re in the oil business and we’re not going to get out of the oil business, and we’ll do everything we can to make money on the oil business.”

By the time Tillerson became CEO in 2006, Exxon’s positions on climate change had become a public-relations nightmare, according to Sprow, who retired from the company in 2005.

Public shift

Exxon’s public shift on climate change came after the Royal Society, a British scientific academy, criticized the company for spreading “inaccurate and misleading” views on climate science in 2006. Exxon responded in a letter that it recognized “the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere poses risks that may prove significant for society and ecosystems.”

An Eagle Scout and a civil engineer by training, Tillerson spent his entire career at Exxon before becoming CEO in 2006. He left in 2017 to become then-President Trump’s Secretary of State.

His views on climate change were influenced by the previous generation of Exxon executives, said former company executives who worked with him. During his tenure, Tillerson took little action to curb the company’s emissions and instead believed the onus was on governments to push companies to address climate change, they said.

In 2011, scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened by the United Nations, warned of global calamity if carbon emissions caused temperatures to rise more than 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100, its worst-case scenario.

Tillerson told a top Exxon climate researcher the scenario was “not credible,” the documents show. Tillerson was “dissatisfied with media coverage,” the researcher, Haroon Kheshgi, told colleagues in a 2012 email about the findings. Further, Tillerson wanted to engage with IPCC “to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info.”

Chris Field was the co-chair of an IPCC working group during Tillerson’s tenure at Exxon. He rejected Tillerson’s criticism that the worst-case scenario laid out by the group wasn’t credible. Though emissions reductions are preventing the worst case, Field said, the science has held up over time.

“I’m honestly flattered that he thought IPCC was consequential enough to want to influence it,” said Field, who is now director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He added that the IPCC process is structured to prevent undue influence from individual businesses or other entities and that the Exxon scientists he’d dealt with were professional.

While Tillerson and others played down the risks posed by climate change, Exxon’s scientists were themselves modeling alarming increases in carbon emissions without dramatic reductions in fossil-fuel consumption.

“It’s almost reluctantly that we address C02 emissions,” Scott Nauman, a corporate planning manager, wrote in a January 2009 email as the company was preparing its annual energy outlook. “It is not a positive story. Global emissions continue to rise throughout the outlook timeframe – that’s clearly a cause for concern.”

Exxon routinely pushed back against the idea that dramatic curtailment of fossil-fuel consumption was necessary. Instead, it suggested that technological solutions, including making cars and other machines more efficient, were the most effective measure to halt global warming. Fossil fuels are responsible for more than 75% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC.

Before giving a speech at an event hosted by Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project in February 2009, Tillerson appeared to make edits to avoid embracing positions that would hurt Exxon’s business.

In one part of the draft speech he crossed out “oil, natural gas and coal will not meet all of the world’s needs to the year 2030.” Later, he added, “the most cost effective steps we can take to address this energy and environmental challenge is to extend our energy efficiency gains.”

Weeks earlier, Nauman had concluded in his January email that emissions would increase through 2030 despite such gains.

“We would like them to be lower, but given the state of technology, given the need for energy, given the practical choices for energy, emissions rise despite aggressive efficiency gains,” Nauman wrote.

‘Skeptic arguments’

In 2008, Exxon announced it would stop funding think tanks and other groups that questioned climate science, saying their positions “could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Exxon researchers continued to support scientific research that cast doubt on climate science and its impacts, documents show.

Later in 2008, Gene Tunison, a manager of global regulatory affairs and research planning, said Exxon should direct a scientist to help the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s influential lobbying group, write a paper about climate science uncertainty.

“I support [Exxon] co-authoring a paper on uncertainty in measuring GHGs,” Tunison wrote in an email.

May 2012

Exxon researchers met regularly about developments in climate science

but continued to discuss doubts about the scientific consensus. Ahead of

a meeting dubbed ‘Friday climate overview’ among Exxon’s top climate

scientists, one researcher said:

“Under ‘some skeptic arguments disproven’ - my question is, are there any

‘skeptic’ arguments that we consider to be not yet disproven, or credible

and worthy of further investigation?”

Tillerson also pushed back against some of the dire consequences of rising temperatures predicted by climate scientists. After a 2011 meeting, Tillerson’s chief of staff, William Colton, emailed colleagues about the CEO’s feedback on a draft disclosure about carbon emissions. Tillerson wanted the words “weather extremes and storms” deleted.

“His view was that even mentioning a possible connection between climate change and weather was possibly giving the notion more credibility than he would like,” Colton wrote.

During a 2012 board meeting about “Developments in Climate Science and Policy,” Exxon board member Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said there was “still uncertainty in predicting future climate changes and impacts.”

“Money and effort spent on climate change is misplaced,” said Brabeck-Letmathe, the former CEO of Nestlé.

In December 2015, Exxon publicly stated its support of the just-signed Paris climate agreement, a nonbinding United Nations treaty that commits countries to work to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Climate scientists have warned that if Earth warms more than 2 degrees it could cross irreversible climate tipping points. During his Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State in 2017, Tillerson said he supported staying in the agreement.

Months before the treaty was signed, Tillerson had expressed skepticism about its aims.

Following a presentation on climate science to Exxon’s board of directors in April 2015, Tillerson called the 2 degrees target “something magical,” according to a summary of the meeting.

“Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough,” said Tillerson, noting that it was “very expensive” to cut the emissions needed to meet such a target.

June 2015

Tillerson received regular updates on climate science from Exxon’s chief

researchers and in some instances asked about uncertainty in

climate-change modeling. An Exxon executive wrote Kheshgi:

“Rex called this afternoon with a couple of pretty detailed questions on

climate science: [1] Do climate scientists understand and are they able to

quantify the radiative forcing/GHG/climate impacts of events like

volcanos and forest fires. If so, how and how well? Is there differentiation

between major events like Mt Pinatubo and other much smaller events?

[2] Does the climate modeling community include these events and

effects in their climate models and projections of future temperatures and

impacts? If so, how and how well? Are these types of events/impacts a

major or minor source of uncertainty?”

“When people like Tillerson argue that 2 degrees is magical, it’s in the context of how you try,” said Field, the former IPCC co-chair. “Two degrees can be affordable with the right costs and benefits globally, even if it is not the right costs and benefits for Exxon.”

Last week, the United Nations warned countries are far from meeting the Paris agreement’s goals. Exxon said in August that the world isn’t currently on track to reach the targets of the agreement, which it continues to support publicly.

Shortly after replacing Tillerson in 2017, Darren Woods spread the word that he was in search of transformative new ideas. A plan to invest in offshore wind projects made its way to the most senior levels of the company, according to people familiar with the proposal. Karen Hughes, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration and an adviser to Exxon, said she counseled that investing in renewable energy would be good for the environment and improve the company’s reputation.

To date, Woods hasn’t invested in renewable energy, arguing it’s a low-return business outside Exxon’s skill set. Instead the company has vowed to spend about $3.4 billion a year on average through 2027 curbing its emissions and helping other companies do the same, and investing in areas including carbon capture, biofuels and lithium mining. It also recently struck a deal to buy Denbury, which operates a large network of pipelines that move carbon dioxide, for about $5 billion.

Exxon currently plans to spend as much as $25 billion a year in capital expenditures through 2027, mostly on oil and gas.

Write to Christopher M. Matthews at christopher.matthews@wsj.com and Collin Eaton at collin.eaton@wsj.com

: 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8}:

Appeared in the September 15, 2023, print edition as 'Inside Exxon’s Climate Two-Step'.

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https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/gcr_contributions_public_policy08.pdf

2008 report

see sep node

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https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/exxon-finally-admits-denialists-cause-problems/

may 2008

Exxon has admitted – for the first time – that the climate deniers it funds are causing problems for action on climate change.

This is a first for the company which has spent, since 1998, $23 million funding the climate denial industry.

And it’s official – Exxon made this statement in this year’s Corporate Citizenship Report, released in time for its shareholder meeting.

The statement reads:

"in 2008 we will distcontinue contributions to several public policy interest groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner." (page 41 under "public policy research contributions."

"Could divert attention"? We award Exxon a special prize for the Understatement of the Year. The denial industry can be held responsible for the US’s failure to act on climate. And Exxon has been at the heart of it for more than a decade.

So which groups is Exxon dropping? According to Reuters, gone from the funding list in 2008 are the George C Marshall Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), Frontiers of Freedom… and others.

These groups are what you might call the "engine room" of the climate denial industry.

But even Exxon’s walking away from them now.

The company started dropping groups in 2006, with the Competitive Enterprise Institute being the first to go. Last year, it dumped the Heartland Institute, which organised the biggest denial conference for a long time, in New York in March and has been running a slightly ridiculous campaign against Al Gore.

The other groups were all co-sponsors of the Heartland conference which concluded, surprisingly enough, that global warming isn’t happening.

We note that this announcement didn’t come from the usual spokesman from Exxon, Ken Cohen, who chairs the company’s funding committee, but from a new person. Clearly the new CEO Rex Tillerson is trying to shift his company from the poisoned chalice left to him by former CEO and arch denialist, Lee Raymond.

But is cutting nine groups getting the job done?

In short, no. From the 2007 Worldwide Giving Report, posted on Exxon’s website on Friday, we can see that Exxon funded a total of 37 global warming denial groups, to the tune of nearly $2 million, which is pretty similar to 2006. Even cutting nine of them means the company is still funding 28 groups engaged in climate denial.

Tillerson needs to make a much wider sweep if he really wants to shake off Raymond’s legacy – he has started, but we think he should apologise to the global community for the harm his company has caused.

1998 communications strategy groups finally seen off

The latest round of Exxon cuts means an end to the funding of the organisations who gathered together in 1998 to plot a communications strategydesigned to foster public scepticism of climate science and undermine the Kyoto treaty.

The plan was drawn up by a small cabal of groups and companies, including Exxon, Chevron and the big energy provider, the Southern Company, and Fred Singer’s outfit, SEPP. In there were also Frontiers of Freedom and the Marshall Institute, who have both enjoyed Exxon funding ever since.

The memo stated that "Victory will be achieved when:

… average citizens "understand" (recognise) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties become part of conventional wisdom;

…"Those promoting the Kyoto Treaty on the basis of extant science appear out of touch with reality."

Well, sorry guys, while you may have achieved a certain level of climate scepticism, the IPCC’s latest report is absolutely clear on the climate science – and governments are acting on it.

Will this stop the denial industry?

Well, no. We note thatWalt Buchholtz, Exxon’s former funding man, left the company and went to work at Heartland for a year. No doubt he helped set up Heartland’s new sources of funding from other members of the business community.

There’s still a ways to go, but it’s a start. When companies like Exxon start questioning this lot, there’s not a lot of people who will continue to support them.

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ref

http://web.archive.org/web/20081118105742/https://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/files/gcr_contributions_public07.pdf

pdf no copy DL 3 22

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feb 2018

https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/exxonmobils-climate-disinformation-campaign-is-still-alive-and-well/

In a recent blog post, ExxonMobil executive Suzanne McCarronreiterated her company’s claim that it fully accepts the reality of climate change and that it wants to do something about it....“I want to use this opportunity to be 100 percent clear about where we stand on climate change,” she wrote. “We believe the risk of climate change is real and we are committed to being part of the solution. So why is the company still a part of—in fact, a major part of—the problem?An exchange between Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt during a recent is a case in point, providing a window into how ExxonMobil’s undue influence continues to block climate action.

During the January 30 hearing, which was held by the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, Sen. Cory Booker inadvertently provoked Inhofe by raising the issue of environmental justice.The New Jersey Democrat cited the threat climate change-induced flooding poses to three dozen Superfund sites in his state and asked Pruitt if he was “taking into account the environmental burdens disproportionately impacting communities of color, indigenous communities and low-income communities.”

Inhofe seized the opportunity to contradict Booker, claiming that minority and low-income communities are disproportionately harmed by environmental protections, specifically citing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have dramatically reduced carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants if Pruitt hadn’t repealed it.

Booker, Inhofe said, was implying that Pruitt was trying to “punish” vulnerable Americans. “I wanted to just remind you,” Inhofe told the committee, “that we had a guy I remember so well, Harry Alford. He was the president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. He provided some of the most powerful testimony that I have ever heard when it comes to the effects of the Clean Power Plan and some of the other regulations … on black and Hispanic poverty, including job losses and increased energy costs.

“[Alford] was very emphatic as to who was paying the price on these,” the Oklahoma Republican continued, “and I think sometimes that the previous administration forgot that there are already people out there who are paying all they can pay just to try to eat and keep their house warm.”

ExxonMobil’s Echo Chamber

Inhofe’s source for his assertion? A discredited, ExxonMobil-funded study by an Exxon-funded advocacy group that was based on discredited studies by other ExxonMobil-funded organizations.

Inhofe rested his argument on previous congressional testimony by Harry Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), a shoestring, mom-and-pop operation that is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. “Of course we do and it is only natural,” Alford wrote on NBCC’s website. “The legacy of Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel…. [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend.”

One of NBCC’s closest economic friends is ExxonMobil, which has donated more than $1.14 million to the group since 2001.

What did the company get for that money?

In 2015, NBCC commissioned a report that claimed the Clean Power Plan would “inflict severe and disproportionate economic burdens on poor families, especially minorities.”

In fact, unchecked climate change would more than likely hurt those communities most, and investments in energy efficiency under the plan would ultimately lower electricity bills across the country.

How did NBCC arrive at its upside-down assessment? The Union of Concerned Scientists took a close look at the report and found it was based on several flawed fossil fuel industry-friendly studies. Two of those bogus studies were produced by ExxonMobil grantees: the Heritage Foundation, which received $340,000 from ExxonMobil between 2007 and 2013, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which received $3 million between 2014 and 2016.

The Chamber study, which came out just days before the EPA released a draft of the Clean Power Plan, was debunked not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and The Washington Post. Among its many faults, the Chamber study—which was co-sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute—wildly inflated the cost of the plan and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.

ExxonMobil Spreads its Money Around

But there’s more than just the fact that ExxonMobil financed deliberately flawed studies to try to derail the Clean Power Plan. The company also is a major supporter of a number of Senate EPW Committee members, including Inhofe, who are adamant climate science deniers.

Inhofe has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, which has donated $1.85 million to his campaign war chest over his long career in Congress, more than twice than any other industry.Three oil and gas companies are among the senator’s top 10 corporate contributors: Koch Industries, Devon Energy and …ExxonMobil.

Six of the other 10 Republicans on the EPW Committee also are on ExxonMobil’s donation list, including Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the current committee chairman. Roughly half of the $119,500 ExxonMobil contributed to the seven senators over the last decade went to Barrasso and Inhofe, the committee’s previous chairman.

Then there’s ExxonMobil’s link to Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general before President Trump tapped him to run the EPA. From 2012 through 2013, he chaired the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA)and afterward served on the organization’s executive committee. From 2014 through 2016, ExxonMobil gave RAGA $160,000 in three annual installments.

Just a few weeks after the company made its 2016 donation of $50,000,Pruitt and then-RAGA Chairman Luther Strange, at the time Alabama’s attorney general, co-authored a National Review column attacking a coalition of state attorneys general investigating ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies for misleading investorsand the general public about climate change. Parroting ExxonMobil’s argument, Pruitt and Strange charged that the coalition was violating the company’s first amendment right to free speech.

“The debate” over climate change, they wrote “is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

Inhofe Upstaged

In this case, Inhofe’s counterfactual comment didn’t make it into the ensuing media coverage. Along with nearly everything else that was said during the two-and-a-half hour marathon, it was eclipsed by a bombshell dropped by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. The Rhode Island Democrat revealed that during a February 2016 radio interview, Pruitt said Trump would be “more abusive to the Constitution than Barack Obama, and that’s saying a lot.” Whitehouse read Pruitt’s remark aloud and asked him if he recalled making it.

“I don’t,” Pruitt responded, “and I don’t echo that today at all.”

“I guess not,” Whitehouse replied.

Not surprisingly, that embarrassing nugget was the story. There was no way that Inhofe’s rambling, ExxonMobil-sponsored falsehood could compete in the media with red meat like that. But overshadowed or not, Inhofe provided yet another incontrovertible piece of evidence that—despite ExxonMobil’s statements to the contrary—the company is still very much engaged behind the scenes in trying to stymie any government attempt to seriously address climate change.

Posted in: Climate Change, Energy, Science and Democracy, Scientific Integrity

Tags: disinformation

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{/2017/:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{9/20/1700089/-27-companies-publicly-supporting-Paris-climate-accord-donated-millions-to-GOP-group-undermining-it

Twenty-seven companies that urged the Trump regime to stick with the Paris Climate Accord also contributed a total of $3.3 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) that has worked assiduously to dump President Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan.That plan was designed specifically to reduce greenhouse emissions from U.S. power plants in 2030 by 32 percent over 2005. It’s the key U.S. government effort to help meet the emissions goals of the nonbinding Paris accord. And it’s in limbo.

[table list]

companies supporting Republican Attorney Generals Association who also say they support Paris Climate Accord.

This is how the 27 companies that urged the Trump regime not to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord divided their donations to the Republican and Democratic attorney generals associations.The Republican group has been highly active in trying to dump the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan that would cut greenhouse emissions. [[While Daniel Weiner at the Brennan Center may not doubt the companies’ sincerity in the matter of climate change, it should not be forgotten that long before the Clean Power Plan was around to be bashed by the group now getting their cash, many of these companies were not exactly on the cutting edge in dealing with climate change. In fact, as we have learned over the recent past, Exxon Mobil—which gave $210,000 to RAGA and none to its Democratic counterparts—donated a hell of a lot more money to help engineer decades of climate science denial when they full well knew that this disinformation was contributing to a global disaster.]]

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exxonmobil-funder-of-clim_b_8684320

no lnx

ExxonMobil, Funder of Climate Change Deniers

It's been an interesting time watching the ExxonMobil attempt to defend its track record on climate science, in the wake of revelations that it had bone fide climate scientists properly studying the issue since the 1970's.

Cindy Baxter, Contributor

Co-author of exxonsecrets.org

Updated December 1, 2016

Stacks and burn-off from the Exxon Mobil refinery are seen at dusk in St. Bernard Parish, La., Friday, Feb. 13, 2015.]

The #ExxonKnew investigations by Inside Climate News and the LA Times have had ExxonMobil's head of PR, Ken Cohen, furiously tweeting, writing letters, and appearing on news programmes to defend his company's honor.

"Our company's work to help understand the role that man-made CO2 emissions play in climate fluctuations has continued unabated for four decades," he opined in the Wall St Journal.

But that's the point. ExxonMobil did know about the science. So the question now is how can the company explain its role in funding, to the tune of $31m 1998-2014, the think tanks running climate denial campaigns specifically aimed at undermining the very science that Exxon's own scientists were studying?

A new review of the climate change papers published by ExxonMobil to somehow defend its position has shown that there was 100 percent consensus among its scientists that global warming is caused by human interference.

Exxon's denial appears to have begun in earnest with CEO Lee Raymond, back in the 90's. Raymond became CEO of Exxon in 1993, and CEO and Chairman of the newly-merged ExxonMobil in 1999.

"A factual, common sense approach will also serve us well as we address the issue that perhaps poses the greatest long-term threat to our industry -- so-called global climate change," Raymond told the annual meeting of the America Petroleum Institute (API) in 1996.

The same year, he told Exxon staff in the company magazine "Lamplight" that "scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate."

In 1998, Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol was present at a meeting organised by the API, along with a number of the think tanks Exxon funded, where they created a communications strategy to undermine support for the Kyoto Protool, by questioning the science.

The leaked strategy's stated goal was "A majority of the American Public, including industry leadership, recognizes that signifcant uncertainties exist in climate science and therefore raises questions among those (e.g. U.S. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change."

Victory, it stated, would be achieved when Americans, industry and media understood the uncertainties on climate science, and those supporting the Kyoto Protocol "on the basis of extant science appear out of touch with reality."

Leaks of the paper may have led to the campaign being quashed, but this was the strategy that ExxonMobil was to fund to the present day.

The think tanks present at the meeting included a number of those funded by ExxonMobil Foundation, under the leadership of Ken Cohen, its chair since 1999.

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), while it no longer receives ExxonMobil funding, is launching a film challenging the science of global warming in Paris on December 7, as part of its 20-year campaign undermining climate science.

Under Lee Raymond's chairmanship, before his retirement in 2005, ExxonMobil spent millions funding these denial campaigns, and on a number of ads in the New York Times opinion pages. In one, in 2000, entitled "Unsettled Science," ExxonMobil quoted science on temperatures in the Sargasso Sea to prove that global warming wasn't happening.

Raymond himself cited the study at the company's AGM that year. The scientist who authored it, wrote to ExxonMobil saying:

"I believe ExxonMobil has been misleading in its use of the Sargasso Sea data. There's really no way these results bear on the question of human induced climate warming... I think the sad thing is the a company with the resources of ExxonMobil is exploiting the data for political purposes."

Think tanks receiving grants from the ExxonMobil Foundation include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was the leading think tank pushing climate denial, coordinating the "Cooler Heads Coalition." At one point, ExxonMobil funded nearly all the groups listed in the coalition.

In 2005, the CEI ran a TV ad proclaiming "C02 is Life." This was the last straw for the UK's Royal Society, which complained to ExxonMobil and led Cohen to declare, in 2007, that the company was no longer funding these organisations. The world's media heralded the move. But ExxonMobil quietly continued funding the think tanks, extensively. In 2009, it dropped a few more.

While Ken Cohen might try to state that the organizations he funded could do what they wanted, it's important to note that in some years, the company specifically spelt out its funding as being for their work on climate change.

Even today, ExxonMobil continues to be a member of -- and to fund -- the American Legislative Exchange Council which, at its annual meeting, has hosted a number of climate change-denying scientists to question the existence of global warming. Research has revealed that that ExxonMobil donated at least $1.6 million to ALEC between 1998 and 2012. In 2014 it gave them more.

A study published in PNAS on November 23 looked at the effect of grants from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers on the discourse around climate science. It showed that the climate denial echo chamber organizations they funded produced misinformation that effectively polluted mainstream media coverage of climate science and polarized the climate policy debate.

The way ExxonMobil is reacting to the #ExxonKnew revelations is bizarre. In the full knowledge of the climate change science, provided to it by its own scientists, this company has spent years, and many millions, funding the myths created by the denier industry to obfuscate the science and slow change.

To me, although I'm not a lawyer, knowing about the harm caused by your product, then spending millions on trying to create doubt about the facts of that harm, sounds very similar to what another industry did with its product.

This post is part of a "Corporate Skullduggery" series produced by The Huffington Post, in conjunction with the U.N.'s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris (Nov. 30-Dec. 11), aka the climate-change conference. The series will put a spotlight on businesses that have actively tried to mislead the public about the dangers of climate change or about their own contributions to rising temperatures. To view the entire series, visit here.

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ref

https://www.desmog.com**/2015**/11/23/research-confirms-exxonmobil-koch-funded-climate-denial-echo-chamber-polluted-mainstream-media/

A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) shows that the climate denial echo chamber organizations funded by ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations produced misinformation that effectively polluted mainstream media coverage of climate science and polarized the climate policy debate.

The abstract and full text of the study can be found here: Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change.

The analysis of 20 years’ worth of data by Yale University researcher Dr. Justin Farrell shows beyond a doubt that ExxonMobil and the Kochs are the key actors who funded the creation of climate disinformation think tanks and ensured the prolific spread of their doubt products throughout our mainstream media and public discourse.

“The contrarian efforts have been so effective for the fact that they have made it difficult for ordinary Americans to even know who to trust,” Dr. Farrell told the Washington Post which was first to cover the news of the study’s release. “This counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own,” Dr. Farrell said.

From PNAS’s press briefing note about the article by Dr. Farrell:

Corporate funding likely influences the nature and content of polarizing texts pertaining to climate change, according to a study. Political polarization has become a hallmark of climate change policy discussion, with multiple groups in various sectors contributing to public discourse regarding climate and energy. To quantify the influence of corporate funding in climate change discourse, Justin Farrell analyzed more than 39 million words of text produced by 164 organizations active in the climate change counter-movement between 1993 and 2013. The author examined the ideological content of the produced texts, as well as the funding behind the organizations that produced the texts.

Organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have produced polarizing texts, the author found, with ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundation acting as influential funders (emphasis added). Further, according to the author, corporate funding may have influenced the ideological content of produced texts. The results suggest quantitative evidence of the influence of funding in the climate change debate that had previously been hypothesized, and suggests an analytical model for integrating texts with the social networks that created them, according to the author.

This study confirms once again the central thesis of industry-funded attacks on climate science, which inspired the DeSmog book Climate Cover-up and countless articles about the deception campaign over the past decade.

Now let’s see how the mainstream media cover this story — that is what I’m most curious to see. (The Washington Post article was pretty straightforward, although it gave ExxonMobil an unchallenged last word, and Joby Warrick seemed to pose a bogus question to Dr. Farrell equating the fossil-funded disinformation campaign with pro-climate-action campaigns, but Dr. Farrell correctly rebutted such a comparison.)

Will this study, published in a highly authoritative journal, finally compel the newsrooms and boardrooms of the traditional media to take responsibility to undo some of the damage done by their complicity in spreading fossil fuel industry-funded misinformation?

Will false balance — quoting a distinguished climate scientist and then speed-dialing Pat Michaels at the Cato Institute for an opposing quote — finally stop?

Will editors commit to serving as referees to ensure the same industry PR pollution isn’t published any longer?

It’s critically important today that the public hears the scientific facts about climate change without the confusion injected into the policy debate by well-funded think tanks and their highly paid PR operative counterparts.

Dr. Farrell’s research also provides further evidence of the public deception orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry, and should prove valuable to investigators examining ExxonMobil as well as other current and future efforts to hold polluters accountable for their PR pollution.

Here is a video produced years ago, “Doubt” by The Climate Reality Project, which provides a nice overview of this issue[vid] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVjr-qOpNk

also highly suggested: track down access to Merchants of Doubt, the full-length documentary by Food Inc. director Robert Kenner that exposes the history of tobacco-to-climate denial and their common PR manipulators such as Marc Morano and Fred Singer.

It’s far beyond the time to end the climate cover-up. And responsible media can lead the way.

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/27/rockefeller-family-tried-and-failed-exxonmobil-accept-climate-change

Rockefeller family tried and failed to get ExxonMobil to accept climate change

This article is more than 6 years old

Founding family of the US oil empire Exxon, begged the company to give up climate denial and reform their ways a decade ago – but attempts at engagement failed

Rockefeller family members voiced concern about the direction of the oil company ExxonMobil

Peter O’Neill, chair of the Rockefeller Family committee (C) sits with Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, economist, and great-granddaughter of John D Rockefeller and Stephen B Heintz, president, Rockefeller Brothers Fund during a news conference in which Rockefeller family members voiced concern about the direction of the oil company ExxonMobil in April 2008 in New York. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Suzanne Goldenberg in New York

@suzyji

Fri 27 Mar 2015

Members of the Rockefeller family tried to get ExxonMobil to acknowledge the dangers of climate change a decade ago – but failed in their efforts to reform the oil giant.

In letters, lunch meetings, and shareholder resolutions, the descendants of John D Rockefeller, founder of the oil empire that eventually became Exxon, sought repeatedly to persuade the company to abandon climate denial and begin shifting their business towards clean energy.

“We were really begging the company to look harder at what they were doing. They were still into climate denial and funding deniers and really against any positive steps,” saidNeva Rockefeller Goodwin, a co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, who helped lead the reform effort.

The outreach effort, led mainly by Rockefeller’s great grandchildren, began with a lunch meeting in 2004 with Exxon’s then head of investor relations.

“This was the family trying to get into a friendly conversation with ExxonMobil, feeling we have a strong historical connection with that company,” said Goodwin. “We wanted to start talking with the company about their view of the future and how they could be a constructive player as well as part of the problem.”

The company was blindsided. David Henry, then head of investor relations, was “stunned” at the family’s concern about climate change, according to Goodwin’s recollection of events.

“The head of investor relations was really surprised to find we didn’t love Exxon as it was but thought changes might be a good idea,” she said.

Over the next few years, Goodwin and about a dozen other Rockefellers launched three separate shareholder resolutions pressing Exxon to recognise climate change and invest in renewable energy. The cousins also sought an independent chairman, believing it would make the company more responsive.

At the time the oil company was the main funder of dozens of front groups and researchers rubbishing any link between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change – or denying climate change was occurring at all.

Among the recipients was Willie Soon, the Harvard-Smithsonian researcherwho received more than $1m (£0.7m) from industry, according to documents obtained by Greenpeace through freedom of information filings.

In a report released on the eve of their 2008 annual general meeting, the oil company pledged to stop funding groups that promote climate denial.

However, the company continued funding Soon for three more years. The documents show that Exxon gave Soon an additional $76,106 from 2008 to 2010, despite claiming to have stopped.

The shareholder resolutions were easily defeated.

The US environmentalist Bill McKibben says the failure of the family’s efforts is telling and signals the limits of shareholder engagement with some fossil fuel companies. “It makes a very clear point that engaging with fossil fuel companies to somehow get them to change their ways is unlikely to work if the family of the founder can’t get Exxon to shift.”

The Rockefeller heirs also tried private and public pressure. Nearly 100 direct descendants also signed a letter expressing concern as investors and begging the company to stop funding climate deniers, Goodwin said.

In 2006,another cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, and Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, wrote a letter to the incoming Exxon chief executive Rex Tillerson, urging the company to stop funding climate deniers.

“ExxonMobil’s longstanding support of a small cadre of global climate change sceptics, and those sceptics’ access to and influence on government policymakers, have made it increasingly difficult for the United States to demonstrate the moral clarity it needs across all facets of its diplomacy,” the letter said. “It is our hope that under your leadership, ExxonMobil would end its dangerous support of the ‘deniers’.”

Most of the Rockefellers’ personal fortunes are held in trusts set up in the 1930s.

The family retains only a tiny fraction of shares in Exxon. But the stand taken by the Rockefellers – at a time when Exxon was under attack from campaign groups for its support of climate denial – rankled company executives who had expected family members to be allies, Goodwin said. “They were shocked to find this family that had a strong link with them, and that they expect to find a great friend and admirer ... had such a negative view.”

But even with the weight of that historical connection Exxon was still not persuaded to change.

“I was pretty discouraged. Exxon has an extremely strong culture of believing that they are right and know what they are doing and really don’t need to listen to anybody else,” Goodwin went on. “It was clear that we didn’t have an ability to make more of a dent in that.”

When the Guardian asked for a comment on the Rockefellers’ attempts to engage with the company it issued this statement. “ExxonMobil will not respond to Guardian inquiries because of its lack of objectivity on climate change reporting demonstrated by its campaign against companies that provide energy necessary for modern life, including newspapers.”

Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil’s vice president for public and government affairs has previously been dismissive of the concept of fossil fuel divestment, saying that it is “out of step with reality”.

“There are no scalable alternative fuels or technologies available today capable of taking the place of fossil fuels and offering society what those energy sources provide,” he wrote in a blog in October.

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Exxon Mobil Accuses the Rockefellers of a Climate Conspiracy https://www.nytimes.com › 2016/11/21 › science › exx...

Nov 21, 2016 — Exxon Mobil, under fire over its past efforts to undercut climate science, is accusing the Rockefeller family of masterminding a conspiracy ...

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mashey 2012

p 156

Z.2007.02.8 Heartland on Monckton Letter

British Lord Demands End to Climate Science Censorship

“Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley and a member of the

Upper House of the British legislature, 763 has sent a letter to Sens. Olympia

Snowe (R-ME) and John D. Rockefeller (D-WV) excoriating them for

attempting to strong-arm ExxonMobil into cutting off support for public interest

groups that question global warming alarmism. …

Monckton, a former science and technology advisor764 to British Prime Minister

Margaret Thatcher, .. Monckton’s open letter, edited for length, appears below.

…”

“You commend Britain’s Royal Society765

, once a learned body and now a mere

Left-leaning political pressure-group, …

Finally, you may wonder why it is that a member of the Upper House of the

United Kingdom legislature,…”

Heartland edited the original766 document, deleting the following section

quite relevant to the topics discussed in this report:

“In the circumstances, your comparison of Exxon’s funding of sceptical

scientists and groups with the former antics of the tobacco industry is

unjustifiable and unworthy of any credible elected representatives. Either

withdraw that monstrous comparison forthwith, or resign so as not to pollute the

office you hold.”

Monckton has been discredited numerous times,767 but Heartland promotes

him as a “global warming expert” to their readership.

This was apparently insufficient as seen in next article.

763en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Br

enchley Monckton has never been a member of the House of Lords.

764 There is no evidence of this claim, and much otherwise.

765 The RS is the oldest science society in the world. Monckton is a nonscientist.

766 www.ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20061212_monckton.pdf p.6

767 scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/12/monckton_debunks_monckton.php

www.skepticalscience.com/monckton-tries-to-censor-john-abraham.html

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/jul/14/monckton-johnabraham

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p 156

Z.2007.02-10 David Ridenour

Senators’ Inquisition Attempts to Stifle Science, Debate

“Nicolas Copernicus was condemned for suggesting that the sun, rather than the

Earth, was the center of our universe. …

Today, U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and John Rockefeller IV are engaging in

persecution of their own, attempting to silence dissenting voices. Just what do

they fear? … IRS-3E

Truth, Science Will Prevail

Scientific method isn’t about winning popularity contests. It’s also not about

being with the majority opinion. It isn’t supposed be determined by politics. It is

about attempting to limit bias or prejudice in the results.

Unfortunately, by attempting to cut off some of the funding for those who

contribute to the diversity of both the scientific and public policy debate, Sens.

Snowe and Rockefeller are attempting to bias the results.

They will fail, however, because funding from energy companies is not what is

fueling the vigorous climate change debate.

What is fueling the debate is a genuine, sincere difference of opinion.”

Ridenour’s degree is in political science and he is now President of

NCPPR, after a 25-year tenure as Vice president.

768

Unsurprisingly NCPPR has gotten ExxonMobil funding. 769

In fact, almost

all of the foundation funding identifiable then came from ExxonMobil.

Likewise, (Fig. F.4), NCPPR was able to obtain tobacco funding, so one

wonders how many children got addicted from NCPPR’s assistance. That

might be a question to ask of Mr. Ridenour for his impassioned defense of

science. Has NCPPR ever done much real science? Any?

768 www.nationalcenter.org/bios/ridenourd.html

www.eri-nonprofitsalaries.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=NPO.Summary&EIN=521226614

This is another family business, run by Amy and David Ridenour.

769 MAS2010 p.71,

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/29/despite-cutbacks-exxonmobil-continues-to-fund-climate-science-denial/

In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant’s support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave off government action and maximize its profits—a fact that my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others revealed more than a decade ago.

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy, then ExxonMobil’s senior director of federal relations, said during the interview. “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. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”

For all his candor, McCoy got at least one thing wrong. ExxonMobil did “join”—in other words, pay—denier groups to spread disinformation to blunt initial government attempts to curb carbon emissions. But McCoy inaccurately used the past tense. In fact, the company continues to fund them.

That videotaped interview caused some major heartburn for McCoy’s boss, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, especially since the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has invited Woods—as well as top executives from the American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to testify at a hearing on October 28 on the “long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.”

ExxonMobil has been at the heart of that campaign. Since 1998, the company has paid a network of seemingly independent think tanks and advocacy groups more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science and stymie government action. Only Charles Koch and his late brother David, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, are known to have spent more.

In 2020, according to ExxonMobil’s most recent corporate grantmaking report, the company spent $490,000 on three grantees—the American Enterprise Institute ($100,000), the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University ($140,000), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($250,000). That amount is down from the $790,000 the company reported it spent on nine climate science denier groups in 2019 and a fraction of what it spent in the past, but there’s a catch.

True, the company lost more than $22 billion in 2020 and cut back its grants across the board. But another factor for this decline is that ExxonMobil changed how it reports grants. As first reported by Salon, the company only listed grants of $100,000 or more in its 2020 annual giving report. In previous years, it included grants of $5,000 or more. The change reduces transparency and ultimately means there is no way to tell how much the company spent in smaller donations to support climate disinformation in 2020 or compare the grants it made in 2020 with previous years.

Only three denier groups—the same three named in the 2020 grantmaking report—received $100,000 or more from ExxonMobil in 2019. That year, their grants collectively amounted to $625,000. The other six denier groups the company funded in 2019—the Center for American and International Law ($5,000), the Federalist Society ($10,000), the Hoover Institution ($15,000), the Manhattan Institute ($90,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000)—collectively received $165,000. None of those grants, even if ExxonMobil continued them, would wind up in the 2020 report, given the company’s new threshold.

Still, it’s worth taking a closer look at where the bulk of ExxonMobil’s self-reported climate disinformation budget did go in 2020.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to “do everything [it] can to prevent” the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—“from becoming law.” And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for “the increased use of natural gas” to make “further progress.”

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.

The American Enterprise Institute

Economist Benjamin Zycher might be considered the climate science denier in residence at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received $4.86 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. Zycher insists that a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” has called the Paris climate agreement an “absurdity,” and rejects the scientific consensus about the causes and seriousness of global warming.

Zycher published his most recent broadside against climate science in the Summer 2021 issue of National Affairs, a formerly independent conservative policy quarterly that AEI brought in-house in 2019. In his essay, “The Case for Climate-Change Realism,” he falsely argued that the “available science” does not support the notion that human activity is “the single most significant cause of climate change” and the “available data” undercut the assessment that extreme weather events are “evidence of an ongoing climate crisis.”

As he has in previous articles, Zycher cited roundly debunked hypotheses for the primary causes of climate change, including a shift in northern Pacific Ocean circulation patterns called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which scientists have determined is incapable of causing a long-term warming trend, and “changes in solar activity,” when, in fact, the sun’s energy has declined since the 1980s while average global temperatures have continued to climb.

This summer was not a fortuitous time to be peddling discredited theories. On August 9, less than two months after Zycher posted his essay, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark, nearly 4,000-page “code red for humanity” report warning that the climate crisis is close to spiraling out of control and human activity is “unequivocally” to blame.

Zycher’s main objective? To make a case, no matter how specious, for continued reliance on fossil fuels, which he falsely claimed are less expensive than renewables. Proposals to cut carbon emissions, including the Paris agreement, would have little real impact, he argued, and could “be accomplished only by substituting expensive energy for cheaper energy.” In fact, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, it is “now cheaper to build and operate new large-scale wind or solar plants in nearly half the world than it would be to run an existing coal or [natural] gas-fired power plant.” To be sure, no one would confuse Zycher for a scientist or National Affairs for a peer-reviewed journal. But he serves ExxonMobil’s interests as a seemingly independent expert who continues to express doubt about climate science and the viability of renewable energy, thereby providing cover for climate science deniers in Congress.

George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center

The relatively unknown Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington (GW) University received $140,000 from ExxonMobil in 2020 and $1.2 million from the company since 2013. Director Susan Dudley founded the center in 2009 after serving as President George W. Bush’s “regulatory czar” at the Office of Management and Budget and, before that, running the Regulatory Studies Program at Koch-financed Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She currently serves in various capacities for other longtime climate science disinformation groups, including the Koch-founded Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Regulatory Studies Center portrays itself as an “objective, unbiased” policy shop, but—like the Mercatus Center—its primary raison d’être is to weaken and quash government regulations, according to a 2019 analysis by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. The GW center’s main tools are reports and public comments it submits to Congress, and although it does not get much mainstream news media attention, it has found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill—and in the previous administration. Much of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, Public Citizen found, echoed the center’s recommendations, including “dramatically reducing the cost that the government attributes to carbon emissions.”

But should the Regulatory Studies Center be lumped in with climate science disinformation groups? In response to the Public Citizen report, as well as criticism from UnKoch My Campus and GW student groups, the center issued a statement in February disputing the charge that it rejects climate science. “Contrary to unsubstantiated claims, no one in the Regulatory Studies Center questions climate science,” it said. “In fact, most of the Center’s scholars do not focus on environmental or energy issues at all. Those who have written on climate issues address economic and legal questions, not the science.”

Whether or not the center directly disputes climate science is beside the point. In the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence, most ExxonMobil-funded disinformation groups have revised their position on the reality of climate change. Instead of challenging the science, their efforts now tend to focus on denigrating renewable energy, overstating the costs of transitioning to a clean energy economy while ignoring the benefits, and preventing government action. That is exactly what the Regulatory Studies Center does. In recent years, for example, it has published papers and filed public comments opposing stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

The center also has enlisted the help of unabashed climate science deniers. In the fall of 2018, for example, it tapped Julian Morris to file a public comment supporting the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of Obama-era standards for cars and light trucks designed to increase fuel economy and, for the first time, substantially reduce tailpipe carbon emissions. Morris, president and founder of the International Policy Network and vice president of research at the Reason Foundation—two libertarian, climate science denier organizations—falsely declared in a paper published in March 2018 that the “effects of climate change are unknown—but the benefits may well be greater than the costs for the foreseeable future.”

Millions More for Disinformation

The money ExxonMobil donated in 2020 to AEI, the GW Regulatory Studies Center and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents only a small percentage of the company’s recent outlays to sway public opinion and blunt government climate action. It is difficult to document all of the company’s related expenditures, but they include:

More than $5 million on Facebook ads in 2020, which is more than half of the $9.6 million that the U.S. oil and gas industry spent on the ads, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap that reviewed more than 25,000 ads on Facebook’s U.S. platform. Many of the ads described natural gas as a “green” fuel source and argued that cutting carbon emissions would drive up energy costs.

An estimated $10 million in annual dues to the American Petroleum Institute (API) (based on how much Shell Oil recently revealed it paid). The U.S. oil and gas industry’s oldest and largest trade association, API is working overtime to block stricter methane emissions standards. McCoy indirectly referenced API during the secretly taped interview when he said ExxonMobil relied on third parties to publicly represent its interests in Congress. “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing,” he said. “It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be, for the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of Congress.”

At least $100,000 in annual dues to trade associations (based on what it reported it spent in 2019) that have a long track record of peddling climate disinformation, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Nearly $834,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles to 118 of the 139 climate science deniers currently in Congress. Over that same time period, the company reportedly spent nearly $41 million to lobby in Washington, but neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil’s other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic of a carbon tax—the company’s avowed top priority—with legislators since 2018, according to its quarterly lobbying reports.

So while ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and his colleagues proclaim that they fully understand the threat posed by climate change and are “committed to being part of the solution,” the evidence shows they continue to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to promote gridlock in Congress on the issue. The future of the planet as we know it hangs in the balance, but as McCoy acknowledged in his interview, ExxonMobil was—and still is—looking out for its investments and its shareholders’ short-term interests, regardless of the long-term consequences.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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DISINFO

SUBSTX --> NYT

Emily Sanders is the Center for Climate Integrity’s editorial lead. Catch up with

...Just days after the Big Oil hearing, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an international nonprofit that “seeks to disrupt the architecture of online hate and misinformation,” released areport finding that posts linking to content from just ten publishers account for 69 percent of Facebook users’ interactions with climate denial content.

Dubbed the “Toxic Ten,” those publishers are:

Breitbart
The Western Journal
Newsmax
Townhall Media
Media Research Center
The Washington Times
The Federalist
The Daily Wire
Russian State Media
The Patriot Post

Examples of viral climate denial content included aWashington Times article claiming there is a “cult of ‘climate change’” whose “worship” is based on unproven science, a Breitbart piece promoting conspiracy theories that climate legislation involves “lockdown decrees,” and a Newsmax article telling readers not to “worry too much about CO2 baking the planet.”

This type of content didn’t emerge on its own. CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said the fossil fuel industry has “shown its willingness to embrace new technologies and every tool available to it to create harm — and climate denial is harm.” Social media, he says, is the last frontier for Big Oil to cultivate opposition against climate action that might threaten their bottom line.

“If they can’t win the battle on legislation, they’re going to seek to undermine the consensus, the self-preservatory consensus that underpins the push for legislation. They know that you can’t possibly get political agreement if we can’t even agree on the basic facts,” Ahmed said. “And all they have to do is simulate the appearance of dissent, of debate.”

According to the report, Facebook and Google, which have portrayed themselves as “green” and allies in the fight for climate action, are doing business with denial. CCDH’s research found that Facebook failed to label 92 percent of the Toxic Ten’s climate disinformation, despite the company’s pledge to start placing information labels on posts about climate change. It found that eight of the Toxic Ten have received a combined $5.3 million in revenue from Google ads in the last six months alone. Google promised to stop attaching ads to climate denial content in October, setting its own deadline of November 9 — but it hasn’t acted on that promise yet.

[twt]

...CCDH isn’t alone in calling this out: online climate disinformation has been identified as an urgent and emerging issue in pieces published in The New York Times, The Conversation, and The Nation within the past week.

CCDH’s research was released during COP26, this year’s United Nations climate summit, where at least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists — more than any country’s delegation — were present, according to an analysis by Corporate Accountability and other advocacy groups.

Go figure: the industry’s attempts to halt climate action through third parties have been simultaneously occurring online, where, thanks to internet trolls, right-wing publications, and the cooperation of social media platforms, they can now reach exponentially more members of the public. At least two of the Toxic Ten have historic ties to funding from ExxonMobil:

Media Research Center, a self-described watchdog against “leftist bias in the news media and popular culture,” received at least $50,000 from ExxonMobil directly in between 2000 and 2003, and another $50,000 in 2009, along with more than $4.5 million from the Scaife Foundations, which themselves are financed in large part by the oil industry.
Townhall, a right-wing media group originally founded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has received at least $870,000 in grants from ExxonMobil, according to the Climate Investigations Center.

Digital platforms make that particularly easy through frequency bias — a fundamental psychological characteristic that causes humans to believe that something must be true or at least popular if we see it frequently enough. And disinformation, whether about vaccinations or climate change or electoral processes, is “sticky,” or “chewy,” in Ahmed’s words — it gets people talking.

Ben Decker, CEO of Memetica, a firm that works to investigate disinformation across digital media platforms, called climate disinformation “the legacy disinformation narrative plaguing America,” and fossil fuel companies the “historical purveyors” of that disinformation.

“The content itself becomes a space where fossil fuel companies can advertise themselves,” said Decker, who says policies to address climate change, not necessarily the science itself, are now the greatest target for these kinds of attacks.

Both Decker and Ahmed referred to the “asymmetry” of these so-called debates, which are manufactured with the help of the fossil fuel industry’s immense resources, and enabled by social media platforms that profit from publishers who advertise climate denial content on their sites.

So how do we tackle the climate disinformation crisis?

CCDH’s report calls on social media companies to stop monetizing and profiting from climate denial, and to comprehensively label climate disinformation on their websites. “It is amazing that the regulatory framework for a bodega in Manhattan is more onerous than that for a company like Facebook, which has literally caused at least one genocide,” Ahmed said, in reference to the violence in Myanmar.

In Decker’s view, it’s important for social media companies to codify exactly what images and words constitute climate disinformation if they’re going to prevent its spread. “They’re coy and smart around the words that they use,” he said of publishers and bad actors that facilitate harm over these platforms.

Growing wells of academic and journalistic research on evolving climate disinformation, and now the ongoing House Oversight investigation, could help define and identify harmful content. But if you ask Ahmed, the problem goes deeper than a lack of consensus or standards.

“We get too tied up in the technology of algorithms, automated moderation, AI and machine learning,” Ahmed said. “It’s a moral choice to gaslight the earth, and that’s what social media companies are doing. They’re making a moral choice to do business with climate denial. These are rapacious companies willing to sell out their communities, nations, and the planet, for their own wealth.”

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ICYMI News Roundup

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/opinion/climate-change-facebook-glasgow.html

GREG BENSINGER

Social Media Is Polluted With Climate Denialism

Nov. 12, 2021

Greg Bensinger

Mr. Bensinger is a member of the editorial board.

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This fall, Exxon Mobil started targeting New Yorkers with Facebook advertisements that warned about a proposed law that would require electric-only appliances in some buildings. “If your household was required to go full electric, it could cost you more than $25,600 to replace major appliances,” one ad reads.

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But the ad doesn’t tell the whole story: The law would apply only to new buildings, making Exxon’s cost claims specious at best. Other advertisements, among roughly 1,200 placed by the fossil fuel giant found by the artificial intelligence outfit Eco-Bot.Netthis year, claimed oil pipelines are necessary to keep “energy affordable and accessible” and that natural gas helps customers “meet their environmental goals.”

These are examples of so-called greenwashing, or corporate attempts to underplay companies’ true impact on the environment. Along with other climate misinformation on social media, such ads have become a potent threat to efforts to combat global warming.Researchers for the environmental group Stop Funding Heat found that climate misinformation is viewed as often as 1.36 million times daily on Facebook.

Social media companies simply aren’t rising to the challenge of rising sea levels. Climate change is an urgent threat, but the companies are treating misinformation around it with far less urgency than other issues like political conspiracy theories, hate speech and lies about Covid vaccines. Climate content can be considered opinion and is therefore exempt from standard fact-checking procedures, which climate change deniers have seized on to push misleading information onto the sites.

The largest social media firms demonstrated in last year’s presidential election that they can effectively combat some misinformation by appending warning labels, using algorithmic suppression and adding links to more reliable news sources. But such work requires sustained effort, and Facebook, for one, dismantled its well-intentioned civic integrity group overseeing election misinformation shortly after the 2020 presidential vote.

“The results from the American presidential election show that the social media companies have the capacity to address misinformation on a broad scale,” said John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University who is advising Facebook on its climate misinformation efforts. “But they’ve not put the resources or effort behind this that are necessary.”

Even with the rapid shift in public opinion and the outward signs of global warming in recent years, social media companies have been slow to adapt, allowing sometimes blatant disinformation to flourish unchecked on their sites. Under Facebook company guidelines, climate content may be categorized as opinion and subject to no more scrutiny than peer-reviewed scientific research.

Social media companies have a standard playbook for addressing many online falsehoods: add warning labels, push them lower in an algorithmically driven news feed, remove them or penalize their creators by suspending or barring them from using the site. But often misleading posts, such as one that claims combating climate change “involves Americans giving up their freedom and way of life,” carry an incongruous and wishy-washy Facebook label about local average temperatures. Compare that to the labels appended to former President Donald Trump’s voting misinformation posts, which Facebook called “disputed” or “misleading.”

Posts featuring conspiracy theories around Texas’ February power grid failure that left many residents freezing in the dark racked up millions of views on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, particularly ones falsely suggesting that frozen wind turbines or President Biden’s energy policies were to blame. The companies did little to intervene. Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, falsely alleged in a tweet that Mr. Biden’s energy policies were “leaving millions of Texans freezing to death.” Twitter never appended a clarifying label.

Employees at Facebook have wrestled internally with how to approach climate change misinformation since at least 2019, according to documents released by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. According to one exchange, an employee seemed flummoxed by the company’s refusal to remove posts featuring climate change denial, because global warming is not a matter of opinion. Another employee said Facebook removes posts when “content may lead to imminent harm against people offline.”

[Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

What does climate change look like around the world?

From “Postcards From a World on Fire,” these 193 stories show how climate change is reshaping reality.

What should our leaders be doing?

Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency.

What are the worst climate risks in your country?

Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces.

Where are Americans suffering most?

Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S.]

Facebook said its policy of not fact-checking or labeling posts from politicians was justified because the company doesn’t “want to limit political speech on the platform” — despite evidence it has that politicians are more likely to be believed than regular users and their posts are more widely shared.

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Facebook, which has called climate change the “greatest threat we all face,” has established only a sparsely visited section on its main site, known as the Climate Science Center, with occasional articles addressing rising global temperatures.

Climate skeptics are simply altering tactics from outright climate change denial to discrediting evidence and shifting blame from corporations to individuals, said Michael Mann, the author of “The New Climate War.”

On YouTube, the nonprofit Heartland Institute, known for attacking climate science, has backed the German influencer Naomi Seibt, who has posted videos denying climate change “hysteria” and encouraging viewers to live carefree lives. But YouTube rarely appends warning labels directing users to more reliable information, even as her videos garner thousands of views.

YouTube says it uses software to make debunked climate content less likely to show up in people’s recommendation feeds, but the climate activism nonprofit Avaaz found last year that the algorithm still prompted millions of views of questionable videos. The group also found that YouTube was selling ads to run alongside them.

As a result, Google, YouTube’s parent company, recently took a baby step, announcing it will no longer allow websites and YouTube creators to make money off advertising that denies humans’ contributions to climate change or denies global warming. Similarly, Facebook said climate change and global warming were on a list of topics that could no longer be used by marketers to target advertising, starting next year.

But spreading false information on the sites remains as easy as making a few keystrokes.

With the public shifting toward acceptance of climate change, corporate strategies are also evolving, including companies’ use of paid influencers on Instagram and TikTok who embark on idyllic road trips to Joshua Tree National Park using Shell gasoline or who snack on chips from Phillips 66 stations.In an effort to combat legislation to ban natural gas hookups, the fossil fuel industry also is paying Instagram stars to post videos of anodyne tasks like cooking tacos over gas stoves. The aim is to conjure good feelings about the brands, known to be significant contributors to carbon emissions, and perhaps even to convince consumers that they are stylish.

Elsewhere on the web, pages have sprung up with names like Climate Change Is Crap and Climate Change Is Natural to spew denialism on social media — no targeted ads needed. One headline from Climate Realism: “Evidence Indicates Climate Change Doesn’t Threaten Human Health.”

Social media could be a forum f or healthy debate about climate action, but the companies’ flimsy policies around policing climate change misinformation stand in the way. Automated software systems are simply not enough to combat misinformation about an unalterably changing Earth.

Facebook, YouTube and other companies have shown they have the power to amplify facts and suppress lies — will they use that to help protect Earth from its most dire threat?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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wapo

Climate & Environment

COP26

COP26 FAQ

Climate Solutions

Invisible project

2C project

Climate and Environment

Exxon lobbyist questions urgency of climate’s catastrophic risks

Speaking on panel, ExxonMobil lobbyist highlights carbon capture’s potential and says of global warming: ‘Is it catastrophic inevitable risk? Not in my mind.’

Listen to article

6 min

Erik Oswald, a vice president and registered lobbyist for Exxon, emphasized the profit opportunity in addressing global warming during a panel in Santa Fe, N.M.

By Desmond Butl

Just last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods assured lawmakers his company neither disputed the scientific consensus on climate change nor lobbied against efforts to cut carbon pollution. But a lobbyist for the oil giant struck a different tone less than two weeks later, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post, suggesting global warming might not be so dire.

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https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/583061-exxon-lobbyist-suggests-climate-change-not-catastrophic-inevitable

lobbyist for Exxon expressed doubt that climate change carries “catastrophic, inevitable risk” in remarks made earlier this month, which were obtained by the watchdog group Documented.

In the Nov. 9 remarks to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, lobbyist Erik Oswald states, “The way I look at it as a scientist is, all's I need to think about is, is there, is there a risk? Yes, there's risk. Is it catastrophic, inevitable risk? Not in my mind. But there's risk.”

“And so if we're going to work on this, you know, as a, as a society, if we're going to work on this risk, then my only ask is, let's do it as efficiently as possible,” Oswald continues in the recording.“Findme the cheapest way to put the most CO2 in the ground,” he says in reference to carbon-capture technology. “And that's what I'm willing to engage in a conversation on.”

In the recording, first reported by The Washington Post, Oswald says the company thinks of such technology “not as the crusaders who are going to be the climate fix” but rather “looking at markets,” comparing the business opportunities of a "green premium” to consumers’ willingness to buy sugar-free foods.

"The statements lack appropriate context and are not representative of the company’s positions on important issues, including climate change and carbon capture," Casey Norton, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, said in a statement to The Hill. "ExxonMobil has long acknowledged that climate change is real and poses serious risks. In addition to our substantial investments in next generation technologies, ExxonMobil also advocates for responsible climate-related policies."

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Exxon’s new emissions targets are more smoke and mirrors

Earthworks campaigner Josh Eisenfeld discusses the company’s latest pledge.

EXXONKNEWS

Dec 8, 2021

Emily Sanders is editorial lead for the Center for Climate Integrity. You can catch up with her on Twitter here.

Last week, oil giant ExxonMobil announced a new emissions reduction pledge — its latest attempt to placate growing calls to hold the company accountable for its immense contributions to the climate crisis.

The new targets are technically Exxon’s most ambitious to date — a comically low bar, if you take a closer look at the details.

Exxon is now aiming to reduce its 2016-level greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2030 — a goal that relies on “measuring the intensity of its emissions,” which could leave room for an overall increase in pollution if the company’s oil production increases.

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The pledge also takes into account pollution from only its operations, otherwise known as Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which comprise an estimated 17% of Exxon’s total 2020 emissions. The other 83% — the Scope 3 emissions released when consumers use the industry’s fossil fuel products — are completely unaccounted for in Exxon’s announcement.

Jamie Henn

@jamieclimate

This is like PhilipMorris pledging that the production of their cigarettes won’t cause cancer.

Offsetting a drilling operation does absolutely nothing for the climate when you’re still selling the gas.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

bloom.bg

December 7th 2021

13 Retweets34 Likes

Once again, Exxon is shifting responsibility for addressing climate change to consumers — even as the company continues to lobby against alternatives to fossil fuels, greenwash their dangerous products, and refuse to significantly change their business model to respond to the crisis.

Twitter avatar for @jeffbradynews

Jeff Brady

@jeffbradynews

This announcement does not include emissions from the oil and gas the company produces. ExxonMobil leaves responsibility for limiting those climate-warming gases to its customers.

ExxonMobil @exxonmobil

Today we announced one of the most ambitious emission-reduction plans in the Permian Basin: net-zero Scope 1 & 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It’s a big step, as the Permian is home to over 40% of our net U.S. oil and gas production. Learn more. https://t.co/T7WKspJGbG https://t.co/nA4JA4jK5m

December 6th 2021

I spoke with Josh Eisenfeld, Corporate Accountability Communications Campaigner at the nonprofit Earthworks, for his take on Exxon’s latest greenwashing. Our interview, edited for length and clarity, is below.

EK: Exxon’s latest targets rely on emissions intensity metrics. Can you explain what that means?

JE: Reducing carbon emissions intensity doesn't mean reducing total carbon emissions. It means reducing the emissions associated with getting a barrel of oil to market. So things like leaking less of their product out or switching from diesel engines to pump oil out of the ground to solar powered engines. If they reduce that intensity metric while increasing their total production of oil and natural gas — which Exxon has indicated they plan to do — they will still increase their overall carbon footprint. We have seen other companies, like Chevron, do exactly that. Between 2016 and 2020 they reduced all of their intensity metrics and still drastically increased their overall carbon emissions because they increased their drilling and production.

Exxon is also promoting a heavy reliance on unproven technology like carbon capture and storage. This allows them to continue to produce fossil fuels under the guise of “we’ll be able to take the carbon out of the atmosphere, so you don’t have to worry.” It’s 100% designed to make the company look good while continuing their bad behavior.

Exxon has known about climate change for half a century. I think this is just more of the same. They denied climate change. Now they’re delaying climate action, and this is just another example of that.

How has Exxon performed on previous pledges?

The data that we’re going off of is the data they’re providing us. There’s no watchdog checking to make sure that their numbers are correct. There is no standardized reporting in the United States. Until we open up the data to be more transparent, there’s no way for any person to know for sure whether they’re hitting these goals.

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The numbers they do account for, like methane numbers, are extremely underreported. What they say is coming out of their oil and gas wells is far, far lower than what is actually coming out based on satellite imagery and scientific studies. When you factor that in too, it’s really hard to know whether any company has hit their mark.

What’s the difference between a pledge and a commitment?

All of these terms mean whatever the industry says they want it to mean.There’s nothing that binds them by law to define or deliver on their promises. It’s one reason a lot of NGOs and activists are pushing on the FTC to create reporting protocols. History shows us that when there is obscurity in rules, companies take advantage of that. That's what’s happening right now.

These pledges come about a month after ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods faced questions before Congress about the company’s efforts to spread climate disinformation. Exxon also faces lawsuits from communities across the country seeking to hold it accountable for those lies.

What do you say to the idea that this pledge demonstrates that the company is at least taking steps in the right direction?

History tells us that the words that come out of the mouth of the CEO of ExxonMobil are not gonna be the truth. They come with an asterisk: these words are designed to increase Exxon’s profits, and that’s it. What they do is all that should matter. It is good that communities are stepping in and fighting back, but ultimately I don't think it’s reasonable to expect a company like ExxonMobil to just fold over and succumb to that pressure. It’s going to take a reigning in of the industry as a whole by government, geopolitical forces, and investors pulling their money out.

These pledges are doing a lot of things for the industry, and that’s why they continue to put them out. They’re fighting a battle for their social license to operate, and they’ve been losing ground. These pledges are a way to remedy that — for their consumers, for politicians who have to answer to their constituencies when they hand out more tax breaks to fossil fuel companies, and for investors who have to justify their complicity in this. It gives them the disguise of change without any pressure to actually act on that change. As we’ve seen, even the investor pressure applied from Engine No. 1 hasn’t really amounted to any real change in Exxon.

This is the first pledge that’s come out since activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 members, who intended to push Exxon to significantly reduce its emissions, were elected. Why hasn’t there been more change?

Two reasons: they only got three board members, and that’s not a majority. These three are gonna come in with an image that others are probably not going to be too warm to in the boardroom. They’re going to have a tough time explaining why doing the right thing is doing the right thing financially. The idea of being able to change a company from within has good intentions, but I don’t see it playing out in a way under the given rules that actually makes change happen fast enough.

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2021 in review: Climate accountability in the courts

EXXONKNEWS looks at how efforts to hold Big Oil accountable progressed through the courts in 2021 — and what’s on deck for next year.

EXXONKNEWS

Dec 2, 2021

Emily Sanders is the Center for Climate Integrity’s editorial lead. Catch up with her on Twitter here.

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/exxonmobil-soon-climate-change-denier/

kate s

no lnx

back in 2008, ExxonMobil pledged to quit funding climate change deniers. But according to new documents released through a Greenpeace Freedom of Information Act request, the oil giant was still forking over cash to climate skeptics as recently as last year, to the tune of $76,000 for one scientist skeptical of humankind’s role in global warming. This—and much more—came to light in a new report about the funding of Wei Hock “Willie” Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Soon has been a favorite among climate skeptics for years, since coauthoring a paper back in 2003 that claimed that the 20th century was probably not the warmest, nor was it unique. That paper, published in the journal Climate Research, was widely criticized by climate scientists for its content, not to mention the funding it received from the American Petroleum Institute. An astrophysicist by training, Soon has also claimed that solar variability—i.e., changes in the amount of radiation coming from the sun—are to likely to blame for warming temperatures.

In 2007, Soon coauthored a paper challenging the claim that climate change harms polar bears. The paper drew plenty of criticism, as it was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, The Charles G. Koch Foundation, and ExxonMobil—groups with a clear interest in the debate over whether the bears merited endangered species protections.

Given that Soon had previously disclosed some of his corporate funding, in December 2009 Greenpeace submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information about Soon’s funders and any conflict of interest forms he may have submitted. In response, Smithsonian produced a list of his major bankrollers, which included more than $800,000 from major energy interests. According to the document, Exxon provided $55,000 for a study on Arctic climate change in 2007 and 2008, and another $76,106 for research into solar variability between 2008 and 2010.

ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers accused Greenpeace of “peddling this discredited conspiracy theory” about its support for climate deniers. He maintained that the company stopped funding Soon in 2009. “We made a decision to discontinue funding groups whose positions on climate change weren’t very constructive. It was distracting,” said Jeffers. “The issue of climate change is so important, it shouldn’t be distracted by the type of things Greenpeace does,” Jeffers said.

Even if Greenpeace and Smithsonian are wrong and ExxonMobil has stopped funding his work, Soon still appears to be getting significant backing from other fossil fuel companies, with the coal giant Southern Company providing $120,000 to look at “solar variability and climate change signals from temperature” in 2008 and 2009, and the Koch Foundation providing Soon another $65,000 last year.

“Dr. Soon needs to make clear what exactly these corporations expected from him,” said Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace. “There’s been a long-term campaign of climate denial for over 20 years, organized by big coal and big oil. This is evidence that it continues to this day.”

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https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-10-27/op-ed-big-oil-congress-hearings

LAT no lnx

OPINION

Op-Ed: Will Congress expose Big Oil like it did Big Tobacco in the ’90s?

BY PATTI LYNN AND GEOFFREY SUPRAN

OCT. 27, 2021

On Thursday, executives from six major oil and gas corporations and trade associations — collectively dubbed the “Slippery Six” by advocates — will testify to Congress about their decades of climate denial and propaganda. The House Oversight Committee’s hearing, led by Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), will consider testimony from leaders at ExxonMobil Corp, BP America, Chevron Corp. and Shell Oil, alongside the presidents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute.

The outcome will be one indication of whether the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying-fueled stranglehold on science-based decision-making can be loosened in time to meaningfully confront the climate crisis. Twenty-seven years ago, similar hearings featuring tobacco industry executives led to litigation by 52 U.S. states and territories and industry restitution to the public. The stakes this time are at least as high: trillions of dollars in predicted loss and destruction from climate change. Big Oil is due its Big Tobacco moment.

FILE - In this Saturday, Sept. 18, 2021 file photo, emissions rise from the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets, near Emmett, Kansas, United States. The world needs to more than halve production of coal, oil and gas in the coming decade to maintain a chance of keeping global warming from reaching dangerous levels, according to a U.N.-backed study released Wednesday. The report published by the U.N. Environment Program found that while governments have made ambitious pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions, they are still planning to extract double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030?than what would be consistent with?the 2015 Paris climate accord’s goal of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

WORLD & NATION

Despite climate pledges, countries are upping fossil fuel production plans, study says

Oct. 20, 2021

In 1994, tobacco executives stood before Congress and lied about the addictiveness of their products. The hearings had a ripple effect. As the tobacco industry’s history of deceit and harmful products was laid bare, its public credibility crumbled. Further legal action against tobacco companies ensued, most notably the Master Settlement Agreement four years later, which required the industry to pay out a minimum of $206 billion over the next 25 years. Laws were passed to curb youth addiction, and smoking rates fell.

Though insufficient to redress the lives lost, livelihoods ruined and staggering healthcare costs of tobacco, especially among low-income communities and communities of color, the agreement set a precedent for Congress to investigate an industry network that has misled the public and policymakers in an effort to deny the dangers of its products and derail regulation. The MSA required corporations to absorb some of their “externalized costs” for society, and complementary litigation yielded millions of damning internal documents.

This week lawmakers have a similar opportunity to accelerate corporate accountability, legal scrutiny and political progress — this time on the climate crisis. Over the past seven years, journalists and scholars (including one of us) have uncovered overwhelming evidence that ExxonMobil, Shell, Total, the American Petroleum Institute, the coal industry and other groups invested in fossil fuels have known for decades that their products could cause dangerous global warming. Yet, rather than warning the public or taking action, they waged disinformation and lobbying campaigns in efforts to mislead the public and undermine climate policies. From strategy to networks to personnel and rhetoric, these efforts to deny and delay come straight from Big Tobacco’s playbook.

In fact, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota, the District of Columbia, New York City and over 20 other cities and counties have already sued ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations for fraud, damages or denial. Advocates around the world are also pursuing legislative and regulatory action beyond the courtroom, such as establishing ecocide as an international crime.

In some cases, attribution science, which can assess the impact of global warming on extreme weather and trace emissions and climate damages to corporations, is making it easier to quantify the economic damages owed. In recent decades, nearly two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions, more than 40% of temperature rise and more than 25% of sea level rise trace back to 90 major industrial carbon producers.

FILE - In this May 1, 2009 file photo, a crew member arrives by boat at th offshore oil drilling platform "Gail", operated by Venoco, Inc., off the coast near Santa Barbara, Calif. Leaders in the California Senate say they are introducing legislation to thwart President Donald Trump's attempts to expand offshore drilling through an executive order he signed Friday, April 28, 2017. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File)

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OPINION

Op-Ed: How Congress could curtail the Big Oil gravy train

Sept. 22, 2021

The oil executives will likely do everything in their power to deflect attention away from this record. But members of Congress should force the CEOs to make a choice: Admit to their companies’ lies and risk further exposing themselves to legal scrutiny, or lie about past lies on climate science — a path in line with Big Tobacco’s undoing.

Historical parallels to tobacco industry tactics suggest that fossil fuel bosses may try to avoid getting caught in their own web of denial by calling climate change a “risk,” rather than what it is: real and human-caused. Tobacco historian Robert Proctor calls this hedging strategy “a kind of legal having-it-both-ways: an admission strong enough to ward off accusations of having failed to warn, yet weak enough to exculpate from charges of having marketed a deadly product.”

Expect also to see the Slippery Six shifting blame away from themselves and onto consumers by presenting the fossil fuel industry as an innocent supplier simply satisfying customer demand, and by positioning oil and gas companies as trustworthy innovators to be relied upon to invent silver bullet techno-fixes for this crisis. Front and center will be companies’ “net zero” pledges, which are inconsistent with the Paris agreement’s goal of holding global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and which rely on economically unproven negative emissions technologies and offset schemes.

These messages of individualized responsibility and fossil fuels as the solution yield a “fossil fuel savior” framing of the climate crisis — again reflecting the playbook of Big Tobacco, which blames customers for choosing to smoke.

Lawmakers must see through Big Oil’s smoke and mirrors. As many politicians work tirelessly to build back greener and more equitably, let Thursday be the moment when they begin to take on the fossil fuel forces standing in the way.

Patti Lynn is executive director of Corporate Accountability, a nonprofit. Geoffrey Supran is a research fellow in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and director of climate accountability communication for the Climate Social Science Network.

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acsholes:

https://www.climatedocket.com**/2019**/06/26/exxon-climate-denial-american-council-science-health/

exxonMobil is funding a little-known nonprofit that calls itself a “pro-science advocacy organization,” but whose scientific advisory board includes several renowned climate deniers and has worked for decades to sow doubt about the health impacts of climate change.

Records show the ExxonMobil Foundation provided grants of at least $60,000 in both 2017 and 2018 to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH),a group that says its mission is to “publicly support evidence-based science and medicine.”

Members of the ACSH scientific advisory board, however, include a who’s who of climate deniers, including Patrick J. Michaels, who has worked for more than 30 years on behalf of the fossil fuel industry;S. FredSinger, who last year wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal falsely claiming that sea level rise is not caused by climate change; andWilliam Happer, a current member of President Trump’s National Security Council who as recently as 2016 argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Documents recently revealed in an investigation by The Guardian guk show ExxonMobil’s current funding of the ACSH began prior to 1999, when Exxon and Mobil merged to become Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the largest oil companies in the world.

“ACSH is a front group for libertarian billionaires, fossil fuel companies, and basically every other industry selling dangerous products,” said Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University researcher who in 2017 published a study that showed how Exxon’s internal memos take the climate issue seriously while its public communications emphasize doubt about the science.

ACSH has also defended fracking as safe for the environment, denied the dangers of bisphenol-A (BPA) and opposed efforts to limit sugar in sodas, among other pro-industry stances.

Corporations fund nonprofits, think tanks and trade groups, many of which are “dark money” organizations that do not disclose their donors to the public, to further their interests without directly being tied to the groups’ work.

“This is just one more example of how these large corporations use third-party organizations to convey their message without being directly connected to them,” said Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, who is now a visiting professor of environment and society at Brown University.

“It fits exactly with the kind of stuff ExxonMobil has done for years and years—this is exactly their strategy,” said Brulle, who has studied the funding patterns of organizations connected to climate denial. “The question is what is still going on and why does Exxon still have its connection to this group after all these years?”

In addition to its questionable science advisory board, the ACSH board of trustees includes Fred L. Smith, founder of the conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and current director of CEI’s Center for Advancing Capitalism.

In a bit of irony, Exxon said in 2006 it would stop funding CEI (which it had given nearly $2 million between 1998-2005) because of its work denying climate change, but it continued to fund ACSH at least through 2018, the last year for which data is available.

ExxonMobil’s current funding of ACSH is a continuation of a relationship that goes back decades.

Prior to merging in 1999, Exxon and Mobilboth funded the ACSH, according to internal Mobil Foundation documents, which include a list of potential grant recipients as well as Mobil’s justification for the funding decision. They reveal that the Mobil Foundation provided at least $125,000 in grants to the ACSH between 1981-93 and funding was expected to continue into 1994.

The Mobil Foundation recommended continuing to provide funding to the ACSH in part because “the Council has achieved high credibility and recognition in the media and scientific community, as evidenced by wide publication of their positions in the press and scientific journals.”

It’s unclear what the most recent ExxonMobil Foundation grants were used for, but Alex Berezow, vice president of scientific affairs for ACSH, said they weren’t designated for any specific research or project.

“Our policy for the past several years precludes us from doing specific research in exchange for corporate grants,” Berezow said.

Since its founding in 1978, the ACSH has worked to promotecorporatepositions on science, most often taking theposition that chemicals are not a threat to humans or the environment.

“It’s a quintessential anti-science astroturf in the fossil fuel industry’s web of denial and delay—this is an organization founded by money from libertarian ideologues like the Scaifes, Olins, and Kochs,” Supran said. “Unsurprisingly therefore, ACSH’s rhetoric on the climate crisis since the 1990’s has masterfully complemented the talking points of itsfossil fuel funders, including Exxon, Mobil, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute.”

Exxon, Mobil and “The Great Defender of Petrochemical Companies”

ACSH was founded in 1978 by Elizabeth Whelan, a public health scientist with postgraduate degrees from Yale and Harvard, who died in 2014. She wanted to counteract the work of environmental and consumer advocacy groups, which she said were not using sound science about the dangers of products to the environment and public health. “We help policymakers see past scaremongers and activist groups who have targeted GMOs, vaccines, conventional agriculture, nuclear power, natural gas, and ‘chemicals,’ while peddling health scares and fad diets,” the ACSH website says.

It’s unknown whether Exxon and Mobil’s funding was used for a specific project or research, but the ACSH grant was recommended by Mobil’s public relations department, which said Whelan’s work was a major benefit to the company.

Whelan’s description of the ACSH was much more candid. In a 1992 memo, she referred to the organization as “the great defender of petrochemical companies.”

In a 1998article titled, Global Warming Not Health Threat, Whelan wrote that climate science is “is rife with uncertainty as are the allegations for the health effects” and climate change models are “far from perfect.”

“As for the hypothetical health effects that are based on the alleged global warming, these predictions are even more dubious,” wrote Whelan, adding that limiting greenhouse gas emissions could worsen human health in developing countries.[grn blk death bs]

Supran said ACSH vociferously promoted Mobil’s position that addressing climate change would result in severe adverse economic impacts and increase poverty.

“ACSH was and is a talking head, amplifying the fossil fuel industry’s narrative while maintaining the false pretense of an “independent” voice,” Supran said. “Their rhetoric faithfully echoed Mobil’s key themes of doubt: that global warming is not real and human-caused, not serious, and not solvable.”

ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.

Wanted: Studies to “Put Climate Change Health Hazards in Perspective”

It was at the urging of Mobil that the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a fossil fuel industry-backed group that worked from 1989 to 2002 to strategically undermine international climate negotiations, looked to the ACSH for help downplaying the potential health effects of climate change.

By the mid-1990’s, the GCC and its fossil fuel members, including many ACSH funders, had become concerned about the growing body of research suggesting climate change could cause serious health impacts. CF

Exxon scientists Dennis Devlin and Barry Friedlander presented a summary of published literature on the health impacts of climate change during a September 1996 meeting of the Global Climate Coalition’s Science and Technology Assessment Committee. The presentation emphasized “key knowledge gaps” and “advocated critical evaluation of models and ongoing studies to put climate change health hazards in perspective.”

After the presentation, the GCC meeting attendees discussed the findings and brainstormed “ways of encouraging a more balanced scientific evaluation of this concern.”

To provide that “balance,” Lenny Bernstein of Mobil suggested Whelan and the ACSH.

Bernstein told the group that Whelan was considering an “independent assessment on the climate change and health issue.” He also noted that many of the Global Climate Coalition’s member companies financially support the ACSH and urged them to contact her to suggest she write an assessment.

“The health issue is increasing in importance with the climate change issue, as with other environmental issues,” wrote the Global Climate Coalition in meeting minutes from January 1997. “The GCC has got to be prepared to respond to the issue this year.”

Disregarding the growing body of research indicating otherwise, the GCC in early 1997 wrote in a position paper that “attempting to link global climate change and adverse health impacts requires a long and very tenuous stretch.” The group downplayed the work of a 1995 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—an intergovernmental body of the United Nations that includes the world’s leading climate scientists—writing “concerns that climate change might be the cause of various health problems rests on a number of unproved assumptions.”

The Global Climate Coalition also provided the ACSH with a two-part grant to study the health effects of climate change.

The study, however, would be anything but independent.

By early summer 1997, the GCC had reviewed a draft of the report and suggested edits. The ACSH then began working on a rewritten draft to be reviewed by GCC committee members.

It’s unclear if that report was ever published, but later that year the ACSH published “Global climate change and human health.” AUTHORS?] CF

As the GCC had hoped, the report downplayed the views of mainstream science and said “implementation of current proposals for mitigation measures—measures to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—would be both costly and ineffective.”

Brulle said corporations and industry groups like the GCC use organizations like the ACSH to add a “veneer of legitimacy.”

“This really fits directly into this whole strategy of third party spokespersons, taking your point, but not attributing it to you, it’s attributed to an ‘independent’ organization,” Brulle said.

The ACSH report did not disclose its funders, but concluded that “policymakers can safely take several decades to plan a response, and scientists will have enough time to develop cost-effective anti-climate-change strategies.”

When asked if the published report was funded by the Global Climate Coalition or if another report was published,Berezow said he did not know.

“Anyone who would know the answer to that question is either deceased or retired,” he said.

ACSH Benefits to ExxonMobil: Denial and Delay

After years of scrutiny, ExxonMobil has stopped funding some of the more vocal climate deniers and organizations. In addition to dropping CEI, the oil giant has ended its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council and has said it no longer funds the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute and the Institute for Energy Research, all organizations that are heavily industry-influenced and have worked for years to deny climate change and delay the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

But ExxonMobil continues to fund the ACSHdespite the organization’s position that “climate change is a slow-moving threat whose consequences are in the medium- to long-term future, not the near-term.”

“We typically only talk about climate change tangentially. For instance, we support Generation IV nuclear power because, among many other things, it helps reduce carbon emissions,” Berezow said, adding that the organization’s main focus is on biomedical science and public health.

Brulle said while using third-party spokespeople and groups like the ACSH isn’t new, ExxonMobil’s continued relationship is notable.

“I do find it a little surprising that ExxonMobil would be cozy enough to be directly connected to this group,” Brulle said.

Supran said ACSH continues to be an excellent investment for ExxonMobil.

“In a 2016 ACSH article promoting the authority of discredited and debunked climate deniers and delayers, for instance, ExxonMobil’s funding fingerprints are nowhere to be found,” Supran said, referring to Meet the Scientific Outcasts and Mavericks,which was authored by Berezow.

In Are The ‘Green 20’ Suppressing Scientific Dissent?, posted in 2017, then-ACSH presidentHank Campbell, critiqued the New York attorney general’s office for its investigation of ExxonMobil for possibly deceiving its investors on the risks of climate change.

In another, Al Gore: Still Demented After All These Years, Berezow said in 2017 that the world’s biggest health problem is poverty, not climate change. “When it comes to human disease, climate change is mostly a distraction. Eliminating poverty will do far more to save people’s lives than lowering the temperature a notch,” Berezow said.

Nowhere on the ACSH website is ExxonMobil’s funding acknowledged.

“As it’s grown more publicly untenable for companies themselves to publicly deny basic science, front groups like ACSH help do their dirty work,” said Supran, adding that the ACSH is a prime example of how ExxonMobil’s denial and delay continue through increasingly veiled initiatives.

“ACSH’s faux-scientific calls for ’evidence-based science’ and its fixation on false dichotomies between meaningful climate action on the one hand, and poverty reduction and economic growth on the other, align with, extend, and amplify ExxonMobil’s own talking points,” he said. “The rhetoric has shifted an inch, but it’s just a rose by any other name—the goal is the same: inaction.”

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royal soc letter to nick

https://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/09/19/LettertoNick.pdf

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ref

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment**/2006/sep/20/**oilandpetrol.business

no lnx

Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

The scientists also strongly criticise the company's public statements on global warming, which they describe as "inaccurate and misleading".

In a letter earlier this month to Esso, the UK arm of ExxonMobil, the Royal Society cites its own survey which found that ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9m to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change.

These include the International Policy Network, a thinktank with its HQ in London, and the George C Marshall Institute, which is based in Washington DC. In 2004, the institute jointly published a report with the UK group the Scientific Alliance which claimed that global temperature rises were not related to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

"There is not a robust scientific basis for drawing definitive and objective conclusions about the effect of human influence on future climate," it said.

In the letter, Bob Ward of the Royal Society writes: "At our meeting in July ... you indicated that ExxonMobil would not be providing any further funding to these organisations. I would be grateful if you could let me know when ExxonMobil plans to carry out this pledge."

The letter, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, adds: "I would be grateful if you could let me know which organisations in the UK and other European countries have been receiving funding so that I can work out which of these have been similarly providing inaccurate and misleading information to the public."

This is the first time the society has written to a company to challenge its activities. The move reflects mounting concern about the activities of lobby groups that try to undermine the overwhelming scientific evidence that emissions are linked to climate change.

The groups, such as the US Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose senior figures have described global warming as a myth, are expected to launch a renewed campaign ahead of a major new climate change report. The CEI responded to the recent release of Al Gore's climate change film, An Inconvenient Truth, with adverts that welcomed increased carbon dioxide pollution.

The latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due to be published in February, is expected to say that climate change could drive the Earth's temperatures higher than previously predicted.

Mr Ward said: "It is now more crucial than ever that we have a debate which is properly informed by the science. For people to be still producing information that misleads people about climate change is unhelpful. The next IPCC report should give people the final push that they need to take action and we can't have people trying to undermine it."

The Royal Society letter also takes issue with ExxonMobil's own presentation of climate science. It strongly criticises the company's "corporate citizenship reports", which claim that "gaps in the scientific basis" make it very difficult to blame climate change on human activity. The letter says: "These statements are not consistent with the scientific literature. It is very difficult to reconcile the misrepresentations of climate change science in these documents with ExxonMobil's claim to be an industry leader."...Environmentalists regard ExxonMobil as one of theleast progressive oil companies because, unlike competitors such as BP and Shell, it has not invested heavily in alternative energy sources...

bad code

ExxonMobil said: "We can confirm that recently we received a letter from the Royal Society on the topic of climate change. Amongst other topics our Tomorrow's Energy and Corporate Citizenship reports explain our views openly and honestly on climate change. We would refute any suggestion that our reports are inaccurate or misleading." A spokesman added that ExxonMobil stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute this year....The Royal Society's move emerged as Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, warned that the polar ice caps were breaking up at a faster rate than glaciologists thought possible, with profound consequences for global sea levels. Professor Rapley said the change was almost certainly down to global warming. "It's like opening a window and seeing what's going on and the message is that it's worse than we thought," he said.

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...September 20 2006:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- ExxonMobil, which has come under increasing scrutiny for funding junk science views on global warming in recent years, has given no money to a global warming denier group it had previously funded.

The oil company donated no money to the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2006, which ran ads on American television touting the benefits of carbon dioxide in May with the catchphrase: "Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."

Carbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels are burned and has been shown to be linked to global climate change.

In 2005, however ExxonMobil (Charts) had given the organization $270,000.

The company says there is no connection between the funding change and a July meeting with the UK scientific society, the Royal Society.

In a letter released at the beginning of the month the Royal Society charged the company with funding "organizations that have been misinforming the public about the science of climate change."

Oil giant Exxon is reviewing its funding of groups that deny global warming's dangers as part of its annual review of organizations it donates to, according to the company.

"Decisions on funding are made based on that review, which is not final," said Mark D. Boudreaux, Media Relations Manager of Exxon Mobil.

Boudreaux said that "the review includes all charitable organizations we support, including those in the public policy area."

"This review is NOT in response to any action by the Royal Society," said Boudreaux "but is something we do in our normal budgeting process."

ExxonMobil shares fell 2.12 percent Wednesday. BP (Charts) ended the session 31 cents lower. Royal Dutch Shell (Charts) gained 32 cents.

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ref guk? 1994 grants:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5756991-Mobil-Grants-with-annotations.html

Mobil Grants with annotations for publication

1994 Budget Recommendations p. 1

$1.2 million of Grant Recommendations for 1994 p. 2

Proposed Foundation Grants Assumed by Corporate and Community Affairs p. 3

JJ Wise Approves $145,000 of recommendations under the heading "Assumed by Corporate and Community Affairs" p. 3

American Council on Science and Health p. 16

Environmental Law Institute p. 17

Institute for Evaluating Health Risks p. 18

National Research Council p. 19

International Bird Rescue Research Center p. 22

National Safety Council p. 24

Wildlife Rehabilitation Center p. 25

Environmental Associates Program p. 26

Bowdoin College Marine Research Laboratory p. 28

Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory/Columbia University p. 29

Greater Caribbean Energy & Environ. Foundation p. 32

Harvard School of Public Health Center for Risk Analysis p. 33

University of Miami p. 34

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution p. 43

Florida A&M University p. 57

University of Chicago p. 107

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https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5756991-Mobil-Grants-with-annotations.html#document/p33/a486174

MOBIL FOUNDATION, INC. GRANT RECOMMENDATION Organization: American Council on Science and HealthDate:__ 6/93_ Address: 1995 Broadway Budget Year: 1994_ Zip Code: New York, New York 10023 Amount: $15,000____ Organizational Contact: Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, Exec. Director Program/Department: Effects of Food, Chemicals & the Environment on Human Health Recommending Mobil Unit (Co.,Div. & Dept.): MOCORP, EHS Mobil Employee Coordinating Grant: A. J. Silvestri Previous Grants by Mobil 1981-86 - $10,000/yr 1987-90 - $ 5,000/yr 1991 $15,000/yr 1992 $15,000/yr 1993 $15,000/yr JUSTIFICATION: Grants by Other Corporations Stauffer Chevron Ashland Union Carbide ARCO Shell Exxon $10,000 10,000 25,000 10,000 10,000 15,000 10.000 501(c)(3) attached ~ (If New Organization) DO NOT WRITE IN THIS BLOCK For Foundation Use Only: Unit Code: Cat. Code: Purpose of Grant The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) promotes accurate,

:{:{scientifically-based evaluations of food, chemicals and the environment on human health and has an effective public outreach program in understandable lay terms. Effectiveness of Program/Orcranization As part of its public outreach, ACSH investigates health-related subjects and reports the findings to technical and general audiences. The Council has achieved high credibility and recognition in the media and scientific community, as evidenced by wide publication of their positions in the press and in scientific journals. ACSH outreach effort involves use of this material by many local radio and television stations. This grass roots approach is needed to help educate the public and reduce fear of industrial chemicals. ACSH promotes rational understanding of the relative minor risks from most industrial chemicals compared with those accepted as normal from natural causes. Benefits to Mobil One of the major benefits is due to the Executive Director, Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, an articulate spokesperson who often appears as a counterpoint to so-called "public interest" groups. We continue to be impressed with the accomplishments of ACSH, and recommend continued funding. This recommendation has the concurrence of the Medical and Public Relations Departments. NCO-4309A (5-81)}:

p. 17

MOBIL FOUNDATION, INC. GRANT RECOMMENDATION Organization: Environmental Law Institute Address: 1616 P Street NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC Zip Code: 20036 Organizational Contact: Mr. W. Futrell Program/Department: Date:__ 6/93 Budget Year: 1994 Amount:__ $7.500 Recommending Mobil Unit (Co.,Div. & Dept.): MOCORP, EHS Mobil Employee Coordinating Grant: J. C. Hildrew 501(c)(3) attached _ (If New Organization) Previous Grants by Mobil 1991 1992 1993 - $5,000 $7,500 $7,500 JUSTIFICATION: Grants by Other Corporations Companies contributing at least $5,000 Ford Occidental DuPont Monsanto GE Sun Oil Shell DO NOT WRITE IN THIS BLOCK For Foundation Use Only: Unit Code: Cat. Code: Description of Activities and Programs The Environmental Law Institute (ELI) is a non-profit organization which promotes better understanding of environmental issues through its publications and through seminars. Although an environmental group, it promotes reasonable approaches and solutions to problems. Two of its leading publications are the Environmental Law Reporter and The Environmental Forum. Purpose of Grant This unrestricted grant would assist ELI in its publications and programs to identify the major issues confronting the country in order to better educate thought leaders on the choices and their implications. Institute publications are widely read in the environmental community and are helpful in communicating industry's concerns to such organizations. Effectiveness of Program/Organization ELI has been an important group in identifying the effects of new environmental requirements on the public's lifestyle. Programs such as recycling and transportation control plans under the Clean Air Act can have significant affects on disposal of waste and suburban development programs. ELI has the ability to keep issues before the government and the public through their symposiums and reports. Benefits to Mobil Mobil Foundation grants will enhance environmental organizations' views of Mobil, enable us to reach through ELI activities many groups that we do not communicate with, and enable Mobil to participate in their dialogue groups. NCO-4309A (5-81)

MOBIL FOUNDATION, INC. GRANT RECOMMENDATION Organization: Institute for Evaluating Health Risks Address: Suite 608, 1101 Vermont Ave., N.W. Zip Code: Washington, D.C. 20005 Organizational Contact: John A. Moore, President Program/Department: Unrestricted Contribution Date:_**_{_ 6/93 Budget Year: 1994 Amount:_**_ $15,000 Recommending Mobil Unit (Co.,Div. & Dept.): MOCORP, EHS Mobil Employee Coordinating Grant: C. J. DiPerna 501(c) (3) attached }_ (If New Organization) Previous Grants by Mobil 1990 - $15,000 (Contribution) 1992 - $10,000 1993 - $15,000 JUSTIFICATION: Grants by Other Corporations DO NOT WRITE IN THIS BLOCK For Foundation Use Only: IEHR sought three year commitments from various companies in 1991. Supporters include Chevron, Dow, GE, Merck, Monsanto, SC Johnson Wax and Texaco. Unit Code: Cat. Code: Purpose of Grant The fundamental mission of the IEHR is, in the words of its president, "... to open up risk assessment both to better science and to a broader range of scientific input." Their strategy seeks to bring government, industry and academia together in a setting where policy and major areas of controversy can be shaped and moved forward. Mobil was asked to provide funding for three years to assist the new organization staff up and demonstrate its effectiveness. The recommended grant of $15,000 would represent the third year of support for IEHR. Effectiveness of Program/Organization The IEHR president is John Moore, previously an assistant EPA administrator, who possesses high credibility with industry health risk assessment groups. Two major activities, the Developmental and Reproductive Toxicants (DART) project and the Bioaccumulation project, resulted in well crafted documents that reflected scientific consensus and could serve as realistic models for regulation development. These examples demonstrate that the organization is providing a mechanism by which the use of science and technology can be advanced effectively, ultimately to influence the development of more cost-effective EHS regulations. Benefits to Mobil Almost all federal and state regulatory agencies conduct, or aspire to conduct, their business according to risk-based management systems. The pervasiveness of the concept and the importance of regulatory systems makes it essential for industry to actively support the rational use of scientific information in risk-based determinations. NCO-4309A (5-81)

p. 19

MOBIL FOUNDATION, INC. GRANT RECOMMENDATION Organization: National Research Council...

Mobil Foundation, Inc. grant recommendation ORGANIZATION: Harvard School of Public Health,Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA)ADDRESS: 718 Huntington Ave., Boston, Mass. ZIP CODE: 02115 ORGANIZATIONAL CONTACT: Dr. John D. Graham, Center DirectorPROGRAM/DEPARTMENT: Harvard Center for Risk Analysis DATE: June 1993 BUDGET YEAR: 1994 AMOUNT: $12.500 RECOMMENDING MOBIL UNIT (CO., DIV. & DEPT.): REEA (EHS) MOBIL EMPLOYEE COORDINATING GRANT: J. C. Hildrew PREVIOUS GRANTS BY MOBIL 501(C) (3) ATTACHED □ (IF NEW ORGANIZATION) DO NOT WRITE IN THIS BLOCK For Foundation Use Only: GRANTS BY OTHER CORPORATIONS 1990-1993 - $25,000 i i i i UNIT CODE: __ CAT. CODE: i __ L JUSTIFICATION: Description of Activities and Programs HCRA was established in 1989 during congressional debate on the Clean Air Act Amendments when it became clear that key principles of risk analysis were not well understood or defended. The Center's mission is to enhance public health by promoting reasoned public responses to hazards by incorporating the risk analysis framework into public policy, education, and scientific research. Three current projects of particular interest to Mobil are "Competing Risks", "Lifesaving Priorities", and "Superfund Reform". These projects will stimulate public debate over the costs and benefits of various programs and whether America is making wise investments of its limited resources.

Purpose of Grant The purpose of this grant is to support continued public policy projects and basic research on risk analysis and its role in public policy development. Effectiveness of Program/Organization HCRA (and Director John Graham in particular) is recognized as a leading authority in the application of risk analysis to public policy. It has been effective in influencing Clean Air Act legislation on toxic emission standards and pointing out the safety risks associated with excessively stringent fuel economy standards. We expect the Center to play an influential role in consideration of future environmental legislative and regulatory actions. Benefits to Mobil Mobil will benefit significantly through the adoption of more cost-effective laws and regulations which give greater consideration to the cost/risk tradeoffs involved. Mobil's environmental expenditures exceeded $1 billion in 1992. Without a greater appreciation of scientific risk analysis, these costs will continue to escalate as environmental rules and programs are made excessively stringent in response to the public's unfounded panic over relatively minor incidents. This grant request for $12,500 is half of the $25,000 to Harvard, with the other half being provided by the Corporate Medical Department. u :flan.cac...

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https://www.salon.com**/2015/07/**15/exxons_lies_go_even_deeper_how_the_oil_giant_broke_its_promise_and_spent_millions_supporting_climate_denial/

even for a fossil fuel company, ExxonMobil's looking dirty.

Just last week, it earned the distinction of being the fossil fuel giant with the longest known history of climate denial. As early as 1981, it emerged, the company was aware that climate change, as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, was going to be an issue. Internally, it understood the science. Yet its public-facing strategy, over the decades that followed, was one based on denial -- a strategy backed by millions of dollars in spending.

Exxon, in response, asserted that it no longer funds climate denial groups. In fact, Exxon swore to quit that habit eight years ago -- and then went ahead and kept doing it anyway. According to the Guardian, the company's given more than $2.3 million to climate denying members of Congress and to thatmonster of anti-climate science lobbying groups, guk] the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Here's the promise that Exxon, in response to pressure from shareholders, made in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship report:

In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.

And here's the breakdown, per its financial and tax records, of what it's done since: it's given $1.87 million to members of Congress who are on the record denying the scientific reality of man-made climate change, and $454,000 to ALEC.

Of course an oil company is going to want to support the politicians who support fossil fuel extraction, and dodging the climate issue is Republicans' go-to way for doing that -- with everything we know about the risks of climate change, it'd be pretty hard for them to justify it otherwise. But the senators who received financial backing from Exxon aren't just pulling the "I'm not a scientist" line -- 49 of them voted "no" on a resolution acknowledging that human activity is the main driver of climate change.

Since 2007, Exxon's given $20,500 to Senator James Inhofe, who has zero qualms about promoting the, and $14,000 to Senator Roger Wicker, who cast the single "no" vote in a resolution saying, simply, that "climate change is real and not a hoax." These are positions of climate change that are most certainly diverting attention from important discussions -- again, the senate's wasting its time voting on whether or not to believe in something that the overwhelming majority of scientists say is happening!

As for ALEC, the group's done nothing to contradict Google chairman Eric Schmidt's infamous accusation that it's "literally lying" about climate change. On the contrary, it's still trying to insist that climate change might turn out to be a good thing.

An Exxon spokesman, in an email to the Guardian, insisted that "we don’t embrace the views of those who deny climate change or think it isn’t a serious matter." Just like our reliance on fossil fuels, it would appear lying is a tough habit to break.

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mojo

https://grist.org/climate-change/**2011-06**-29-exxonmobil-break-its-promise-stop-funding-global-warming-deniers/

kate s

back in 2008, ExxonMobil pledged to quit funding climate change deniers. But according to new documents released through a Greenpeace Freedom of Information Act request, the oil giant was still forking over cash to climate skeptics as recently as last year, to the tune of $76,000 for one scientist skeptical of humankind’s role in global warming. This — and much more — came to light in a new report about the funding [PDF] of Wei Hock “Willie” Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Soon has been a favorite among climate skeptics for years, since coauthoring a paper back in 2003 that claimed that the 20th century was probably not the warmest, nor was it unique. That paper, published in the journal Climate Research, was widely criticized by climate scientists for its content, not to mention the funding it received from the American Petroleum Institute. An astrophysicist by training, Soon has also claimed that solar variability — i.e., changes in the amount of radiation coming from the sun — are to likely to blame for warming temperatures.

In 2007, Soon coauthored a paper challenging the claim that climate change harms polar bears. The paper drew plenty of criticism, as it was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, The Charles G. Koch Foundation, and ExxonMobil— groups with a clear interest in the debate over whether the bears merited endangered species protections.

Given that Soon had previously disclosed some of his corporate funding, in December 2009, Greenpeace submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information about Soon’s funders and any conflict of interest forms he may have submitted. In response, Smithsonian produced a list of his major bankrollers, which included more than $800,000 from major energy interests. According to the document, Exxon provided $55,000 for a study on Arctic climate change in 2007 and 2008, and another $76,106 for research into solar variability between 2008 and 2010.

ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers accused Greenpeace of “peddling this discredited conspiracy theory” about its support for climate deniers. He maintained that the company stopped funding Soon in 2009. “We made a decision to discontinue funding groups whose positions on climate change weren’t very constructive. It was distracting,” said Jeffers. “The issue of climate change is so important, it shouldn’t be distracted by the type of things Greenpeace does,” Jeffers said.

Even if Greenpeace and Smithsonian are wrong and ExxonMobil has stopped funding his work, Soon still appears to be getting significant backing from other fossil fuel companies, with thecoal giant Southern Company providing $120,000to look at “solar variability and climate change signals from temperature” in 2008 and 2009, and the Koch Foundation providing Soon another $65,000 last year.

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment**/2015/jul/**15/exxon-mobil-gave-millions-climate-denying-lawmakers

no lnx guk

exxonMobil gave millions to climate-denying lawmakers despite pledge

Under pressure from shareholders, company promised eight years ago to stop funding climate denial – but financial and tax records tell a different story

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

@suzyji

Wed 15 Jul 2015

ExxonMobil pledged in 2007 to stop funding climate denial.

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ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.

Climate denial – from Republicans in Congress and lobby groups operating at the state level – is seen as a major obstacle to US and global efforts to fight climate change, closing off the possibility of federal and state regulations cutting greenhouse gas emissions and the ability to plan for a future of sea-level rise and extreme weather.

Exxon channeled about $30m to researchers and activist groups promoting disinformation about global warming over the years, according to a tally kept by the campaign group Greenpeace. But the oil company pledged to stop such funding in 2007, in response to pressure from shareholder activists.

“In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner,” Exxon said in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship report.

But since 2007, the oil company has given $1.87m to Republicans in Congress who deny climate change and an additional $454,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), according to financial and tax records.

In a statement to the Guardian this week, Exxon spokesman Richard Keil reiterated: “ExxonMobil does not fund climate denial.”

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Alec, an ultra-conservative lobby group, has hosted seminars promoting the long-discredited idea that rising carbon dioxide emissions are the “elixir of life”, and was behind legislation banning state planners in North Carolina from considering future sea-level rise.

Campaigners said Exxon’s support for members of Congress and lobby groups that deny climate change was at odds with the company’s public position that it is committed to acting on the threat posed by global warming.

“If they are going to be serious about what they say about believing in the science of climate change, they should actually take action and show they are genuine,” said David Turnbull, campaign director of Oil Change International, which compiled the data on Exxon contributions to members of Congress at the Guardian’s request.

A majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate deny climate change or oppose action to fight climate change, according to the Center for American Progress.

Exxon’s beneficiaries in Congress include the Oklahoma senator Jim Inhofe, who called global warming a hoax, and who has received $20,500 since 2007, according to the Dirty Energy Money database maintained by Oil Change International.

Exxon funded the Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, who cast the single no vote earlier this year against a symbolic “sense of the Senate” resolution that climate change was real and not a hoax. The resolution passed 98-1. Wicker, who received $14,000 from Exxon, voted no.

Exxon also gave a total of $868,150 to Republican senators who voted against another symbolic resolution that human activity was a significant driver of climate change.

Each of the 49 Republican senators who voted no received at least $5,000 from Exxon, according to Oil Change figures.

Exxon has also continued to fund Alec, which works to block climate legislation in state legislatures, according to figures compiled by the Climate Investigations Center from the oil company’s own disclosures in its annual Worldwide Giving Reports and foundation tax filings.

Alec has for decades worked to block action on climate change, by drafting bills for state legislatures aimed at dismantling environmental regulations. The lobby group hosted a summit last December featuring a speaker who called carbon dioxide emissions “the elixir of life”.

“The ongoing rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide should be welcomed with opened arms,” Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, told about 100 state legislators and corporate executives at the summit, according to InsideClimate News. Such claims have been dismissed in their entirety by scientists.

The ultra-conservative Alec claims to support “free market environmentalism” and on its website accuses campaign groups of conflating this with climate denial. However, the website refers to climate change as a “historical phenomenon”, and states – contrary to fact – that its causes are a matter of continued debate. When asked directly, an Alec spokesman declined to say whether the lobby group saw climate change as a threat, and declined to say whether it stood by Idso’s views.

“Alec is a forum for the exchange of ideas and continuing education of state legislators. All viewpoints are welcome. Indeed,” Wilhelm Meierling, an Alec spokesman, said in an email. “Today, legislators want to learn from as many viewpoints as possible in order to make the best possible decision for the people they represent.”

He said Exxon did not underwrite the “continuing education workshop” with Idso.

Alec suffered a string of defections over its position on climate change during the last year, with companies such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, BP America, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo resigning their memberships.

Google accused the lobbying group of lying about climate change.

Exxon would not discuss its membership in Alec. However, the company said it was serious about confronting climate change and does not fund climate denial. In 2007, the oil company committed to ending its support for a network of think tanks and activist groups that deny the science underlying climate change or have worked to block action against climate change.

Keil, the Exxon spokesman, said in an email: “We are taking action in a range of ways – by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in our operations, helping consumers reduce their emissions, and by supporting research at leading US universities into both increased emissions reduction capability and research into alternative energy sources.”

Keil did not respond to specific questions about Exxon’s financial support for members of Congress who deny climate change, about its support for Alec, or about funding of the Idso seminar.

“I don’t believe we underwrite specific Alec functions, and, as should be abundantly clear from my past statements to you, we believe climate change is real and warrants action, we’re taking steps to address it, which I’ve also provided you voluminous detail on, and we don’t embrace the views of those who deny climate change or think it isn’t a serious matter,” Keil wrote in an email.

He went on: “Because The Guardian has abandoned objective journalism and has a clear agenda regarding climate change, it can no longer be trusted to do the job its readers have a right to expect, which is to provide accurate and unbiased coverage on this important topic.”

Corporate funding of climate denial is seen as a major barrier to US action on climate change – and dividing the US from Europe in addressing global warming.

“If Exxon was very clear about this, it would be a big help,” said Jeff Sachs, president of the Earth Institute and an adviser to the United Nations on climate change. “If this is what they believe, they ought to make it known and they ought to make it known very publicly because we have the entire Republican party in denial and fighting tooth and nail every step of the way against reasonable action. Exxon could make a very big difference.”

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Gunther, Fortune senior writer

May 29 2007

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- ExxonMobil's stock is up by 35 percent in the last year. The oil giant made $39.5 billion in profits in 2006, tops in the Fortune 500. But don't expect a roomful of smiling faces at Exxon's annual shareholder meeting tomorrow.

Instead, Greenpeace, gay-rights groups, critics of bloated CEO pay, religious shareholders and some of the nation's biggest public pension funds will assail the company for its lack of responsibility. They've filed a dozen shareholder resolutions on environmental, governance and social issues.

Rarely has there been such a stark disconnect between a company's outstanding financial performance and its not-so-stellar reputation as a corporate citizen.

While other companies have become more "green," more gay-friendly and more willing to give stronger voice to shareholders, ExxonMobil (Charts, Fortune 500) continues to go its own way. Like his predecessor, Lee Raymond, chief executive Rex Tillerson seems disinclined to bow to today's conventional wisdom about how big corporations are supposed to behave.

Why does ExxonMobil draw so much flak? Partly it's a matter of size and style. As the world's largest publicly traded oil company, ExxonMobil is a big target and it has done little, until recently, to engage with its critics.

"It is a closed company," complains Robert A.G. Monks, a veteran shareholder advocate, whose family trust owns 100,000 shares of Exxon, worth about $8 million. "It is a company that listens only to itself."

Last week, the California state teachers retirement fund, the state treasurers of a half dozen states, labor union pension funds and socially-responsible mutual funds said they would withhold their votes for an Exxon director, Michael Boskin, because he wouldn't meet with them. Boskin, a Stanford economics professor, chairs the board's public issues committee. He didn't respond to an e-mail seeking comment, but a company spokesman said Boskin communicates regularly with shareholders and that he helped arrange a day-long meeting for institutional investors with top ExxonMobil officials. The investors say they want access to the directors, as well.

Speaking on a conference call, California's state controller, John Chiang, said of Boskin: "Your failure and unwillingness to communicate with your shareholders speaks volumes about your corporate governance policies."

But the shareholder discontent is about substantive issues, too.

The most prominent is climate change. General Electric (Charts, Fortune 500), Wal-Mart (Charts, Fortune 500), DuPont (Charts, Fortune 500) and oil companies Conoco-Phillips and BP (Charts) have called for strong federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. They accept the scientific consensus that global warming is a threat, that it's caused by man-made activity and that forceful remedies are required.

ExxonMobil won't go that far. In its corporate responsibility report issued last week, the company says: "Because the risk to society and ecosystems from rising greenhouse gas emissions could prove to be significant, strategies that address the risk need to be developed and implemented." It goes out to lay out a set of principles that it believes make sense in addressing climate change. You can read more here.

But the company has upset some environmentalists by providing financial backing (albeit small amounts) for groups that challenge the conventional wisdom on climate change.

The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, publishes a newsletter called Environment and Climate News. Sample headlines: "Fears of Melting Polar Ice Are Discredited," "Record April Freeze Hits U.S." (!), "Scientists Urge Gore to Cool His Global Warming Rhetoric," "When Will We Tire of the Fear Mongers?" ExxonMobil gave $115,000 to the Heartland Institute in 2006.

Another group on Exxon's support list is the George C. Marshall Institute. The climate change page on its Web site displays such headlines as "Storm Guru: Oceans, Not CO2, Cause Global Warming," and "Earth's Climate is Seesawing, According to Climate Reseachers." The institute got $85,000 last year from ExxonMobil.

Gantt Walton, an ExxonMobil spokesman, said it's unfair to call these groups "climate deniers," as Greenpeace did, and that, in any case, they don't speak for ExxonMobil, which supports a broad range of public policy groups. Another Exxon spokesman told me by e-mail: "Groups like the Marshall Institute discussing credible reports from academics and climatologists are legitimate and important components in public policy development." Make up your own mind by visiting Marshall or Heartland.

On governance issues, ExxonMobil opposes Monks' resolution that asks the company to separate the jobs of chairman and CEO. It opposes a proposal from Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law school professor and prominent critic of excessive CEO pay, asking the company to give more power to its independent directors to approve executive compensation. It doesn't want to give shareholders a vote on executive comp, either.

ExxonMobil also opposes a resolution asking the company to adopt in writing a non-discrimination policy against gays and lesbians. More than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies (and 98 of the biggest 100) have done so. While Exxon says it opposes any form of discrimination, you have to wonder why the company won't put its position in writing, and what kind of signal that sends to gay or lesbian employees or prospective employees.

All of these resolutions argue, in essence, that ExxonMobil has been too slow to adjust to a changing world. The dissident shareholders say the company and its shareholders will suffer if ExxonMobil does not prepare for an energy future that is less dependent on fossil fuels. They say the company will pay a price if it ignores social concerns about rising CEO pay. They say the company needs to reach out to diverse groups of employees, including gays.

None of these arguments are new, and ExxonMobil has done just fine up to now by going its own way. That's probably why the company remains resistant to change.

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