Indonesia
aka exxon 3
5/16
post bust. see rico gw, team red and blue, corp person
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AN 2 26
Donald Trump's aggressive "America First" agenda has caused a "profound shift" around the world, with a new analysis reported on by The Guardian showing the extent to which more countries are siding with China as strong U.S. alliances have "crashed."
On Friday, The Guardian published a report sharing the findings of a survey by the firm, FocalData. Using the results of United Nations votes over the first year of Trump's second term as a measure of how much the nations of the world are siding with either the interests of the U.S. or China. The results, as depicted in a chart showing a map of the world, are significant, with many more countries, including once-key allies, shifting towards China, as Trump's machinations have "started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China."
Based on the map created with FocalData's findings, every UN country in Europe has shifted more towards China in the last year, as have the likes of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Most of South and Central America has made the same shift, except for Peru. Africa and Asia are closer to an even split, but countries that shifted towards China are still in the majority, including major players like Japan, South Korea, India and even Russia.
Among the countries that have shifted more towards the U.S. are North Korea, South Africa, Madagascar, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Nigeria.
Though the shifts show some notable trends, many countries have not yet changed their overall voting allegiance. Most of Europe, for example, remains largely aligned with the U.S. despite the shift towards China. Still, the trends show a world power balance in the midst of a historic shift.
"In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory," The Guardian explained. "With significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term."
The report further detailed: "The total number of countries strongly aligned with the US has crashed under Trump, in contrast to China, which has maintained its allies. When comparing all of Trump’s years in the White House, including his first term, with those of his immediate predecessors – Barack Obama and Joe Biden – the number of countries strongly aligned with the US has collapsed, from 46 to just seven. The number of countries closely in China’s orbit has remained broadly constant."
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920 medium.com
Radical Plan to Save the Fastest Sinking City in the World
Many of our coastal cities are imperiled, but none have plotted an escape quite as audacious as Jakarta’s
Steve LeVine in GEn
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https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/07/hold-on-brother-final-days-of-doomed-crew-on-chinese-shark-finning-boat
lied to about job, salary skimmed, passport taken
deforestation
https://www.ecowatch.com/worlds-largest-palm-oil-plantation-2645576807.html
no lnx
3.20
A new company has begun clearing rainforest in an area of Indonesia's easternmost Papua province earmarked to become the world's largest oil palm plantation, in a vast project that has been mired in allegations of lawbreaking.
If seen through to completion, the Tanah Merah project will generate an estimated $6 billion in timber and create a plantation almost twice the size of London, at the heart of the largest tract of intact rainforest left in Asia. It will also release an immense amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at a time when Indonesia has committed to reducing emissions from deforestation.
Since March of last year, the Digoel Agri Group, founded by a politically connected Jakarta family and now backed by an investor from New Zealand, has bulldozed 170 hectares (420 acres) of rainforest in a section of the project previously spared from land clearing, satellite imagery shows.
The clearance amounts to a fraction of the 280,000 hectares (692,000 acres) allocated for the project, now controlled by several different conglomerates. But it signals that deforestation could quickly accelerate after a decade of false starts by other investors.
A satellite view of Digoel Agri's forest clearance, seen in late November 2019.
Since it was first conceived in 2007, the rights to the project have changed hands several times, involving a string of investors who have deployed crude and complex corporate secrecy techniques to hide their identities.
The licensing process for the project has been plagued by irregularities. A cross-border investigation by The Gecko Project, Mongabay, Malaysiakini and Tempo, published in November 2018, revealed that key permits were signed by an elected official who was simultaneously serving a prison sentence for embezzling state funds.
A subsequent report found that officials believe other essential permits — for both the plantation and a giant sawmill to process the timber — were falsified.
Two companies, majority-owned by anonymous firms registered in the United Arab Emirates, began operating on the basis of these permits, to the north of the land now held by Digoel Agri. In response to written questions from The Gecko Project and Mongabay they have denied the allegation that the permits were falsified.
On paper, Digoel Agri's involvement in the project represents a clean break from those allegations. The firm arrived on the scene after the suspect permits held by earlier investors were revoked and reassigned to it.
Jackson Iqbal de Hesselle, 32, a member of the Rumangkang family, which is behind Digoel Agri, said its operations were clean. "We're obeying the rules," he said in a recent interview at the firm's office in Jayapura, the capital of Papua province.
However, while there are no apparent links between Digoel Agri and the previous investors, its ability to operate is partly predicated on the allegedly compromised licensing process that went before....
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ew 120
In fact, Australia has earned the dishonor of being ranked dead last out of 57 countries recently evaluated for how well they're fighting climate change at the policy level.
Meanwhile, Indonesians are directing their fury at their government's inability to respond quickly and forcefully enough to a single, inescapable truth: Jakarta is sinking. According to the World Bank, the city could well be at 16 feet below sea level in just five more years. Last August, in a move that stunned the world, Indonesia's leaders revealed that they would be transferring the nation's capital to Borneo. While many government workers may have been relieved to hear the news, the announcement did little to quell the fears of the other nine million or so people who live in and around Jakarta and who lack the resources to pack up and leave. Wealth inequality is**rampant in Indonesia**; climate change is showing us what it looks like. One photograph on Twitter taken during the recent flooding distills the magnitude of this problem simply and breathtakingly. The aerial image shows both an upscale, resort-style hotel and the much poorer residential neighborhood separated from it by the resort's security fence. The hotel appears untouched by the flooding; the adjacent neighborhood, however, is almost completely underwater. The reason: The hotel — like most new d"...
The hotel — like most new developments that cater to tourists and elites — is elevated several feet above street level. The tweeter's terse caption: "If you think [the] gap isn't real, think again."[*** pix]
If 2019 was the year that climate consciousness hit its tipping point, thanks in large part to the efforts of Greta Thunberg and the youth climate strikers, then 2020 is already shaping up to be the year that we fully absorb the message these activists have been struggling to impart: Policies matter. The people of Australia and Indonesia need immediate disaster relief. (Learn more about how you can help them here and here.) But once they've gotten it, they need something else: governments that will work to prevent future disasters by enacting climate policies that cut carbon emissions, hasten the end of coal and other dirty fossil fuels, preserve and improve infrastructure, encourage cities to adapt to a new slate of inevitable challenges, and ensure that the negative effects of climate change aren't borne disproportionately by the poor and politically marginalized.
The images coming out of Australia and Indonesia right now are hard to look at. But we can't afford to look away.
By nearly every credible account, 2020 is the last year we have to get things right. The horror we're witnessing in just these first weeks is a reminder that there's no time to waste — and definitely no time to indulge governmental hypocrisy or lassitude. This is the year that the people hold their leaders to account. It has to be.
Reposted with permission from onEarth.
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floods 1/20 // fires Oz
Indonesia Seeds Clouds After Flooding Kills 43
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/magazine/palm-oil-borneo-climate-catastrophe.html
no lnx
The remains of an Indonesian rain forest that was cleared to make way for oil palms.
The remains of an Indonesian rain forest that was cleared to make way for oil palms.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
FEATURE
Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.
A decade ago, the U.S. mandated the use of vegetable oil in biofuels, leading to industrial-scale deforestation — and a huge spike in carbon emissions.
The remains of an Indonesian rain forest that was cleared to make way for oil palms.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
By Abrahm Lustgarten
Nov. 20, 2018
This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine.
The fields outside Kotawaringin village in Central Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, looked as if they had just been cleared by armies. None of the old growth remained — only charred stumps poking up from murky, dark pools of water. In places, smoke still curled from land that days ago had been covered with lush jungle. Villagers had burned it all down, clearing the way for a lucrative crop whose cultivation now dominates the entire island: the oil-palm tree.
The dirt road was ruler straight, but deep holes and errant boulders tossed our tiny Toyota back and forth. Trucks coughed out black smoke, their beds brimming over with seven-ton loads of palm fruit rocking back and forth on tires as tall as people. Clear-cut expanses soon gave way to a uniform crop of oil-palm groves: orderly trees, a sign that we had crossed into an industrial palm plantation. Oil-palm trees look like the coconut-palm trees you see on postcards from Florida — they grow to more than 60 feet tall and flourish on the peaty wetland soil common in lowland tropics. But they are significantly more valuable. Every two weeks or so, each tree produces a 50-pound bunch of walnut-size fruit, bursting with a red, viscous oil that is more versatile than almost any other plant-based oil of its kind. Indonesia is rich in timber and coal, but palm oil is its biggest export. Around the world, the oil from its meat and seeds has long been an indispensable ingredient in everything from soap to ice cream. But it has now become a key ingredient of something else: biodiesel, fuel for diesel engines that has been wholly or partly made from vegetable oil.
Finally we emerged, and as we crested a hill, the plantations fell into an endless repetition of tidy bunches stretching for miles, looking almost like the rag of a Berber carpet. Occasionally, a shard of an old ironwood tree shot into the air, a remnant of the primordial canopy of dense rain forest that dominated the land until very recently.
Our driver, a 44-year-old island native and whistle-blower named Gusti Gelambong, had brought us here to show us the incredible destruction wrought by the growing demand for palm oil. The oldest male among nine siblings, he was modestly built but exuded a wiry strength. His father, he told us, was a king of one of Borneo’s dozens of Dayak tribes, the sixth descendant of the sultan of Old Kotawaringin, and his mother came from a line of warriors who served in the Indonesian special forces. In 2001, he said, he took part in a brutal ethnic cleansing of Indonesians who had moved in from the nearby island of Madura. He macheted his way through the nearby town of Pangkalan Bun, slaughtering dozens of people. He felt no remorse about the violence. But the palm-oil companies, Gelambong said, were much stronger than the Madurese. As we approached an intersection, we could see two plantation guards lying back in a shack, rifles propped against their knees. He sped past the guards, averting his eyes.
Most of the plantations around us were new, their rise a direct consequence of policy decisions made half a world away. In the mid-2000s, Western nations, led by the United States, began drafting environmental laws that encouraged the use of vegetable oil in fuels — an ambitious move to reduce carbon dioxide and curb global warming. But these laws were drawn up based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs. Despite warnings that the policies could have the opposite of their intended effect, they were implemented anyway, producing what now appears to be a calamity with global consequences.
The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe. The unprecedented palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has enriched and emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which have begun using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.
ImageA worker on an oil-palm plantation on Borneo.
A worker on an oil-palm plantation on Borneo.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times]
We arrived at another plantation and stopped near where a stream coursed through the bog. People still lived here: A mother bathed two children beneath a culvert, and a shirtless young boy ran through row after row of identical young palms in the distance, surrounded by dragonflies and sparrows. The uniformity of the world he was growing up in was striking, like the endless plains of drilling rigs in an East Texas oil field. It was, in a way, an astounding achievement, the ruthless culmination of mankind’s long effort to extract every last remaining bit of the earth’s seemingly boundless natural wealth. But it was also frightening. This was what an American effort to save the planet looked like. It was startlingly efficient, extremely profitable and utterly disastrous.
- ‘Oh, My God, What the Hell Is Happening Here?’
The last thing anyone expected from President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address was a proposal for the largest-ever cut in the nation’s use of gasoline. The president was no climate champion — he had backed out of the Kyoto Protocol shortly after taking office in 2001 — but he did favor what he called “energy independence.” He had declared the United States “addicted” to foreign oil, yet dependence on Middle Eastern fuel continued. Hurricane Katrina, and the lingering damage it did to oil pipelines and refineries, had pushed up gas prices, renewed fears of global warming and kept a firm thumb on the economy.
Now, Bush proposed, homegrown energy could be drawn from the rural places most in need of an economic boost. Clean-coal initiatives would generate the electricity of the future, but it wasbiofuels — in particular ethanol, which is largely distilled from corn, and biodiesel, made with vegetable oil — that would power the vehicles of the future. Within 10 years, the country would replace 35 billion gallons of petroleum, or one-fifth of all the gas and diesel burned, with fuel made from plants. The measure, as he put it, would confront “the serious challenge of global climate change.” Unsaid, but clear to anyone paying attention, was that it would also please America’s agriculture industry, which had been lobbying for ethanol and advanced biofuel research for years. The House chamber erupted in applause.
On the night of the president’s address, Timothy Searchinger sat on his couch in Takoma Park, Md., just a few miles from the Capitol, and watched on television, struck by what seemed to him a glaring lapse in logic. “Oh, my God, what the hell is happening here?” he recalls wondering aloud.
Searchinger wasn’t a scientist; he was a lawyer, working with the Environmental Defense Fund. But he saw a serious flaw in the claim that the president’s proposal would ameliorate climate change. Searchinger knew that cropland had already consumed virtually every arable acre across the Midwest.Quintupling biofuel production would require a huge amount of additional arable land, far more than existed in the United States. Unless Americans planned to eat less, that meant displacing food production to some other country with unused land — and he knew that when forests are cut, or new land is opened for farming, substantial new amounts of carbon can be released into the atmosphere. Forests hold as much as 45 percent of the planet’s carbon stored on land, and old-growth trees in particular hold a great deal of that carbon, typically far more than any of the crops that replace them. When the trees are cut down, most of that carbon is released.
Scientists and lawyers who study environmental impact often deploy “carbon-life-cycle analysis” to determine just how much carbon a given product is removing from, or introducing to, the environment over the course of its production and consumption. When a truck burns biodiesel, the carbon emissions that come from its tailpipe aren’t much different from those of a truck burning petroleum. But a part of the biodiesel emissions aren’t counted, because — in theory — they have been balanced out: Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere when they grow, and fuel experts subtract that sequestered carbon from the tailpipe emission, completing a transaction that they say balances at zero.
In ideal circumstances — unvegetated land planted for the first time — this balancing out really happens. When corn grows, it soaks up carbon, and when it is consumed (whether as food or fuel), it releases that carbon back into the air. But the analysis breaks down when faced with the reality of land use. Almost everywhere in the world, planting more corn or soy for biofuel would involve creating more farmland, which in turn would involve cutting down whatever was already growing on that land. And that would mean releasing a huge amount of carbon into the air, with nothing to balance the books. As Searchinger watched Bush’s call for an unprecedented increase in biofuel production, his hunch was that the biofuel balance sheet would turn out to be tragically shortsighted.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, at the time a powerful 16-term Democrat from California who had presided over several failed efforts to pass climate legislation, was also skeptical about Bush’s plan. But he knew that one of the most vexing aspects of global emissions reduction was the question of how to replace transportation fuels. It was hard enough to upgrade several thousand electrical power plants to draw on wind or solar or even nuclear power. That would take years. But transforming the more than 100 million cars and trucks on America’s roads would take far longer, decades even, and in the meantime those vehicles were producing 28 percent of carbon emissions in the United States. Waxman thought a biofuel requirement could be a turning point in climate legislation, a moment when Washington stopped pretending.
Within months of Bush’s speech, the House and the Senate were reconciling a draft of a sprawling omnibus bill that would eventually be called the Energy Independence and Security Act, or EISA. In addition to requiring carmakers to improve fuel standards, a longtime priority for Democrats, the bill updated and expanded renewable-fuel standards, requiring fuel producers to mix in soy, palm and other kinds of vegetable oil with diesel fuel and to use ethanol from corn and sugar in gasoline. The bill also set tough standards for how much cleaner, in terms of carbon, each of those categories of fuel had to become — 50 percent for diesel, 20 percent for gas — and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to judge what qualified.
The expected gains were enormous. The switch to biofuels, the E.P.A. would later calculate, promised to stop the release of 4.5 billion tons of carbon over three decades, the equivalent of parking every single American automobile for more than seven years. Before the bill passed in December 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “the shot heard round the world for energy independence.”
The law had a profound effect. Biodiesel production in the United States would jump from 250 million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016. Imports of biodiesel to the United States surged from near zero to more than 100 million gallons a month. As fuel markets snatched up every ounce of domestic soy oil to meet the American fuel mandate, the food industry also replaced the soy it had used with something cheaper and just as good: palm oil, largely from Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the sources of nearly 90 percent of the global supply. Lawmakers never anticipated that their well-intentioned plan — to help the climate by helping American farmers — might instead transform Indonesia and present one of the greatest threats to the planet’s tropical rain forests. But as Indonesian palm oil began to flood Western markets, that is exactly what began to happen.
“We saw great promise,” Waxman told me recently, sitting in a glass conference room at Waxman Strategies, the Washington lobbying firm of which he is chairman. But he is no longer so hopeful. He is now also the chairman of the environmental organization Mighty Earth, which lobbies food and agriculture companies to deploy more climate-friendly production methods. In 2007, he and other lawmakers were focused on the benefits of biofuels and the bridge they promised to even greener technologies. Now the soft-spokenWaxman is far more concerned about the other side of the equation. “We didn’t think we were going to pay such a heavy price,” he said.
- ‘No One Fights for Their Rights’
Palm-oil producers had been lobbying American lawmakers to introduce biofuel incentives for years, and they were well prepared for the moment when the incentives became law. Wilmar — the colossal Singaporean conglomerate that controls nearly half of the global palm-oil trade — announced in 2007 that it would quadruple its biodiesel production. In Indonesia, officials directed state-owned and regional banks to make loans on more than $8 billion worth of palm-oil-related development projects and pledged to produce 5.9 billion gallons of biofuel within five years. They also announced that Indonesia would convert more than 13 million acres of additional forest to industrialized palm production. It was as if in response to a law in China, the United States undertook a plan to convert every single acre of New Jersey to soybean crops, and then threw in all of Connecticut and New Hampshire....
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Dato' Sri Haji Mohammad Najib bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak (Jawi: محمد نجيب بن عبدالرازق; born 23 July 1953) is a Malaysian politician who served as the 6th Prime Minister of Malaysia from 2009 to 2018. He was the former President of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the leading party in Malaysia's Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which maintained control of Malaysia's government as a parliamentary majority for more than sixty years until the coalition's defeat in the 2018 general election.
On 3 July 2018, Najib was arrested by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), investigating how RM42 million (US$10.6 million) went from SRC International into Najib's bank account. Police seized 1,400 necklaces, 567 handbags, 423 watches, 2,200 rings, 1,600 brooches and 14 tiaras worth $273 million.[2]
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Indonesia
Main article: Indonesia–Malaysia relations
Najib with PresidentSusilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Putrajaya on 18 December 2012.
Najib made a visit to Indonesia on 22–24 April 2009. Several issues were discussed, including co-operation in the tourism, oil and gas, and high-technology industries, as well as electricity supply from the Bakun dam to Kalimantan. Najib and his entourage also attended an official dinner hosted by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife Ani Yudhoyono.
also duterte
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https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3034284/former-malaysian-pm-najib-had-no-idea-millions-his
no lnx vid
Former Malaysian PM Najib Razak had no idea millions in his accounts came from 1MDB, defence argues
Southeast Asia
Former Malaysian PM Najib Razak had no idea millions in his accounts came from 1MDB, defence argues
Lawyers for Najib Abdul Razak have argued for his acquittal of corruption charges related to Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal
Prosecutors have wrapped up their case and a decision on whether to acquit him or call for him to enter his defence will be delivered on November 11
SCMP
Reuters
Associated Press
Published: 10:31pm, 23 Oct, 2019
TOP PICKS
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak did not know that millions of dollars transferred into his personal accounts came from scandal-linked state fund 1MDB, his lawyers said on Wednesday as prosecutors wrapped up their first case against the ex-premier.
Najib, 66, who lost a general election last year, is facing dozens of criminal charges over allegations that US$4.5 billion was stolen from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a state fund he co-founded in 2009.
In the first case against him, Najib has pleaded not guilty to seven charges of criminal breach of trust, money laundering and abuse of power over allegations that he illegally received transfers totalling 42 million ringgit (US$10 million) from SRC International, a former 1MDB unit.
Attorney general Tommy Thomas said in his closing submissions on Tuesday that Najib acted like an “emperor” and misused his positions as prime minister, finance minister and adviser to SRC to obtain the funds.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak arrives at the Kuala Lumpur High Court on Tuesday. Photo: AP
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak arrives at the Kuala Lumpur High Court on Tuesday. Photo: AP
“In every part of the transaction, the accused had an important role to play. We say this was deliberate, premeditated, designed and planned by the accused as a corrupt act,” he said.
Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, who leads Najib’s defence team, called for the case against his client to be dismissed.
“We can prove that my client had no dishonesty, no knowledge that the money came from other sources other than the donation from the Arabs,” he told the court.
Najib’s defence strategy had been to lay the blame squarely on his former confidante-turned-fugitive, Low Taek Jho, 37, or more popularly known as Jho Low, whom witnesses testified often called the shots with respect to SRC and Najib’s bank accounts, purportedly with Najib’s knowledge.
Najib was duped by Low into believing that US$681 million banked into his accounts in 2013 weredonated by the Saudi royal family, rather than misappropriated from 1MDB as US lawsuits have alleged, Muhammad Shafee said.
Najib later returned US$620 million to the donor because the money was not utilised, the lawyer said.
“He spent the money for the 2013 election and returned the balance of US$620 million,” Shafee said. “What kind of crook takes money, then lets the money travel around the world, takes it back … and then sends it back to where it came from?”
First of Najib’s corruption trials hinges on knowledge of 1MDB funds
Referring to the SRC case, another defence lawyer, Farhan Read, said the alleged transfers occurred three years after the company was set up and questioned why Najib would wait so long to secure the funds.
“In addition that he was the puppet master and emperor, it implies that he also has the gift of foresight,” Farhan said. “This puts too much on the accused, the evidence says otherwise.”
Jho Low faces charges in Malaysia and the United States over his alleged central role in the case. Photo: AP
Jho Low faces charges in Malaysia and the United States over his alleged central role in the case. Photo: AP
Low faces charges in Malaysia and the United States over his alleged central role in the case. He has denied wrongdoing and his whereabouts are unknown.
Prosecutors wrapped up their case against Najib after hearing statements from 57 witnesses. A ruling on whether to acquit or call for him to enter his defence will be delivered on November 11.
The case has also drawn scrutiny to US bank Goldman Sachs, which has been charged in Malaysia for allegedly misleading investors over bond sales of US$6.5 billion that the bank helped raise for 1MDB.
Malaysia has discussed a US$2 billion to US$3 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, quoting unnamed sources.
Malaysia
Malaysia 1MDB scandal
Goldman Sachs
Corruption in Asia
Crime
United States
Read more
Najib’s corruption trials in Malaysia hinge on knowledge of 1MDB funds in his account
First of Najib’s corruption trials hinges on knowledge of 1MDB funds
Najib was ‘briefed’ to say Jho Low had no role in 1MDB, former aide testifies
Najib was ‘briefed’ to say Jho Low had no role in 1MDB – former aide
Malaysia privately discusses slashing Goldman Sach’s 1MDB penalty to just US$2 billion
Malaysia mulls slashing Goldman Sachs’ 1MDB fine to just US$2 billion
Najib’s corruption trials in Malaysia hinge on knowledge of 1MDB funds in his account
His defence said prosecutors have not shown evidence that the former prime minister had a ‘corrupt intent’ to take the money found in his account
The case will serve as a key test of Malaysia’s ability to get to the bottom of the 1MDB scandal and bring those responsible to justice
Bloomberg
Bloomberg
Published: 3:41pm, 22 Oct, 2019
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Najib Razak - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Najib_Razak
2.
**Education**: BSc Industrial Economics
**Children**: 5 (including Mohd Nazifuddin); Riza ...
Political party: UMNO - BN (1976–)
Alma mater: University of Nottingham
Premiership of Najib Razak · Mohd Nazifuddin Najib · Rosmah Mansor
Former Malaysian PM Najib Razak had no idea millions in his ...
https://www.scmp.com › News › Asia › Southeast Asia
1.
Najib Razak 1MDB: Malaysia's former PM faces biggest trial ...
https://www.bbc.com › news › world-asia-49492707
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People also ask
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How a U.S. law intended to reduce dependence on fossil fuels has unleashed an environmental disaster in Indonesia. by Abrahm Lustgarten |
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Photos: An Indonesian Village That’s Fighting for Its Life In Bea Nehas, the small plots that homes are built on are in constant jeopardy of being burned to the ground and bulldozed. A sprawling plantation that surrounds the village produces huge volumes of palm oil. by Ashley Gilbertsonspecial to ProPublica |
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omg
Indonesia Will Move its Capital from Fast-Sinking Jakarta
https://www.ecowatch.com/indonesia-to-move-capital-jakarta-2636197365.html
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Oil Spill Now Larger Than Paris Ravages Indonesian Island, 5 Dead
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Allan Nairn: Indonesian General Tied to Mass Killings Plots to Arrest Critics If He Wins Presidency
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/15/allan_nairn_indonesian_general_tied_to
Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who is better known as “Jokowi,” is up for re-election on Wednesday. His chief rival is Prabowo Subianto, a former special forces military commander and the former son-in-law of Indonesia’s longtime dictator Suharto. It is a rematch of the 2014 election that Jokowi won by almost 6 percentage points. Investigative journalist Allan Nairn has just uncovered shocking plans made by Prabowo for if he wins the presidency. According to minutes of a campaign strategy session obtained by Nairn, Prabowo has made plans to stage mass arrests of political opponents and his current allies. Nairn reports Prabowo also wants to restore Indonesia’s Army to the role it played in the U.S.-backed Suharto dictatorship which lasted from 1967 to 1998. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation and the third-largest democracy in the world behind India and the United States. We speak with Allan Nairn in Indonesia.
https://theconversation.com/how-social-media-is-helping-big-tobacco-hook-a-new-generation-of-smokers-112911
Big Tobacco is increasingly using social media to find new ways to hook young people on smoking, circumventing decades of laws restricting the marketing of traditional cigarettes to minors.
In major cities around the world such as Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Jakarta and Milan, tobacco companies have been holding extravagant events with names like “K_Player” and “RedMoveNow” that were designed to connect with young people. Often featuring alcohol, live music and attractive hosts, these lavish events spare no expense as they seek find new buyers for their tobacco products.
The problem? Those party-goers are carefully targeted young influencers, who are encouraged to share photos of their glamorous tobacco-sponsored adventures with friends and followers on social media using appealing hashtags like #iamonthemove, #decideyourflow and #mydaynow. And although the influencers are over 18, their social media followers can be much younger.
This exploitation of social media’s organic reach is one of the findings from a global research project I’ve been working on since 2016 with more than a dozen different scholars. The anti-smoking advocacy group Tobacco-Free Kids noticed a lot of photos of young people with cigarettes turning up in their online scans of global social media and asked me to look into it.
My own research focuses on how to rigorously research online culture using natural observational techniques, something that this study definitely required.
My team’s task was to monitor, report upon and analyze the programs behind the hashtagged social media posts of young people smoking. What we learned about tobacco company’s current advertising surprised us.
Tobacco ads were much bigger in 1996 – literally. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
Skirting marketing restrictions
Tobacco companies have always had a knack for finding creative ways to skirt regulations intended to curb marketing to young people.
In 1971, the U.S. Congress banned tobacco ads from television and radio. In response, companies invested heavily in outdoor advertising and magazines. In 1997, the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement banned tobacco on outdoor and billboard ads. In response, tobacco money flowed into sponsorships of sports, music and other events. These type of event sponsorships were banned, with some exceptions, in 2010, at the same time wider restrictions on youth marketing were also introduced.
No matter the medium, the messaging was often the same: find ways to reach new and young potential smokers. As documents from the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library reveal, tobacco executives have long believed that the continued survival and success of their companies depends on one thing: convincing young people to buy their products.
In 2005, the World Health Organization banned tobacco advertising in 168 signatory countries. By 2010, the U.S. had closed a lot of Big Tobacco’s favorite advertising and tobacco loopholes.
With conventional media mostly off-limits, what was Big Tobacco to do? Like the Marlboro Man, the unregulated Wild West of social media rode to the rescue.
The perfect marketing medium
Social media fits Big Tobacco’s advertising needs to a tee.
At least 88 percent of American youth say they use social media apps like Facebook and Instagram regularly, and the technologies are notoriously difficult to regulate.
With Tobacco-Free Kids’ financial support, I assembled a growing team of researchers to investigate. Our work is ongoing.
My team collected a plethora of social media data and also conducted interviews with a range of tobacco brand ambassadors, party attendees, influencers and industry insiders from around the world. What we found was an astoundingly effective use of social media by a range of different tobacco companies to connect with the next generation of potential cigarette smokers.
While tobacco companies were careful to abide by the letter of the law – the influencers involved in these posts were all of legal smoking age in their countries – social media has a public setting that makes it an effective and largely unregulated form of broadcast.
Legally, anyone age 13 or over can have an Instagram or Facebook account. Our “netnography” – a type of qualitative social media inquiry that focuses on cultural contexts, social structures and deeper meanings – only looked at public posts, images that any 13-year-old with an account could see.
Training camps and pop-up parties
Our investigation uncovered a range of promotional activities and a web of public relations and advertising agencies that cleverly leveraged the strengths of social media to keep tobacco advertising under the radar of existing regulation.
We found tobacco companies in countries such asIndonesia and the Philippines recruiting “nano-influencers” of just 2,000-3,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram and encouraging them to post about their tobacco-sponsored adventures.
In Indonesia, we found brand ambassador training camps that lasted two full weeks and were run by the domestic tobacco company Gudang Garam. At these camps, young nano-influencers were paid generous fees, taught about cigarette brands images and then provided lessons about how to better maintain their social media feeds.
Public relations agencies in Uruguay taught their influencers how to take pictures of cigarette packages in ways that best accentuated their brands, offering tips on lighting, hashtags and the best time to post them for maximum impact.
Some companies used Facebook pages to recruit young people to attend their parties. After answering a few questions on the Facebook page, for example, responders were enrolled in a mailing list resulting in invitations to cool pop-up “parties and edgier events.”
At those parties, young people were greeted by attractive attendants who offered them cigarettes and encouraged them to pose with floor designs modeled after cigarette brand logos. After snapping pictures, they were encouraged to post them on their social media feed using the party’s decisiveness and action-oriented hashtags. The result was unquestionably a new form of cigarette promotion.
These activities clearly violate the spirit of the existing agreements not to indirectly advertise to young people. You can call it stealth, undercover or guerrilla marketing if you wish. Whatever its name, this is 21st-century cigarette advertising that reaches millions of young people around the world.
Exploiting social media
Our research has not only helped shine a light on Big Tobacco’s unchecked use of social media, it has also informed a recent petition to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission requesting it to investigate and enforce these novel forms of cigarette advertising.
Although it might be difficult for governments to keep on top of media in these rapidly changing times, they must do so if they hope to prevent global smoking rates and their consequent health problems from rising once again. Indeed, with leadership change in the Food and Drug Administration, new and tighter regulations on tobacco and vaping in the United States are already being cast into doubt.
Social media provide an incredible advance in communications that democratize communications in unprecedented ways.
However, that openness is easy to exploit by marketers with dubious motives.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rise-populist-nationalist-leaders-turning-point-global-climate-talks
The election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil not only marks the rise of another populist nationalist leader on the world stage. It’s also a turning point for the global politics of climate change.
When the new president takes office in January 2019, by my estimate at least 30 percent of global emissions will be generated from democracies governed by populist nationalist leaders.
As climate policymakers meet at this week’s UN climate conference in Poland (a country itself governed by a populist nationalist party) people who care about achieving the Paris Agreement goal should push for and develop new strategies for advancing policies to reduce emissions within countries headed by these leaders.
Populism and cutting national emissions
What is populist nationalism? Although both populism and nationalism are contested terms, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, offers this tidy synthesis of the characteristics associated with populist nationalists leaders in democracies.
Firstly, these leaders define “the people” narrowly to refer to a single national identity which is oftentimes anti-elitist. Secondly, they promote policies which are popular among their selected people, or base of support, in the short term but may not be in the long-term economic, social or environmental interests of the country. Thirdly, populist nationalists are expert at capitalizing on their supporters’ cultural fears about a loss of status in society.
Over the past five years there have been several populist electoral victories in countries that are among the highest emitters of greenhouse gases. This includes the U.S., India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland and the Philippines. While these regimes each represent a different brand of populist nationalism, they exhibit the basic characteristics I’ve just described.
From my perspective as a scholar focused on global energy and climate policies, it’s clear that the political structure of populist nationalism makes introducing policies to reduce, or mitigate, emissions in democracies difficult.
Mitigation policies require leaders to expend short-term political capital for long-term economic and environmental gains. However, populists have shown a particularly strong disinterest for doing so, particularly if those short-term costs would affect their prioritized group of the people.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is President Donald Trump’s unwinding of the Clean Power Plan. It may bring short-term benefits to his base, which includes coal miners and related interests, but it is not aligned with long-term energy market trends in the U.S. toward natural gas, wind and solar for generating electricity and away from coal.
Resistant to global pressure
Secondly, as several country-level case studies have shown, developing policies to reduce national emissions is often a top-down and elite-driven activity. This is particularly true in high-emitting middle-income democracies like Mexico or Indonesia. In these countries, mitigation policies, like carbon taxes, have not emerged by way of large scale social movements but by top-down policy processes supported by international donors and nongovernment actors. In these countries, climate mitigation is at risk of being overridden by policies with more popular appeal.
In a forthcoming paper on Mexico, a colleague and I investigate incoming President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO’s) mitigation policy. The AMLO administration has publicly committed to reduce emissions through a little-known set of carbon pricing policies, while at the same time responding to a popular demand to reduce fuel prices by increasing domestic oil refining. In the contest between the top-down mitigation policy and the widespread popular demands for low gasoline prices, it is likely that the latter will take priority.
A third issue relates to the international governance of climate mitigation. Under the Paris Agreement, governments are asked to progressively ratchet up their emission reduction goals. This mechanism assumes political leaders will respond to international pressure to increase their ambition. However, populist nationalists have shown that they are not motivated by international reactions to their climate policies.
Take Indonesian President Joko Widodo, for instance, who was elected into office in 2014. As I have described elsewhere, one of his first moves in office was to shut down a US$1 billion mitigation policy program funded by the Norwegian government. This decision to close the agency breached the bilateral agreement between Indonesia and Norway, and points to the disregard shown by some of these leaders to international political pressure.
As these short anecdotes suggest, the mechanism by which populist nationalists hold and retain political power makes it difficult to introduce climate mitigation policies. Their interest is to prioritize short-term programs which favor their select group of the people, rather than longer-term mitigating policies which have widespread economic and environmental benefits. Also, because they don’t comply with traditional norms of international relations, it will not be possible to coerce this group into meeting the Paris Agreement goals.
However, there are some ways countries that want to make reach consensus on global climate policies can better engage these leaders.
Ways to engage
As a starting point, it is important to emphasize the short-term benefits of climate mitigation policy to populists.
I believe policymakers and advocates would be well-served in drawing attention to how clean energy may bring multiple short-term benefits to the people on whose support these leaders rely, including lowering domestic air pollution, low cost energy, improved health outcomes and less reliance on foreign fuel imports. Indeed on some of these points, Bolsonaro, has recently said that he will increase the country’s hydropower and nuclear capacity.
Further, recent research suggests the cultural dimension of populist nationalism is of central importance. Rather than reducing emissions and tackling global climate change, it may be better to frame mitigation as part of a large-scale effort towards modernization; that is, modernizing energy systems, transportation systems and infrastructure. A narrative built around modernization, highlighting the economic and societal benefits for all, may resonate more with the disaffected middle classes who have led the rise of populist nationalism.
At the international level too there may be some approaches to ensuring the international governance regime continues in the face of this current wave of populist nationalism. As scholars David Victor and Bruce Joneshave recently argued, it may be useful to form small groups – or clubs – of countries which share similar interests to focus on clean technology and policy innovation. Focusing on shared interests within small clubs may work better than trying to push populist nationalists to comply with broad international agreements.
Populist nationalist leaders, like Bolsonaro, are the consequence of deeply entrenched economic, political and cultural shifts that have occurred in democracies over decades. These leaders, in other words, are likely to be a feature of democratic politics for some time into the future.
To continue to make progress on global climate agreements, I think it’s crucial that negotiating countries meet national populist leaders on their own terms for ongoing attempts to save the climate.
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1,400 Dead, 70,000 Homeless After Earthquake and Tsunami in Indonesia
Indonesia's devastating earthquake-tsunami combo last week has left 70,000 people homeless in the city of Palu, CBS News reported Thursday.
The death toll has climbed to more than 1,420 people since Friday, when the 7.5 magnitude earthquake and the 18-foot tsunami it triggered struck the island of Sulawesi.
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ivanka shuts co; indo moms say pay too low to live w/ kids 7/18 dn
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/25/headlines/ivanka_trump_shutting_down_namesake_fashion_brand
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Indonesia Calls in the Army to Fight Plastic Enemy
In March, a diver's video of masses of plastic floating off the Indonesian coast went viral. But that plastic often reaches the ocean through the country's rivers, clogging them to such an extent that Indonesia had to call in the army, the BBC reported Thursday.
The BBC spent time on the ground in Bandung, Indonesia's third largest city, and observed a concentration of bottles, plastic bags and styrofoam packaging so large it looked like an iceberg.
Trump's Indonesian Allies In Bed With ISIS-Backed Militia Seeking to ...
https://theintercept.com/.../trumps-indonesian-allies-in-bed-with-isis-backed-militia-se...
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Shocking Exposé Reveals Trump Associates & ISIS-Linked Vigilantes ...
https://www.democracynow.org/.../4/.../shocking_expose_reveals_trump_associates_is...
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Trump's Indonesian Allies in Bed with ISIS-Backed FPI Militia: They ...
www.globalresearch.ca/trumps-indonesian-allies-in-bed-with-isis...to.../5588694
May 5, 2017 - The following important essay, by the respected and reliable journalist Allan Nairn, reports what Indonesian generals and others have told him ...
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-pepsico-mcdonalds-nestle-unilever-kelloggs-mars-and-procter-gamble-are-pushing
Leuser Ecosystem on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia thrums with life. It is an ancient, 6.5 million acres of lush rainforest and steamy peat swamps, and because of its rich biodiversity, is one of the most important rainforests still standing today.
Its clear rivers provide drinking water for millions of people and its lowland and mountainous rainforests are literally the last place on earth where Sumatran elephants, orangutans, tigers, rhinos and sunbears still coexist in the wild. Globally, we all depend on it for the climate regulating effects such a large carbon-sink can have.
And yet, the Leuser Ecosystem is being actively destroyed for palm oil and other industries.
One of Sumatra’s remaining and critically endangered baby elephants peers out from behind its mother’s trunk in the Leuser Ecosystem. (image: Paul Hilton/RAN)
A new field investigation released by Rainforest Action Network exposes how one company is pumping conflict palm oil—palm oil connected to the clearance of tropical rainforests and the destruction of carbon-rich peatlands—into the global marketplace. The conflict palm oil coming out of the Leuser Ecosystem is shipped to the major brands whose products line store shelves the world over.
Palm oil has quickly become the most widely used vegetable oil in the world. It can be found in every room of the house, in products ranging from potato chips to laundry detergent, ice cream to cosmetics, and cookies to cooking oil. The boom in palm oil has been driven, in part, by a demand in Western countries for shelf-stable vegetable oils, used to replace the hydrogenated oils now despised for their transfats.
However, the palm oil industry is rife with issues, and conflict palm oil still dominates the market. Child labor, human trafficking, land grabbing, rainforest deforestation, endangered species habitat destruction and massive forest fires are all connected to the production of conflict palm oil....
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The Guardian: Abuse & Low Pay at Ivanka Trump Indonesian Clothing Factory
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early trump supporter, rt wing populist wave
n Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto failed in his critical first step: building a domestic base large enough to sweep him into the presidency, in part because his call for order resonated so discordantly with a public still capable of remembering his earlier bid for power through eerie violence that roiled Jakarta with hundreds of rapes, fires, and deaths.
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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/shocking-expose-reveals-trump-associates-isis-linked-vigilantes-are-attempting
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https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/21/shocking_expose_reveals_trump_associates_isis
As Vice President Mike Pence railed against ISIS-linked terrorism Thursday, we speak with longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn about his shocking new exposé that reveals backers of Donald Trump in Indonesia have joined army officers and a vigilante street movement linked to ISIS in an attempt to oust Indonesia’s president. Writing in The Intercept, Nairn reveals that Indonesians involved in the coup attempt include a corporate lawyer working for the mining company Freeport-McMoRan, which is controlled by Trump adviser Carl Icahn. Video has even emerged showing the lawyer at a ceremony where men are swearing allegiance to ISIS. According to Nairn, two of the other most prominent supporters of the coup are close associates of Donald Trump—Fadli Zon, vice speaker of the Indonesian House of Representatives, and Hary Tanoe, Trump’s primary Indonesian business partner, who is building two Trump resorts, one in Bali and one outside Jakarta. Nairn’s article is making waves in Indonesia.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Vice President Mike Pence visited the largest mosque in Southeast Asia Thursday during a trip to Indonesia. A day earlier, he addressed reporters at a press conference with Indonesian President Joko Widodo in Jakarta.
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: The United States is also proud to be one of Indonesia’s oldest and most engaged defense partners. And under President Trump, we are firmly committed to continuing to collaborate on the security of both of our peoples. A stronger defense partnership will serve us well as we confront the various security threats and challenges that we now face. And, of course, one of the greatest threats we face is the rise and spread of terrorism. Sadly, Indonesia is no stranger to this evil, nor is the United States of America, as the president and I discussed. The world watched with heartbreak in January of last year when ISIS-linked terrorists struck in central Jakarta in a barbaric suicide bombing. Our hearts broke for your people. This vile attack claimed the lives of five innocents, injured more than two dozen others. What I can assure you and the people of Indonesia is that you had the condolences and the prayers of the American people as you confronted this tragedy.
AMY GOODMAN: While Vice President Mike Pence railed against ISIS-linked terrorism, a shocking new exposé by longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn has revealedbackers of Donald Trump in Indonesia have joined army officers and a vigilante street movement linked to ISIS in an attempt to oust Indonesia’s democratically elected president. Writing in The Intercept, Nairn reveals Indonesians involved in the coup attempt include a corporate lawyer working for the mining company Freeport-McMoRan, which is controlled by Trump adviser Carl Icahn. Video has even emerged showing the lawyer at a ceremony where men are swearing allegiance to ISIS. According to Allan Nairn, two of the other most prominent supporters of the coup are close associates of Donald Trump: Fadli Zon, the vice speaker of the Indonesian House of Representatives, and Hary Tanoe, Trump’s primary Indonesian business partner, who’s building two Trump resorts, one in Bali and one outside Jakarta. Nairn’s article is making waves in Indonesia. The Indonesian military is threatening legal action against the news portal tirto.id, after it published a partial translation of the article and ran a profile about Allan Nairn. In response, Nairn tweeted a message to the Indonesian military, saying, quote, "Dear TNI: If you want to threaten brave Indonesian reporters and publishers, please threaten me too," unquote.
Well, I recently sat down with Allan Nairn in our Democracy Now! studio and asked him to outline what he’s uncovered.
ALLAN NAIRN: Indonesia is in the midst of a political crisis, in that there is an attempt to stage what people on both sides of the conflict call the coup. And this is a de facto, or even direct, coup against the elected president, the elected government of Indonesia, which is headed by President Joko Widodo, Jokowi. Jokowi was the first person from outside the political elite who ever was elected president. He’s—on certain issues, in certain respects, he’s a bit of a reformist. He got elected, in an important part because he speaks the language of the poor, and people relate to him. He has been pushing social programs on health and education. But, especially in recent months, his government has been fighting for survival. Those backing this coup project include the top generals in the country, who are seeking to escape any whisper of accountability for their past mass murders—mass murders that have been supported by the U.S.—and for their ongoing atrocities in West Papua, also the friends and business partners and political associates of Donald Trump. The local Trump people in Indonesia, including his top political backer, the politician Fadli Zon, including his local business partner, Hary Tanoe, and others, have been funding and backing this coup movement.
The instrument they have been using is a—what purports to be a radical Islamist street movement, which has been staging massive demonstrations on the streets of Jakarta, demonstrations drawing out hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people. And their hook is what they claimed to be a religious issue, where they are attacking and demanding the death by hanging of the incumbent governor of Jakarta, who happens to be an ethnic Chinese Christian who is currently standing trial for insulting religion, for insulting Islam. And he could actually be sent to prison. And he’s also currently standing for re-election. But this Islamist street movement is, in a sense, a front for the real powers, the real interests, which are trying to use the demonstrations and the attacks on Governor Ahok—that’s his name, Ahok—to bring down the government of President Jokowi. I know this because for much of the past year I’ve been talking to people within the Jokowi government and also people within the coup movement, and they’ve been describing what’s happening as it—as it goes along. The group that they are using to front the street demonstrations is called the FPI. The FPI is what are known in Indonesia as preman, street thugs. They were created by the Indonesian army and police shortly after the fall of Suharto, in order to do killings—
AMY GOODMAN: U.S.-backed dictator.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yes—in order to do repression and, when needed, killings on behalf of the army, without the army having to take responsibility for it. And they would do it under the banner of radical Islam, kind of diverting attention from the fact of army and police sponsorship behind it. This group, the FPI, has been implicated in attacks on mosques—they frequently attack Islamic religious denominations that they do not agree with—attacks on churches and murders, one of which, in spectacular fashion, was videotaped, and their mob is seen beating and kicking to death a man who’s lying face down in the mud. They openly call for the hanging and murder of various politicians who displease them. They live day to day by—in addition to the funds they get from the army and the police, by extortion. They claim to be religiously compliant, but one of their key tactics over the years has been to go into strip clubs, go into bars; if the owners haven’t been giving their weekly payoff to the FPI in a timely fashion, breaking the place up with heavy sticks, then taking the liquor and drinking it or reselling it. I mean, this is famous on the streets of Jakarta. Everybody knows about this. Another of their big activities has been evicting the poor. They would be rented out to army, police, rich developers, landlords, in order to violently evict poor people so that their homes could be demolished and used for other purposes.
The group also happens to be listed by Western intelligence, including ASIO, the Australian intelligence service, as a violent extremist organization—a term they use for "terrorist." And this happens to be one of the cases where their characterization of a movement as violent and extremist is accurate. This group FPI also has numerous connections to ISIS. The leader of the FPI militia is a lawyer who is a corporate lawyer for Freeport-McMoRan, the giant U.S. mining corporation that is controlled by Carl Icahn, Donald Trump’s good friend and White House deregulation adviser. This lawyer—his name is Munarman—he represents a local corporate front for Freeport. And he is there presiding over the militia, as—the FPI militia, as they commit violence, and standing next to the FPI leaders as they call for the death by hanging of Jakarta’s governors. This lawyer for Carl Icahn’s Freeport was videotaped not long ago at an ISIS swear-in ceremony, where he was one of two people presiding as a group full of young men pledged allegiance to—swore allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. The program of massive street demonstrations, aimed at ultimately bringing down the Jokowi elected government, has been endorsed by Indonesians who have gone to Syria and joined up as ISIS fighters, as they describe themselves, etc.
This is the group which is being used by the U.S.-trained Indonesian generals and being backed by Donald Trump’s key Indonesian business partner, Donald Trump’s key Indonesian political backer and the lawyer for Carl Icahn’s Freeport-McMoRan. Maybe it was about a year ago, we did a short segment on Democracy Now! regarding the fact that one of these figures, Fadli Zon, the politician who was involved in this coup movement, he appeared at Trump Tower along with Donald Trump. This was shortly after Trump launched his presidential campaign. He launched his campaign by attacking Mexicans as rapists, and he got some heat for that. And one of the things Trump did, apparently, was to say to his people, "Get me some foreigners." One of the foreigners they got him was this Indonesian politician, Fadli Zon. He appeared at the press conference with Donald Trump. For doing so, he was fiercely attacked by the grand imam of the Indonesian mosque here in New York City—a very courageous act, by the way, by that imam, given the fact that Fadli Zon is not just a politician but is also the right-hand man of General Prabowo. Prabowo is the most notorious mass-killing general in Indonesia. He was also the general who was the closest protégé of the U.S. Pentagon and intelligence during his military career. So, Fadli Zon was attacked by—
AMY GOODMAN: And Prabowo was instrumental in East Timor.
ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. He did massacres in Timor and many other places. But now, it is his right-hand man, Fadli Zon, who was appearing with Trump at Trump Tower, helping in the—the initial stages of launching the campaign, and who is now one of the main supporters of this movement, which has as its final goal the toppling of Indonesia’s democratically elected president. And among the generals—and this is in a piece that I’ve been working on, and maybe by the time this airs the piece will have already been released—that have been complicit, in one degree or another, in this movement, include General Prabowo; General Wiranto, who is currently still under indictment for war crimes in Timor; General Gatot, who is currently the commander of the Indonesian armed forces.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll be back with investigative journalist Allan Nairn in 30 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who has just published a shocking exposé at The Interceptrevealing backers of Donald Trump in Indonesia have joined army officers and a vigilante street movement linked to ISIS in an attempt to oust Indonesia’s president. I asked Allan Nairn to talk more about Trump’s connection to Fadli Zon, the Indonesian politician who was seen with Trump at Trump Tower during the presidential campaign.
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, after Fadli Zon returned to Indonesia, as I mentioned, he was fiercely and very courageously attacked by the grand imam of the Indonesian mosque here in New York City. And then he was also attacked by his colleagues in the Indonesian congress. Fadli was and is the number two person in the Indonesian congress. And they tried to censure him for appearing with Donald Trump, on the grounds that it was unethical. And as the imam had pointed out, the thing that Trump is famous for in New York—in U.S. politics is being a racist and being anti-Islam. And this was especially sharp and ironic, because Prabowo and Fadli Zon have used as their main political tactic attacking any of their opponents on the grounds that their opponents are, one, anti-Islam, not as Islamic as they are, and, two, tools of foreigners. Prabowo, of course, as he had told me in our extensive discussion, himself was the most—the closest partner of U.S. intelligence in Indonesia when he was helping to run the mass-murdering Suharto military. He worked for the DIA, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. But in the campaign, he was running as a phony nationalist.
So, after he returned to Indonesia, Fadli Zon was under pressure from the congress. He, in the end, escaped any serious censure. But he did not repudiate Donald Trump. He became Donald Trump’s most vocal defender within Indonesian politics. And indeed, after the point in the campaign when Trump said that he was going to ban all Muslims from the United States, including in its first version, in its first iteration, ban even Muslims who were citizens of the U.S., even members of the U.S. military who happened to be overseas at that moment—he was going to ban them from returning home; he later had to modify and back off from that—after Trump made his first outrageous call for the Muslim ban, Fadli Zon defended him in Indonesia. And he said, "Trump is not anti-Islam. Donald Trump is not anti-Islam. And just you wait and see. As soon as he becomes president, he’s going to drop all that stuff, because that’s only campaign rhetoric." So, in essence, Fadli Zon has been Donald Trump’s political spokesman in Indonesia.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Allan Nairn, who is Hary Tanoe.
ALLAN NAIRN: Hary Tanoe is one of Trump’s two business partners in Indonesia. They’re working on a resort and some other projects. And there was recently a report within BIN, the Indonesian intelligence agency, which asserted that Hary Tanoe was covertly donating funds to the anti—the coup involving the FPI and the generals. Hary Tanoe is a media magnate like Trump. They actually have a similar profile in business. He’s in media, and he also sponsors beauty pageants. Tanoe’s media stations have been, in a sense, propaganda wings of the—of the coup, the street coup movement, to the extent to which they were actually admonished, officially admonished, by the Indonesian state broadcasting board, which is a very—usually a very weak, quiescent body. So these stations have been serving as kind of the propagandists for Trump. And the internal intelligence—
AMY GOODMAN: For Trump?
ALLAN NAIRN: As propagandists for the coup movement. And the internal intelligence report, which I had access to, asserts that Tanoe was also going beyond that and directly contributing funds to the movement.
Now, the background to this is very important. The Indonesian military came to power in 1965 in a coup, where they ousted the country’s founding father, Sukarno. They consolidated power with a massacre of anywhere from 400,000 to a million civilians. The massacre was enthusiastically backed by the U.S. The CIA gave them a list of 5,000 communists to start with. The U.S. press hailed it as, in the words of one New York Times column, "a gleam of light in Asia." The army installed General Suharto as the country’s dictator. The Clinton White House, years later, described Suharto as "our kind of guy." President Ford and Henry Kissinger gave—personally gave Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, which produced the most extensive proportional slaughter since the Nazis. The army implemented a regime which involved kind of a semi-religious glorification of the army and stigmatization of any kind of reformist element, which they would characterize as communist. And, when needed, or when they felt like it, over the years, they would stage additional massacres.
Then, in ’98, partly as a result of the Asian financial crisis, triggered by banks, partly as a result of the amazing courage of activists who came out on the streets of Jakarta to demand the ouster of Suharto, partly as a result of the fact that the grassroots movement here in the U.S. had succeeded in cutting off most of the arms pipeline from the U.S. to Indonesia, which then constrained them, in the extent to which they were willing to open fire on those demonstrators, Suharto fell.
After Suharto came what is referred to as Reformasi, reform, which is still underway. The army is still the dominant number one power in Indonesia, but their power is much less than it used to be. The fact that Jakowi, the civilian who related to the poor, was able to defeat the mass-murdering U.S. protégé, General Prabowo, in the presidential election was a real watershed in Indonesian politics. A very courageous movement of survivors of army massacres and human rights activists in Indonesia has persisted for year after year after year, putting their own lives at risk and sometimes dying in the process, like in the case of Munir, the brilliant and heroic human rights activist and my friend, who was assassinated by arsenic poisoning in 2004. They have persisted with this movement to bring the generals to justice. And in past few years, they’ve succeeded in upping the pressure. They’ve made gains, to the point that some generals have started to worry about whether they might be brought to justice, or at least might be publicly humiliated by their crimes being acknowledged publicly and the survivors gaining some degree of public legitimacy. So, the generals, to a degree much more than I realized before I started talking to people about this coup movement, have become obsessed with the idea of staving off justice.
And what has happened with their sponsorship, the sponsorship of many generals of this coup movement, is that they’ve created a very elegant win-win strategy. If they succeed in toppling President Jokowi, then no worry about accountability. On the other hand, if they don’t succeed, Jokowi will owe the generals who are supporting him, because although the bulk of the mass-murdering generals are affiliated in one way or another with the coup movement, there’s another fraction who are backing Jokowi and helping him to fend off the coup movement, and are getting—exacting a de facto guarantee. "Hey, we’re keeping you alive here. No prosecution, right? No public exposure of our crimes. No humiliation for the atrocities that we have committed." So, whichever way it turns out, in their mind—and there’s certainly reason to think that it’s a not unreasonable expectation— justice and accountability lose—loses, and the army wins.
AMY GOODMAN: Is Jokowi aware of the Trump connections to the supporters of the coup movement?
ALLAN NAIRN: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know when this will air, but as we are speaking, as this is being recorded, next week, on Wednesday, the Jakarta gubernatorial election is due to happen. That’s when it will be decided whether the governor, who is the kind of pretext for this street movement, will be voted in or voted out as—
AMY GOODMAN: This is April 19th.
ALLAN NAIRN: —as governor. Yes. And the day after the scheduled gubernatorial election, Vice President Mike Pence is due to arrive in Indonesia for two days and to meet with President Jokowi. Now, one interesting aspect of this is: Where does the U.S. stand on all of this? Because, on the one hand, the U.S. has a longtime policy, in countries around the world, of backing the repressive armies and security forces, but, on the other hand, also backing elected presidents—as long as those elected presidents do not have a program that threatens U.S. corporate interests or the interests of the local rich or the fact that the U.S. is allowed to back the local army and security forces. Barring that, the U.S. is all for local elected presidents. So, in accord with that historic worldwide policy, the U.S. has, up to this moment—as far as I know, up until at least recently, been backing Jokowi against the coup movement.
But it’s Trump’s local people who have been helping to push the coup movement. Now, I don’t know whether this question has come to the attention of President Trump himself. It could come to his attention through his business partner, Hary Tanoe, through his main Indonesian political partner, Fadli Zon, through his other business partner, Setya Novanto, who is a famously corrupt politician, or it could come to his attention through Carl Icahn, who is close to Trump, is his deregulation adviser from the White House and who is the controlling shareholder of Freeport-McMoRan, the oil and—the mining giant of copper and gold which has been ravaging West Papua, taking their gold and copper, but which—and this is quite significant—recently has been under challenge from the Jokowi government. For years, Freeport-McMoRan has had a free ride in Indonesia. As long as they paid off General Suharto and his cronies, as long as they paid off the army, various bureaucrats, they were able to do whatever they want. They were able to just strip the mountains of West Papua, turn the rivers indescribable primary colors from their pollution, knock off their dissident workers when necessary. They were able to do anything. But now, just in the past year and a half or so, they have been under challenge from the Jokowi government, which is demanding a renegotiation of the contract between the Indonesian government and Freeport-McMoRan, and which has been restricting Freeport’s copper exports. So this is creating a problem for Icahn, a serious economic problem for Carl Icahn. As this conflict between the Jokowi government and Icahn’s Freeport has been going on, the local lawyer for Icahn’s Freeport has been helping to lead the coup movement to oust—to oust Jokowi.
Now, I don’t know how much Trump knows about this, but I know there’s some question among some officials in Indonesia as to, in the end, which side will the U.S. come down—come down on. Will it continue the traditional U.S. policy of wanting to keep an elected president in for kind of stability purposes and front purposes, or might it align with Trump’s personal and business connections on the other side, who are backing the coup?
AMY GOODMAN: Investigative journalist Allan Nairn. We’ll link to his piece at The Intercept.
https://business-humanrights.org/en/exxonmobil-lawsuit-re-aceh?page=2
I
n 2001, eleven Indonesian villagers filed suit against ExxonMobil in US federal court alleging that the company was complicit in human rights abuses committed by Indonesian security forces in the province of Aceh. The plaintiffs maintain that ExxonMobil hired the security forces, who were members of the Indonesian military, to protect the natural gas extraction facility and pipeline which ExxonMobil was operating. The plaintiffs further claim that ExxonMobil knew or should have known about the Indonesian military’s human rights violations against the people of Aceh. The plaintiffs allege that they suffered human rights violations, such as murder, torture and rape, at the hands of these security forces.
On October 14, 2005, a US federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs’ case may proceed on District of Columbia (DC) state law claims (which include wrongful death, theft by coercion and assault and battery), but he dismissed the plaintiffs’ federal claims under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act. On March 2, 2006, a US federal judge denied a motion to dismiss filed by ExxonMobil, and ordered the parties to proceed toward discovery in this case. In January of 2007, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit denied ExxonMobil's appeal of the lower court's denial of its motion to dismiss. Additionally, the court of appeals denied ExxonMobil's petition for a writ of mandamus to compel the lower court to dismiss the claims against the company. In July of 2007, ExxonMobil appealed to the US Supreme Court (petitioned for a writ of certiorari). On 13 November 2007, the US Supreme Court invited the US Solicitor General to file a brief expressing the views of the executive branch on this petition. On 16 June 2008, the US Supreme declined to hear this case. On 27 August 2008, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on a motion for summary judgment filed by ExxonMobil; the judge declined to grant the defendants’ motion. The judge found that the plaintiffs had presented sufficient preliminary evidence to support their allegations of abuse and therefore the case should be submitted to a jury for trial. On 30 September 2009, the US District Court ruled on another motion to dismiss from the defendants. The judge granted ExxonMobil's motion to dismiss the case finding that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case in a US court. On 8 July 2011, the Court of Appeals reversed the district court's dismissal of the case, finding that a corporation should not be immune from liability under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The court remanded the lawsuit to the lower court. ExxonMobil filed a motion with the Court of Appeals on 8 August 2011 asking the court to rehear the case en banc. In September 2014, a US federal court held that Indonesian villagers from the Aceh province can proceed with their claims against ExxonMobil. In a decision issued in July 2015, a US federal court ruled that the plaintiffs' claims sufficiently "touch and concern" the United States and may proceed in US court.
- "Exxon Wants Rehearing in Corporate Liability Dispute", Mike Carcella, Blog of the Legal Times, 10 Aug 2011
- "Appeals Court Revives Torture Claims Against Exxon", Mike Scarcella, Blog of the Legal Times, 8 Jul 2011
- "Judge Dismisses Indonesians' Lawsuit Against Exxon", Brent Kendall, Dow Jones, 30 Sep 2009
- “Judge Rejects Summary Judgment in Human Rights Lawsuit Against Exxon”, Mike Scarcella, Legal Times, 28 Aug 2008
- "Exxon faces lawsuit on killings in Indonesia", Bloomberg News, Associated Press, 17 Jan 2007
- "Exxon: Torture suit sets bad precedent", Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press, 8 Mar 2006
- “ExxonMobil Rejects Aceh Human Rights Abuse Claims”, Kirsty Alfredson, CNN.com, 22 Jun 2001
- ExxonMobil: Human Rights Policy
- Cohen, Milstein (co-counsel for the plaintiffs): ExxonMobil - Aceh, Indonesia
- International Rights Advocates (co-counsel for the plaintiffs): ExxonMobil: Case Summary(includes links to legal briefs filed in this case)
- [PDF] John Doe VIII, et al. v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al. - Petition for Rehearing En Banc, 8 Aug 2011
- [PDF] Exxon Mobil Corporation v. John Doe I – Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Reply Brief in Support of Petition, 23 Oct 2007
- [PDF] Exxon Mobil Corporation v. John Doe I – Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Respondents’ Brief in Opposition, 9 Oct 2007
- [PDF] Exxon Mobil Corporation v. John Doe I – Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, 20 Jul 2007
- US State Department: [PDF] Amicus Brief filed in Doe et al. v. ExxonMobil et al., 14 Jul 2003
- International Rights Advocates: [PDF] Complaint filed for Doe et al. v. ExxonMobil et.al., 11 Jun 2001
- US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia: [PDF] John Doe VIII, et al. v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al. - Opinion of the Court, 8 Jul 2011
- US District Court for the District of Columbia: [PDF] John Doe VIII, et al. v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al. - Memorandum Opinion, 30 Sep 2009
- US District Court for the District of Columbia: [PDF] John Doe, et al. v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, et al. - Memorandum & Opinion, 27 Aug 2008
- US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit: [PDF] Doe et al. v. ExxonMobil, 12 Jan 2007
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In Kiobel filings, human rights group queries AG Holder conflicts
Author: Alison Frankel, Thomson Reuters News & Insight
The human rights group EarthRights International wants answers about the government's amicus brief in the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court rehearing of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, which will determine whether victims of international human rights violations can sue in U.S. courts. In Kiobel's first trip to the Supreme Court last term, the U.S. government sided with the plaintiffs…But when the justices sent the case back to the parties…-- the Justice Department switched sides…The State Department, which had joined Justice in signing the first Kiobel amicus brief, pointedly did not sign the second one…EarthRights has sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the Justice Department, the Solicitor General's office and the State Department, asking for any records related to [Attorney General Eric] Holder, [Deputy Solicitor General Sri] Srinivasan and the Kiobel case, including any communications from business groups that sought to influence the Justice Department. [also refers to Chiquita, ExxonMobil, Ford]
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broke margin, see bak?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zNAn_OTrncoFaDZRXvL8nAsp_V1sttFl4hN5E6KPiT4/edit?usp=sharing
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11012017/exxon-shareholders-climate-change-rex-tillerson
Once again this year, dissident ExxonMobil stockholders have filed several resolutions with the company asking it to be more forthright in addressing the climate crisis.
Submitted months before Exxon's annual meeting in May, by a twist of fate it also helps set the stage for Wednesday, when Rex Tillerson, Exxon's former chief executive and Donald Trump's pick to become secretary of state, appears at a Senate confirmation hearing.
At the hearing, Tillerson's critics are likely to connect the dots between his stance on climate change as the head of the oil giant and how he would approach the problem as the nation's top diplomat, in light of the global climate treaty that Trump has opposed.
And that may mean Tillerson finds himself facing questions about the treaty's goals that shareholders have pressed him about before.
Most of the seven shareholder resolutions filed under Exxon's deadline in recent days resemble those the company vehemently opposed in recent years under Tillerson's leadership.
They ask Exxon to add a board member with environmental expertise; disclose funding of lobbyists and organizations dedicated to influencing climate policy; and to explain in detail how the company might align its business with a low-carbon economy.
Exxon is expected to oppose those resolutions, as it has consistently for more than two decades.
Dismissing one resolution last year, Tillerson told shareholders that confronting climate change had to be balanced against other objectives, like providing energy to the world's poor.It's an argument he has made repeatedly, and can be expected to be repeated in a new setting this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"It is a judgment of balance between future climatic events which could prove to be catastrophic but are unknown ... and the more immediate needs of humanity today," Tillerson told shareholders last year.
Over the years, the dissident shareholders have carefully built a troika of recommendations that are meant to box in the company and make it acknowledge the conflicts between business-as-usual and the Paris agreement's goals.
One resolution, offered last year and refiled in essentially the same form by New York State's pension fund managers, calls for Exxon to prepare a stress test of how the company would perform if emissions were limited to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, a key Paris goal.
A second resolution, filed by Arjuna Capital, a company focused on sustainable investments on behalf of it clients, asks for a report summarizing how the company will adjust. "A transition toward a low carbon economy is occurring and trends to reduce global demand for carbon-based energy are accelerating," it asserts. "A failure to plan for this transition may place investor capital at substantial risk."
A third, also from Arjuna, asks the company to return capital to shareholders instead of investing in development of high-cost oil reserves that may never be exploited because of reduced demand for fossil fuels.
"In a perfect world we would see a scenario where the company admits the problem, communicates its options and then implement those options in transitioning its business models," said Natasha Lamb, Arjuna's director of equity research and shareholder engagement.
At the shareholder meeting last year in Dallas, the open floor debate was dominated by arguments over the climate resolutions. Tillerson took the lead in urging votes against the resolutions.
Exxon's opposition to the shareholder resolutions has put it in a position of dancing around the Paris treaty's goal of keeping global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and striving to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Any warmer, scientists say, and the risks are intolerable.
However challenging the targets, there is a clear scientific consensus that achieving them means reducing net emissions of greenhouse gases to zero over the coming decades. But Exxon shies away from that conclusion.
"Even among members of the global scientific community, including leading climate change researchers and nonpartisan think tanks, there exists significant disagreement over how to define or reach a 2 degree target," said a letter from an Exxon attorney to the Securities and Exchange Commission spelling out the company's opposition to one resolution.
That attitude, some climate advocates worry, colors the worldview of the man nominated to represent the country's climate policy.
"The key difference between his role as Exxon CEO and role of Secretary of State needs to be focused on what is the best interest of the United States and its people not just on the economic interests of a global energy company," argued Shanna Cleveland, a senior manager at Ceres, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable investing.
Under Tillerson, Exxon continued to be one of the most obstructionist oil companies worldwide when considering climate change mitigation, said Richard Ferlauto, a member of the governing board of 50/50 Climate Project, a nonprofit focused on increasing the climate awareness of publicly traded corporations.
Opposition to shareholder climate resolutions exemplifies that resistance, said Ferlauto, who served four years as deputy director for the SEC's office of Investor Education and Advocacy....
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http://www.ecowatch.com/exxon-climate-research-2190240911.html
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Exxon Ordered to Fork Over 40 Years of Climate Research
Lorraine Chow
ExxonMobil was dealt a major blow on Wednesday after a Massachusetts judge ordered the company to hand in more than 40 years of climate research.
On Wednesday, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Heidi E. Brieger denied the oil giant a protective order that would have blocked Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's subpoenas for Exxon's internal research on climate change.
"This affirms our authority to investigate fraud," Healey tweeted after the decision. "ExxonMobil must come clean about what it knew about climate change."
Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers told Reuters the company was "reviewing the decision to determine next steps."
In June, the company filed a lawsuit at a federal court in Texas to block Healey's investigation. However, a Texas judge later ruled that the court had no jurisdiction over an investigation in Massachusetts.
Exxon is cooperating with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's own subpoena and has already turned over thousands of pages of documents.
Healey and Schneiderman are among 20 state attorneys general who have launched an unprecedented investigation into whether "Exxon knew" about man-made climate change for several decades but disseminated false information to shareholders and the public in order to boost profits.
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In April, DeSmog uncovered Exxon corporate documents from the late 1970sstating unequivocally "there is no doubt" that CO2 from the burning of of fossil fuels was a growing "problem" well understood within the company. Despite having this information, multiple reports have surfaced over the company's efforts to lobby the government against emissions regulations and funding of climate change denial.
The ruling is not just a huge win for Healy, it also raises significant questions over the country's next presumptive secretary of state. On the same day of the court's decision, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson faced off with the U.S. Senate over his nomination as Donald Trump's top foreign affairs adviser.
At one point during the rocky all-day hearing, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia asked Tillerson, "Are these conclusions about ExxonMobil's history of promoting and funding climate science denial, despite its internal awareness of the reality of climate change during your tenure with the company, true or false?"
Tillerson, despite working for half of his 42 years at Exxon as an executive, said he could not answer the question since he no longer worked for the company.
Kaine, however, pressed on. "I'm not asking you on behalf of ExxonMobil. You have resigned from ExxonMobil. I'm asking you whether those allegations about ExxonMobil's knowledge of climate science and decision to fund and promote a view contrary to its awareness of its science, whether the allegations are true or false."
Tillerson again did not answer.
"Do you lack the knowledge to answer my question, or are you refusing to do so?" Kaine asked.
Tillerson finally responded, "A little of both."
Oil Change International campaigns director David Turnbull told EcoWatch that "the prospect of a sitting secretary of state becoming entangled in a lawsuit for his role in misleading the public about climate change is as real as it is alarming."
"Tillerson should stop the evasiveness and make all of the documents it provided to New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman public, so we have a full account of his role in Exxon's disinformation campaign," Turnbull added. "Anything short of that will leave questions looming that evidence suggests may only be later answered in court."
350.org co-founder Bill McKibben issued a similar statement.
"Rex Tillerson may be trying to make his getaway, but it's good to see that the courts may yet hold Exxon responsible for the damage it's done to this planet and to our democracy," McKibben said. "It was astonishing to watch Tillerson dodge and weave, almost as if he hadn't spent his entire career at ExxonMobil. Apparently, alongside the climate damage it causes, longterm exposure to Big Oil impairs your memory."
Lorraine Chow
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http://www.ecowatch.com/big-oil-exxon-big-trouble-2072533181.html
For years people have been warning that Big Oil's business model was fundamentally flawed and was not only putting the climate at risk, but millions of dollars of shareholders' money.
For years the industry's critics warned the industry was ignoring the risks of climate change and was just caring on drilling regardless.
But the oilmen did what the oilmen do: find oil and gas, no matter the consequences.
And the worst oil company has been Exxon which for decades has denied climate change and the impact that climate change will have on its business.
For decades it could have invested wisely in renewables but it carried on looking for oil and gas—including unconventional oil which is even more carbon intensive than conventional oil. Its critics warned this was pure folly: but the oilmen carried on drilling anyway.
Big Oil is used to doing things its own way.
The warnings have kept coming, but the boys from Exxon didn't listen. Oil Change International, 350.org, Carbon Tracker and many others in the #keepintheground movement have been saying for years that large swathes of oil reserves must stay in the ground.
They warned that fossil fuel reserves will become "stranded assets."
Exxon often dismissed its critics as irrelevant lentil-eating, sandal wearing hippies, who wanted to take humanity back to the stone age.
And it carried on drilling. And it dismissed the fact that any of its assets could become stranded.
But then came the Paris agreement on climate change last December. "With the Paris agreement on climate ratified in December 2015 … no company has more to lose than Exxon," noted the Chicago Tribune in a great article written last Friday entitled, Exxon enters no man's land.
The Chicago Tribune continued:
"Big oil companies have been solid investments for years, with a deceptively simple business model: Find at least as much new oil as you sell, book those barrels as future sales and reinvest in the hunt for new reserves. That made sense as long as oil prices went up, but it locked companies into a vicious cycle of replenishment, leading them to search for ever more extreme, and expensive, sources of crude oil in the Arctic and beneath the oceans."
And it added:
"Cheap oil has stopped that business cold and the threat of climate action raises fundamental questions about whether it'll ever be viable again."
The issue of long term viability has been raised by numerous organizations over the last eighteen months too. Last year the energy watch-dog, the International Energy Agency, argued that two thirds of known reserves would have to stay unburnt, if we are to keep climate change to the limits agreed in Paris.
But Exxon carried on drilling.
Last year Citigroup issued a report warning policies to limit climate change could render vast swaths of oil companies' reserves worthless, leading to trillions in losses.
But Exxon ignored the warnings.
In May this year, the London-based Chatham House warned in a report, entitled The Death of the Old Business Model, that the world's largest oil companies "Faced with the choice of managing a gentle decline by downsizing or risking a rapid collapse by trying to carry on business as usual."
Importantly, most of Exxon's de-booked reserves, about 3.6bn barrels, will be at the company's dirty Kearl oil sands project in Canada. The reduction would account for over three quarters of the reserves. Not only are tar sands very energy intensive, but they are expensive to produce.
In a low oil price, carbon-constrained world, they are stranded assets.
"For the oil sands, this is a tipping point," argued Andrew Logan, director of the oil and gas program at the ethical investment organization, Ceres. "Why would any company invest billions of dollars in a new oil-sands project now, given the near certainty that the world will be transitioning away from fossil fuels during the decades it will take for that project to pay back?"
Indeed, two days before Friday's announcement an article on CNN Money noted just how much trouble the oil giant was in: "Exxon's stock is down 17% from its 2014 peak amid the crash in oil prices. The oil giant's profits have plunged to 17-year lows and its once-perfect AAA credit rating has evaporated."
It quoted Tom Sanzillo, former deputy comptroller of New York State and now head of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis saying the company was in the middle of an "irreversible decline."
Friday's announcement is further evidence that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the oil age.
And the great carbon dinosaur Exxon is slowly dying before our eyes.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Oil Change International.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29092016/exxon-mobil-change-change-investigation-oil-sands-tar-sands-alberta-canada-sec
State and federal investigators are zeroing in on ExxonMobil's accounting practices as part of two independent probes, asking whether the energy giant might have misled investors about the value of its assets.
Increasingly, those assets are made up of Canadian tar sands oil, among the world's most expensive and dirtiest forms of crude oil.
An InsideClimate News analysis of the company's financial disclosures shows that Exxon's oil sands reserves grew dramatically over the past decade. Doing so has deepened the company's dependence on an oil source that some economists say should be one of the first to be abandoned if governments decide to leave much of the world's fossil fuels in the ground to stave off global warming.
Since 2007, Exxon's tar sands reserves grew to 5.1 billion barrels from 1.4 billion barrels, nearly quadrupling. As a percentage of the company's total liquid reserves, these holdings more than doubled to 35 percent from 17 percent....
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http://www.ecowatch.com/exxon-lawsuit-mystic-river-2024418598.html
ExxonMobil is facing a first-of-its-kind lawsuit for failing to account for the risks from climate change to its fuel storage terminal outside Boston. The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) claims that sea level rise and accompanying storm surges could damage the facility and lead to further pollution of the Mystic River.
....
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http://www.ecowatch.com/sec-exxon-climate-change-2011247494.html
...
The SEC requested information and documents from Exxon and the company's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, in August, as well as documents from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's similar investigation of the company. Exxon has been under increasing government scrutiny since multiple reports revealed the oil giant may have misled the public about the dangers of climate change.
"This is a remarkably important development—the federal government is joining the courageous state attorneys general, and they're all following the trail of clues that began with powerful investigative journalism," Bill McKibben, 350.org co-founder, said. "Before they're done we'll understand considerably more about how the world overheated—but in the meantime, every institution that invests in Exxon should take real note of who you're keeping company with."
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"This investigation is a welcome opportunity for transparency from the fossil fuel industry,"Greenpeace Executive Director Annie Leonard said. "We know Exxon has published projections showing that demand for oil and natural gas will continue growing for decades to come—projections which are flatly incompatible with limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, as called for by the Paris climate accords. What we don't know is how Exxon's balance sheet would change if the world meets the climate challenge."
For a deeper dive:
News:Wall Street Journal, CNBC, ThinkProgress, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, New York Times,CNN Money, Financial Times, Houston Chronicle, Huffington Post, Politico Pro, Grist, Wired
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In 2015, ExxonMobil funneled millions to groups peddling climate denial. According to its publicly available 2015 Worldwide Global Giving report, over $1.6 million (20%) of ExxonMobil’s Public Information and Policy Research contributions went to the following organizations discussed during the web of denial floor statements.
- American Legislative Exchange Council: $61,500
- American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research: $325,000
- Hoover Institution: $15,000
- Hudson Institute: $15,000
- Manhattan Institute: $200,000
- Mercatus Center: $25,000
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation: $1,000,000
ALEC’s climate obstructionism is particularly notorious, earning an entire website-- ALECclimatechangedenial.org—to debunk its work. When an ExxonMobil official serves on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Advisory Council, and your company is a top sponsor of ALEC’s recent annual meeting in Indianapolis, we find Ms. Fariello’s assurances less than assuring....
https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-schatz-call-out-exxonmobil-for-continuing-to-fund-effort-to-block-climate-action
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olympic greenwash
https://act.climatetruth.org/sign/EnergyLiesHere_fshare?t=2&akid=4183.100725.NjIIBl
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-evidence-suggests-big-oil-didnt-borrow-big-tobaccos-playbook-lie-public-about
Recent analysis of more than 100 industry documents conducted by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has revealed that the oil industry knew of the risks its business posed to the global climate decades before originally suspected.
It has also long been assumed that, in its efforts to deceive investors and the public about the negative impact its business has on the environment, Big Oil borrowed Big Tobacco’s so-called tactical “playbook.” But these documents indicate that infamous playbook appears to have actually originated within the oil industry itself.
If that is true, it would be highly significant—and damning for Big Oil—because the tactics used by the tobacco industry to downplay the connection between smoking and cancer were eventually deemed to have violated federal racketeering laws by a federal court. The ruling dashed efforts by Big Tobacco to find legal cover under the First Amendment, which just happens to be the same strategy that ExxonMobil and its GOP allies are currently using to defend the company against allegations of fraud. If the playbook was in fact created by the oil and gas industry and then later used by ExxonMobil, it ruins the company’s argument of plausible deniability, making it highly likely that the company violated federal law.
This latest development is a major blow to Big Oil, which has been trying to rebuff comparisons to the tobacco industry. It also comes as a group of state attorneys general are pursuing an investigation into possible fraud committed by ExxonMobil. The probe, which could ultimately extend to include other oil and gas companies, was launched in November by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has since been joined by 16 other state AGs in a historic national coalition seeking to find out if America’s largest oil company intentionally hid critical climate-related information about their future business from investors and the public.
Environmentalists and corporate accountability advocates have cheered the investigation, contending that ExxonMobil has engaged in a decades-long campaign of climate denial and deception, ultimately delaying action on climate change and putting the planet at risk.
“We began with three simple, related questions,” says Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL, about the recently analyzed documents, which are housed at the tobacco industry document archive at the University of California, San Francisco medical center. “What did they know? When did they know it? And what did they do about it? What we found is that they knew a great deal, and they knew it much earlier and with greater certainty than anyone has recognized or that the industry has admitted.”
Sowing seeds of doubt about climate science
“Big Oil created the organized apparatus of doubt,” Muffett said. “It used the same playbook of misinformation, obfuscation and research laundered through front groups to attack science and sow uncertainty on lead, on smog, and in the early debates on climate change. Big Tobacco used and refined that playbook for decades in its fight to keep us smoking—just as Big Oil is using it now, again, to keep us burning fossil fuels.” To wit: Exxon’s own Corporate Citizenship Report from last year revealed that the company is still funding climate denial groups.
The documents suggest that the tactics in question were developed by the Smoke and Fumes Committee, a group launched 70 years ago by the American Petroleum Institute, the national trade association that represents the U.S. fossil fuel industry, to study oil industry pollution and present its own spin to the public. If that is the case, it appears those same tactics were likely co-opted by the tobacco industry, which was later found guilty of committing fraud following a racketeering lawsuit filed in 1999 by the Department of Justice. The documents reveals that the deceptive actions taken by the oil industry so many decades ago prevented the possibility of early action on climate change—action that may have prevented potentially millions of climate-related deaths across the globe.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. The World Health Organization estimates that around 6 million peopleworldwide die from tobacco-related illnesses. Between 2030 and 2050, WHO estimates that climate change will cause approximately 250,000 deaths per year, from heat stress, malnutrition, malaria and diarrhea. That number does not include the deaths caused by climate-related natural disasters, which have more than tripled since the 1960s, resulting in over 60,000 deaths each year, mainly in developing countries.
Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University is also the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr., founder of the American oil giant Standard Oil Company, out of which ExxonMobil was born. Earlier this year, Goodwin decided to divest her shares of ExxonMobil stock and use the proceeds to fight climate change and climate denial. In an interview with AlterNet, she contrasted the impact of tobacco and fossil fuel:
In the large picture ... tobacco and fossil fuel emissions are quite different. Tobacco kills people one by one. Climate change will increasingly cause events like hurricanes that will destroy large swathes of property, kill numbers of people, make many homeless. While it can be argued that smoking tobacco is a matter of individual choice, the production and use of fossil fuels is more obviously a social issue. In the long run, producers of fossil fuels will have to lose. The only question is how much the people and ecologies of the world will lose before our economies cease to make the situation worse.
U.N.: Climate change is "irreversible"
While the climate situation can certainly become worse, the actions of ExxonMobil and Big Oil have helped to put the planet on what many scientists are now saying is an unstoppable path. In 2014, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered a grim assessment: “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts.” That has left environmentalists not only angry at the oil industry, but also wondering how the narrative might have been different had the industry been honest and open about its early findings.
“It’s increasingly clear that the fossil fuel industry knew a lot more about the causes of climate change—and its effects—much earlier than anyone else," said Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, about CIEL’s findings. "It pains me to think how much better shape the planet and vulnerable communities could be in if the fossil fuel industry had taken positive action based on this knowledge instead of trying to profit from it."
Climate activist Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has been a long-time critic of the oil and gas industry. “The ongoing revelations about the depth of oil industry research into—and obfuscation of—the greatest crisis humans have ever faced are hard to read; thanks to them, we wasted vital time,” he said in a press statement.
In a CIEL video, Muffett explains how “the world's most powerful industry used science, communications and consumer psychology to shape the public debate over climate change,” noting “it begins earlier, decades earlier than anyone recognized.” He points out that in 1968, API commissioned a report titled "Sources, Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmospheric Pollutants,” which revealed rising levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by the combustion of fossil fuel, in the atmosphere. The report’s authors, Elmer Robinson and R.C. Robbins of the Stanford Research Institute, warned of significant climate risks posed by the continued use of fossil fuel. "If the earth's temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis," they wrote, adding, “there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe."
Notably, Muffett said, is the fact that the report's authors "recognized that the most important remaining uncertainties were technological: How would we respond and how would we modify our technology to reduce emissions?" Now, nearly half a century later, the question becomes: Why did the oil industry hide this information from the public? Of course, we know the answer to that question: Profits. Instead of responding responsibly to the dire warnings that came with this information by moving the nation’s energy portfolio and infrastructure to a low-carbon future, the oil industry kept on drilling, kept businesses and consumers burning their primary retail products, which continued to pollute the environment and damage the Earth’s climate.
Seventy years of denial and deception
The question for Schneiderman and his fellow state attorneys general is, did ExxonMobil, and possibly other oil companies, intentionally mislead investors, consumer and the public, hiding the damning scientific evidence that their own industry paid to discover? With CIEL’s analysis of industry documents, it appears that Big Oil may be even guiltier than originally suspected, as the group traced the origins of the 1968 API report to a meeting of oil and gas industry executives in Los Angeles more than two decades earlier, in 1946.
That was the year API established the Smoke and Fumes Committee. "Faced with growing public concern about air pollution,” Muffett said, “the industry embarked on what would become a well-funded, carefully coordinated, multi-decade enterprise of funding scientific research and using that research to promote public skepticism of environmental regulations the industry considered hasty, costly and potentially unnecessary.”
One of the tactics used by the oil industry was to delay any climate action that might harm its business by sowing seeds of doubt. “The worst thing that can happen, in many instances, is the hasty passage of a law or laws for the control of a given air pollution situation,” wrote Vance Jenkins, executive secretary of the Smoke and Fumes Committee, in a 1954 trade journal article about smog pollution.
The ties between the oil and tobacco industries run deep. In the 1950s, Monroe J. Rathbone, the president and director of Standard Oil, sat on American Cancer Society's committee on smoking and public policy. In 1968, Esso Research and Engineering Co., an affiliate of Standard Oil, filed a patent claim for a new type of cigarette filter, made out of polypropylene, a thermoplastic polymer that was first synthesized by Phillips Petroleum, an American Oil Company. In 1979, R.G Baker, the chair of British American Tobacco, the second largest tobacco company in the world, also sat on the board of Exxon, the world's biggest publicly traded oil company. In the 1970s, R.J. Reynolds, America's second-largest tobacco company, diversified into the energy business, acquiring American Independent Oil Company, Burmah Oil and Gas Company and Burmah Oil Development, Inc.
In a CIEL video, Muffett explains the key events that reveal the oil industry didn’t just borrow the tobacco industry’s playbook, but was actually behind behind it all along:
As evidence mounts of the oil industry's decades-long campaign of climate deception and denial, Exxon and its allies assure us that oil is not the new tobacco. The 14 million documents at the Tobacco Archives prove Exxon right: Oil is not the new tobacco. But six decades ago, tobacco was the new oil. In December 1953, tobacco executives met in a New York hotel room to hatch a plan to confront the rising tide of science linking smoking with cancer. To help craft that plan, tobacco turned to PR firm Hill and Knowlton. Hill and Knowlton, in turn, drew on its long expertise supporting the oil industry. Richard Darrow, the principal architect of tobacco's strategy, also represented Hill and Knowlton's biggest oil company clients.
In the years that followed, the tobacco conspirators looked repeatedly to oil industry campaigns on smog, lead and other air pollutants for models, for resources and for people. They turned to Stanford Research Institute, a key player in the oil industry's “Smoke and Fumes” effort to develop a suitcase-sized testing kit that would sample smoke without attracting attention. They turned to Truesdail Laboratories, which in 1958 was doing the earliest documented climate research for the American Petroleum Institute, and to a former Standard Oil executive who recommended an array of scientists for the tobacco industry's scientific advisory board, nearly all with proven links to the oil industry and many of whom would go on to work for tobacco.
Suffice it to say, CIEL’s analysis has uncovered the deep and complex relationship between the oil and tobacco industries that goes back many decades, and continues to this day. From advertising campaigns and marketing tactics to PR firms and scientists, the two industries have shared a wealth of information, strategies and human resources. The relationship was formed on mutual dependence, which consistently placed profits above public and environmental health. As Muffett points out, "For Big Tobacco, gas stations were vital retail outlets. For Big Oil, cigarettes were their biggest retail product after gasoline."
“These documents are the tip of an evidentiary iceberg that demands further investigation,” said Muffett. “Oil companies had an early opportunity to acknowledge climate science and climate risks, and to enable consumers to make informed choices. They chose a different path. The public deserves to know why.”
The investigation continues
ExxonMobil and its allies on Capitol Hill—a coterie of GOP legislators who have received political contributions from the oil industry—have attempted to stop the AGs' fraud probe by claiming the investigation is a violation of the company's First Amendment rights.
In June, ExxonMobil filed a complaint in federal district court in Fort Worth, Texas, against Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who had subpoenaed the company under consumer and securities fraud statutes, in an effort to secure company records going back 40 years. In its lawsuit, which is seeking an injunction to stop Healey's probe, ExxonMobil said Healey's investigation is "nothing more than a weak pretext for an unlawful exercise of government power to further political objectives," adding that the attorney general is "abusing the power of government [and] … has deprived and will continue to deprive ExxonMobil of its rights under the United States Constitution.”
Unfortunately for ExxonMobil, the First Amendment claim has already been discredited. In United States vs Philip Morris Inc., a federal appeals court found that the First Amendment does not protect fraudulent statements. Likewise, Healey’s office has dismissed ExxonMobil’s claims.
"For many months, ExxonMobil has engaged in an unprecedented effort to limit the ability of state attorneys general to investigate fraud and unfair business practices," said Cyndi Roy Gonzalez, Healey's communications director.
"Our investigation is based not on speculation but on inconsistencies about climate change in Exxon documents which have been made public," Gonzalez said, and echoing the tobacco lawsuit, added that "the First Amendment does not protect false and misleading statements in the marketplace. Exxon's assertion that we cannot investigate it because the company has not engaged in business here in Massachusetts is completely preposterous."
However, a similar battle between ExxonMobil and U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker ended in a ceasefire, as Walker agreed to withdraw a similar subpoena in exchange for ExxonMobil’s withdrawal of its lawsuit against him. Walker’s withdrawal hasn’t been viewed as a setback for the ongoing probe, as legal experts contend that the primary battlefields will be Massachusetts and New York. So far, Exxon is cooperating with New York's investigation and has already relinquished more than 700,000 pages of documents to Schneiderman's office.
But 100 or so recently analyzed documents may reveal the true origin of Big Tobacco's infamous playbook.
Watch CIEL’s “Smoke and Fumes” videos to learn more about its analysis of those documents
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negin ucs
8/16
carbon tax support BS
Recent press accounts report that ExxonMobil is now actively promoting a carbon tax.If true, that’s big news. It would mean that, after nearly 20 years of blocking action on climate change, the world’s biggest energy company has finally come to its senses.
But wait a minute. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So one might well ask: Is this anything more than a PR ploy?
Let’s take a closer look.
As I reported earlier this year, ExxonMobil has paid lip service to the idea of a carbon tax since 2009 but, all the while, has continued to fund federal lawmakers who resolutely oppose it. In March 2015, for example, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010 voted in favor of the prohibition. Meanwhile, in March 2013, 156Housemembers cosponsored a nonbinding resolution stating that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses and is not in the best interest of the United States.” Ninety-three percent of the cosponsors were funded by — you guessed it — ExxonMobil.
OK, but that was then, and things can change, right? After all, last December, Ken Cohen, the company’s outgoing vice president of public and government affairs,blogged about ExxonMobil’s strong support for a carbon tax, noting that the company has been holding “countless private briefings with members of Congress on carbon tax policy options.”
So how have the company’s friends on Capitol Hill responded?
In June, the House passed a resolution stating “a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy” on a 237 to 163 vote. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution received ExxonMobil political donations since 2013; 82 of them are documented climate science deniers.By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution — a measly 16 percent — received ExxonMobil money.
The numbers are unambiguous: When it comes to a carbon tax, there’s no escaping the fact that ExxonMobil still funds legislators who don’t favor it and, by the same token, doesn’t support many who do.
Disingenuous Origins
In his December blog post, Cohen traced ExxonMobil’s support for a carbon tax back to January 2009, when company CEO Rex Tillerson endorsed it in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Cohen, however, neglected to explain the context for this pronounced break with ExxonMobil’s long-held position against any policy that would curb carbon emissions:Tillerson was trying to derail momentum on Capitol Hill for a different approach.
Back then, Congress was seriously considering instituting a cap-and-trade system, modeled after the George H. W. Bush administration’s successful plan to reduce acid rain, which would have set a cap on overall carbon emissions and established a regulated marketplace where polluters could buy and sell emissions allowances. The less carbon they emitted, the less they would pay.
The European Union had instituted such a system in 2005 and, although there were disagreements over the details, the idea of a U.S. cap-and-trade system had the support of a number of environmental organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, and more than two dozen companies, including oil giants BP America, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Perhaps most important, the plan had the backing of President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, who then controlled both houses of Congress.
Tillerson was having none of it. “A carbon tax strikes us as a more direct, transparent and effective approach” than a cap-and-trade system, he said in that January 2009 speech. “It is the most efficient means of reflecting the cost of carbon in all economic decisions, from investments made by companies to fuel and product choices made by consumers.” Any carbon tax, he added, should be revenue-neutral, meaning it should be offset by reductions in income and corporate taxes.
But there was a major obstacle in the way of Tillerson’s preferred solution: It had no political support. When California Rep. Pete Stark proposed a carbon tax just the year before, it attracted only three cosponsors.
Tillerson, who surely knew Congress wasn’t about to pass a carbon tax, publicly conceded it faced long odds. “Right now, any talk of imposing new taxes would rattle the markets and individuals,” he told E&E News, a trade publication, the same day he spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “...But probably later this year, I think they’re going to get around to want to further investigate what their alternatives are.”
As it turned out, the House narrowly passed a cap-and-trade bill on a 219 to 212 vote in June 2009. In the Senate, however, it was a different story. The legislation never made it out of committee for a number of complicated reasons, but the fact that fossil fuel interests had plenty of friends in the upper chamber — many of them longtime recipients of ExxonMobil political donations — no doubt played a significant role. The bottom line? ExxonMobil ultimately got what it wanted by plugging a carbon tax: gridlock.
Beyond the Rhetoric
There has been some speculation about what motivated ExxonMobil to recently ramp up its pro-carbon tax rhetoric. First, with multiple investigations underway by state attorneys general of the company for misleading its shareholders and the general public about climate risks, it likely feels the need to polish its tarnished image. Second, the company knows that last December’s historic U.N. climate meeting in Paris, where 195 countries committed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, means that it will be harder to maintain the status quo. Third, if and when Congress does seriously consider a carbon tax, ExxonMobil wants to position itself to influence the debate. And finally, ExxonMobil would likely benefit more than its competitors from a carbon tax, because such a tax would favor the cleaner-burning natural gas over coal and ExxonMobil has the largest natural gas reserves of any U.S. company.
These are all plausible reasons, except for one thing: The evidence suggests that the company is still doing what it can to obstruct policies to combat climate change.
Last fall, for example, California Rep. Ted Lieu — who has not received any ExxonMobil campaign contributions — met with the company’s lobbyists in what was presumably one of the “countless private briefings” Cohen cited in his December blog. Lieu asked the lobbyists what they would do if he drafted carbon tax legislation. They replied that “they would take a look at it,” Lieu told InsideClimate News. “They didn’t say they wouldn’t support it and they didn’t say they would,” he added. “It’s clear that they are not going around championing their position. If they actually believe this internally, then they ought to do so in a much louder way than just quietly sticking it on a website.”
In the Senate, meanwhile, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii have introduced a carbon tax bill, the “American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act.” Has ExxonMobil endorsed it or lobbied on its behalf? According to Whitehouse and Schatz, no.
“Regarding ExxonMobil’s alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we’ve seen no meaningful evidence of that,” the senators said in a letter they sent to the company Tuesday. “None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil’s management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation.”
Conversely, House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, a climate science denier, explained to Fox News host Steve Doocy in December 2012 that he told ExxonMobil lobbyists a carbon tax was a “bad idea.” “I sat down with the Exxon folks a couple of months ago,” Upton
, “and let it be known that this is not a proposal that ... is going to be coming through in the House.” Nevertheless, ExxonMobil donated more to Upton during the current election cycle than it did in either the 2012 or 2014 cycles.
Besides its political donations and lobbying, the company is still spending millions of dollars a year on think tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that dispute climate science and disparage climate policies, including a carbon tax. Just last month, ExxonMobil was a lead sponsor of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) annual conference, which featured Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a self-described free-market think tank ExxonMobil has been funding since 1998. According to one conference participant, Cass “absolutely eviscerated the case for conservatives adopting a carbon tax.” Conference organizers also provided ALEC state legislator members with a sample resolution against the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to curb power plant carbon emissions.
ExxonMobil doesn’t just rely on paid surrogates, however, to spread disinformation and block government action. Company executives may sing the praises of a carbon tax, but they still find time to misrepresent climate science and question the necessity of taking any action at all.
Climate Science Denial Starts at the Top
In March 2013 — the same month 146 ExxonMobil-funded House members cosponsored a resolution against a carbon tax — Tillerson appeared on on PBS’sCharlie Rose, ostensibly to promote one. The CEO told Rose he preferred a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade system, but then he doubted whether scientists knew enough to warrant one. “The facts remain there are uncertainties around climate change, why it’s changing, [and] what the principal drivers of climate change are,” Tillerson claimed, repudiating the consensus among climate scientists worldwide. He also falsely claimed there is no scientific evidence of a link between global warming and extreme weather events.
Two years later, at ExxonMobil’s 2015 annual shareholder meeting, Tillerson again argued that climate models are not accurate enough to justify a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels. “What if everything we do,” he asked, “it turns out our models are lousy and we don’t get the effects we predict?” He recommended continuing to burn fossil fuels and adapting to whatever happens, be it sea level rise or crop failures. “Mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity,” he said, “and those solutions will present themselves as the realities become clear.”
Contrary to Tillerson’s assertions, climate models have proven to be extremely accurate. A March 2013 peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, for example, found that the models accurately predicted the rise in global temperatures over the previous 15 years to within a few hundredths of a degree. No matter. When given the chance to set the record straight at this year’s shareholder meeting in late May, Tillerson would not back down. “My view on the competencies of the models,” he said, “has really not changed.”
Perhaps the most revealing statement demonstrating the depth of ExxonMobil’s support for a carbon tax, however, came the day before the House resolution vote in June — the one where nearly 90 percent of the ExxonMobil-funded House members casting a ballot voted yes, a carbon tax would hurt the U.S. economy. AHuffington Post reporter contacted ExxonMobil Media Relations Manager Alan Jeffers to find out what the company had to say. Given the company’s supposedly heightened interest in persuading Congress to pass a carbon tax, one would have expected Jeffers to register the company’s opposition. Certainly he would explain why the resolution was misguided and tell House members to vote no. It was what some would call a teachable moment.
So how did Jeffers respond?
“We’re not commenting on the resolution.”
http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxonmobils-latest-campaign-stonewall-federal-climate-action
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http://www.ecowatch.com/climate-denier-groups-exxon-is-funding-1919648161.html
ExxonMobil officials may hem and haw when reporters ask them if the company still funds climate science denier organizations, but the numbers don't lie.
The company says it acknowledges the reality of global warming and claims it supports acarbon tax, but its recently disclosed list of 2015 "public information and policy research" grantees shows it spent nearly $2 million last year on more than a dozen think tanks, advocacy groups and associations that dispute climate science and disparage renewable energy.
That's significant from both a legal and political perspective.
There are legal implications because ExxonMobil is currently under investigation for allegedly misleading investors and the general public about climate risks. Its scientists, who were conducting cutting-edge climate research as far back as the 1970s, cautioned top management that continuing to burn vast quantities of fossil fuels could be catastrophic. Instead of heeding those warnings, the company stressed scientific uncertainty to protect its long-term profitability and bankrolled denier groups to spread disinformation.
Likewise, it is politically significant because, by sowing doubt about climate science and the potential of carbon-free energy sources, denier groups provide cover for elected officials to stand in the way of progress.
Two Decades of Duplicity
Shortly after the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol international climate treaty, Exxon went on a spending spree to block federal efforts to address global warming. The company, which was outed by a 2007 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), spent $18.62 million from 1998—a year before it merged with Mobil—through 2005 on a network of more than 40 groups. From 2006 through last year, it spent another $14.35 million, for a total of $33 million.
That's just what can be gleaned from the company's tax filings and statements, however. Corporations are not required to disclose all of their political spending and there is reason to suspect ExxonMobil has spent quite a bit more on its climate disinformation campaign. A former ExxonMobil executive who wishes to remain anonymous told UCS that the company secretly allocated as much as $10 million annually for what insiders called climate "black ops" from 1998 through 2005.
In any case, according to its own figures posted last week, ExxonMobil spent $1.96 million on 16 denier and obstructionist groups last year. Ten of them, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Federalist Society and Hoover Institution, were among those listed in the 2007 UCS report.
So what is ExxonMobil getting for its money? Let's take a look at a handful of last year's grantees to find out.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
Half of ExxonMobil's 2015 denier donations—$1 million—went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the same amount it gave the Chamber in 2014.
The chamber acknowledges that climate change is happening, but discounts the prevailing scientific consensus that it is largely due to human activity, mainly burning fossil fuels. When pressed about the Chamber's position during a March 2014 Senate hearing, Karen Harbert, head of the Chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy, replied that there is a "robust debate" over what is causing climate change. "It is caused by a lot of things," she insisted.[tobacco scam]
Harbert's scientifically indefensible comment was not surprising. The Chamber has a long history of disputing climate science and that has alienated some of its members. In 2009, Apple, Exelon, Nike, PNM Resources and PG&E, for example, cancelled their memberships after Chamber Vice President William Kovacs demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convene a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" on climate science with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge ruling on the reality of global warming. "It would be evolution versus creationism," Kovacs explained. "It will be climate change science on trial."
Those high-profile defections apparently had little impact on the Chamber's position. In May 2014, just days before the EPA announced its draft Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant carbon pollution, the Chamber released a grossly misleading report attacking the proposed rule. The report, which was also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, was denounced not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post. Among its many faults, the report wildly inflated the cost of the rule and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.
Last October, the Chamber and 14 other business associations filed a lawsuit against the EPA, arguing that the Clean Power Plan exceeds the agency's authority to regulate the energy sector and the Chamber's priorities for 2016 include opposing EPA efforts to curb carbon emissions as well as the agency's science-based finding that global warming endangers public health and the environment.
Manhattan Institute:
ExxonMobil gave the Manhattan Institute $200,000 in 2015, boosting the company's total donations to the self-described free-market think tank to $1 million since 1998. In turn, the institute has been cranking out papers and articles denouncing efforts to cut carbon and maligning renewable energy technologies.
Last summer, for example, Manhattan Institute Senior FellowOren Cass dismissed the idea of a carbon tax—ExxonMobil's supposed preferred policy—as a "shell game" in an article he wrote for National Affairs. He followed up that essay in October with a white paper calling the impending UN climate negotiations in Paris a "farce." What did Cass propose as a better solution? He urged policymakers to "abandon fruitless negotiations and focus instead on the realistic option of promoting innovation and preparing for any future adaptation that may be necessary."
The institute's longtime point man on energy,Robert Bryce—who previously worked for the ExxonMobil-funded Institute for Energy Research—says he's "agnostic" about climate change. Over the years he has written numerous columns for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications praising oil, natural gas and coal and disparaging wind and solar. A recent Bryce column in the National Review, for instance, denounced tax breaks and subsidies for the wind industry but ignored the fact that, since 1918,federal oil and gas industry subsidies have averaged $4.85 billion a year in today's dollars.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):
ALEC, a secretive lobby group that drafts sample corporate-friendly legislation for state lawmakers, has received $1.79 million from ExxonMobil since 1998 and that investment is still paying dividends. At ALEC's annual meeting last July, for example, corporate and legislator members collaborated on bills and resolutions that would inhibit state implementation of the Clean Power Plan, hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to homes and businesses and undermine state renewable energy standards by restricting investment in wind and solar.
One of the keynote speakers at that meeting, Stephen Moore—founder of the Club for Growth and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation—declared at a plenary session that the "biggest scam of the last 100 years is global warming." ALEC's official position on climate change is only slightly more nuanced, leaving open the question of the role human activity plays. "Climate change is a historical phenomenon," its website states "and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions."
With that scientifically challenged position, it's no wonder ALEC invites speakers for its conferences from such notorious climate science denier groups as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Heritage Foundation—all former ExxonMobil grantees.
While ExxonMobil and other major carbon producers Chevron and Peabody Energy remain steadfast ALEC members, more than 100 corporations have severed ties with the organization for a variety of reasons, including its stance on climate change. Those companies include a number of heavy hitters in the energy sector, including American Electric Power, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell.
National Black Chamber of Commerce:
From 2002 through last year, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) received $1.1 million from ExxonMobil and the organization's president, Harry C. Alford, is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. "Of course we do and it is only natural," Alford states on the NBCC 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."
Last summer, NBCC published a report that falsely claimed the Clean Power Plan would pose "economic hardship" on poor and minority Americans. A UCS analysis found that the report was based on fraudulent claims from previously published studies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's anti-Clean Power Plan report from 2014. In fact, unchecked climate change would likely hurt poor and minority communities most.
More recently, Alford wrote an opinion piece attacking the Clean Power Plan for The Hill, a Washington political trade publication. Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's bogus 2014 report, Alford's June 29 column vastly exaggerated the cost of the proposed rule and did not factor in the billions of dollars in health and economic benefits that would result from cutting carbon pollution.
ExxonMobil's Pretzel Logic
Last fall, UCS and reporters at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon's own scientists had warned the company decades ago about the potential for climate catastrophe. The new revelations also showed that the company responded to that bad news by downplaying climate risks and helping establish the climate science denial network.
A number of journalists did follow-up stories, pressing ExxonMobil officials about the company's longtime support for denier groups. They didn't always get the same answer.
During an interview last September with Richard Keil, ExxonMobil's senior media relations advisor, WNYC's On the Media host Bob Garfield pushed Keil for an explanation. "Please clarify this for me: Are not funding or did not fund them?" Garfield asked. Keil's response was unequivocal. "We are not funding," he said.
When asked the same question by the New York Times in early November, then-Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Kenneth Cohen likewise said no. "We stopped funding them in the middle part of the last decade because a handful of them were making the uncertainty of the science their focal point," he said. "Frankly, we made the call that we needed to back away from supporting the groups that were undercutting the actual risk" of global warming.
Cohen's response wasn't a surprise. He made the same disingenuous claim back in February 2007, a few weeks after UCS disclosed that ExxonMobil had been spending millions of dollars on climate science denier groups. Greenwire, a trade news organization, reported that Cohen said the company "has stopped funding them."
The surprise came on November 9, three days after the New York Times story ran, when PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff asked Cohen if ExxonMobil has been funding denier groups. This time he took a different tack.
"Well, the answer is yes," replied Cohen, who retired from the company in January. "And I will let those organizations respond for themselves."
But before anyone declares a victory for corporate transparency, it turns out that Cohen's moment of candor was, well, momentary.
On December 1, a Washington Post story quoted yet another ExxonMobil spokesperson who qualified Cohen's remark. Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager, said the company "rejects the premise" that it has been funding climate science denial.
"We were engaged with funding public policy groups on policy issues, not on science," Jeffers explained. "We made our position known on some climate policies that made us unpopular with environmental activists and they tried to position that as us funding climate denial. And that's just not accurate."
Not accurate? As Jeffers, Keil and their former boss, Cohen, surely know, the think tanks, advocacy groups and associations ExxonMobil has been sponsoring all these years lie about the science to strengthen the argument against doing anything to address climate change. After all, if people believe climate science is a fraud—or at least "far from settled"—they will see no reason to support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system or any other climate policy. And that line of reasoning, which protects the status quo, seems to suit ExxonMobil just fine.
Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS staff members Dave Anderson and Jayne Piepenburg provided research for this article.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19072016/exxon-climate-investigation-subpoenas-lamar-smith-maura-healey-eric-schneiderman
how subpoena war could play out
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7/16 cf whitehouse bill:
EXXONMOBIL'S $33 MILLION CAMPAIGN TO SOW DOUBT AND DENIAL ABOUTGLOBAL WARMING
Revelations in media reports by The Guardian in July 2015, Inside Climate News' series, and Los Angeles Times partnership investigation with Columbia Graduate School of Journalism graduates led by Steve Coll (author of Private Empire) document what #ExxonKnew about the impact of fossil fuel pollution on climate and when the company knew it.
Despite its advanced knowledge of the climate disruption fueled in large part by oil, gas and coal pollution, ExxonMobil turned its back on crafting responsible solutions and instead funded a sophisticated campaign to sow doubt and delay action to curb carbon emissions — honing the tobacco industry's playbook with even more advanced public relations, advertising and lobbying muscle.
As Bill McKibben summed it up best,
“ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.”
But nobody has spent more time and energy researching and exposing Exxon's climate denial campaign than Kert Davies, the creator of ExxonSecrets while he served as research director of Greenpeace USA. Davies, who now runs the Climate Investigations Center and continues to expose climate denial and attacks on solutions to global warming, worked with many researchers over the years (including DeSmog's Brendan DeMelle and Kevin Grandia) to assemble a clear record of Exxon's extensive funding of organizations and think tanks responsible for spreading doubt and denial about climate science.
Since the late 1990s, Greenpeace researchers have collected information on organizations and individuals blocking solutions to climate change and vending misinformation. In 2004, Greenpeace launched ExxonSecrets.org, which houses a relational database of Exxon funding to these people, think tanks and front groups. The database allows researchers, policy makers and advocates to see relationships and funding linkages.
In total, the ExxonSecrets database has found over $33M going to over 60 different organizations since 1998, the year after the Kyoto Protocol was launched. The data is drawn from Exxon's published “Giving” reports and IRS Form 990s for ExxonMobil Foundation.
We know this $33M figure is an underestimate of the total spending by Exxon to fund opposition work on climate policy. For example, the Chamber of Commerce appears for the first time on Exxon's Worldwide Giving report in 2014 at $1 Million. We assume this is not the first (or the last) contribution Exxon has made to the US Chamber of Commerce.
On this page, you'll find the total amount of funding from ExxonMobil and its foundations to dozens of organizations that worked to spread climate denial. Hyperlinks will take you to further detail about each organization's funding specifics and activities.
Recommended Reading on Exxon's Funding of Climate Deniers
“Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years,” by Suzanne Goldenberg, TheGuardian, July 8, 2015.
“Exxon: The Road Not Taken” series by Inside Climate News. See in particular “Exxon Sowed Doubt About Climate Science for Decades by Stressing Uncertainty,” by David Hasemyer and John H. Cushman Jr., Inside Climate News, October 22, 2015.
“What Exxon Knew About the Earth's Melting Arctic,” by Sara Jerving, Katie Jennings, Masako Melissa Hirsch and Susanne Rust, Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2015.
“Exxon Knew Everything There Was to Know About Climate Change by the Mid-1980s—and Denied It,” by Bill McKibben, The Nation, October 20, 2015.
“Exxon's climate lie: 'No corporation has ever done anything this big or bad,'” by Bill McKibben, The Guardian, October 14, 2015.
“ExxonMobil Targets Journalists and Activists After Climate Change Investigation,” by Melissa Cronin, Vice, October 24, 2015.
“Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago,” by Shannon Hall, Scientific American, October 26, 2015.
“ExxonMobil pioneered climate-change research since the 1970s, and now it’s attacking media reporting on that,” by Steve LeVine, Quartz, October 26, 2015.
“Should Exxon Be Prosecuted for Suppressing Climate Science?” by Joseph Davis, Climate Science and Policy Watch, October 27, 2015.
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxon-fraud-probe-biggest-bipartisan-climate-battle-ever
On June 24, the DNC platform committee unanimously agreed to call on the Department of Justice to launch a fraud investigation into ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies, which would add to the ongoing Exxon fraud probe by several state attorneys general, first launched by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in November.
The DNC request follows a forum titled Oil Is the New Tobacco, convened June 22 by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. The forum highlighted the worrisome inconsistency between ExxonMobil's internal process and business decisions regarding its early knowledge of the impact of fossil fuel combustion on the climate and its public campaign to promote doubt, deception and denial of climate science.
These recent moves by Democrats come on the heels of a second round of letters sent on June 17 by 17 Republican members of Congress on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology to several nonprofit organizations, including 350.org and Greenpeace USA, demanding documents and information related to their work advocating for climate action and holding Exxon accountable for fraud. The Committee also made similar requests to the state attorneys general working on the Exxon probe.
This most recent House request was not initially made public; however, 350.org and Greenpeace USA responded by the June 24 deadline, reiterating yet again in a letter that they have no intention of complying with the request. All nonprofit groups had rejected the Committee’s first request, which was made on May 18.
In their letter, the GOP legislators again repeated the claim that ExxonMobil’s alleged fraud is protected by the First Amendment:
The Committee intends to continue its vigorous oversight of the coordinated attempt to deprive companies, nonprofit organizations, and scientists of their First Amendment rights and ability to fund and conduct scientific research free from intimidation and threats of prosecution.
However, that claim has already been refuted. In United States vs Philip Morris Inc, the federal government explicitly told the tobacco industry: “False, misleading, or deceptive speech in furtherance of a scheme to defraud receives no First Amendment protection.”
In a June 24 Washington Post op-ed, Robert Post, the dean of Yale Law School, argued that ExxonMobil was abusing the First Amendment:
Despite the efforts of tobacco companies to invoke First Amendment protections for their contributions to public debate, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found: “Of course it is well settled that the First Amendment does not protect fraud.” The point is a simple one. If large corporations were free to mislead deliberately the consuming public, we would live in a jungle rather than in an orderly and stable market.
ExxonMobil and its supporters are now eliding the essential difference between fraud and public debate. Raising the revered flag of the First Amendment, they loudly object to investigations recently announced by attorneys general of several states into whether ExxonMobil has publicly misrepresented what it knew about global warming.
Republicans funded by Big Oil
All 13 GOP Congress members who signed the first letter have collectively received more than $70,000 in contributions from ExxonMobil in the last decade alone. In particular, Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), has a long history of attacking climate scientists and maintains strong financial ties with ExxonMobil and other oil and gas companies. Since 1998, Smith has taken more than $22,000 in campaign contributions from Exxon, according to Oil Change International's Dirty Energy Money database.
Steve Horn, research fellow at DeSmogBlog, reported that “$19,500 of the Exxon money has flowed to Smith's campaign since 2008 alone,” based on data from OpenSecrets.org.
“This latest bid by Exxon and their bought-and-paid-for allies in Congress proves that the House Committee on Science is more committed to sowing misinformation and deception about climate change than to actually acting on science,” said May Boeve, 350 Action executive director, in a statement to press. She addded:
At least half a century ago, Exxon’s executives were warned about the very devastation communities around the world are experiencing today, yet chose to pour resources into sowing doubt and funding an extensive climate denial machine. We know that this is an industry-wide problem, and we will keep spreading the word about all Exxon knew, and keep working to see these climate miscreants held accountable for their role in wrecking our planet and robbing us of a generation’s worth of climate action.
Schneiderman probe
In November 2015, New York Attorney General Schneiderman issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil, demanding a wide range of documents in order to determine if the world's largest publicly traded international oil and gas company lied to the public or investors about the risks of climate change to its future business, based on the firm’s own internal studies. The case is building that the oil giant has been pushing climate denial since the 1980s, when it joined with other energy firms to form the Global Climate Coalition, intended to lobby support from Congress and lawmakers while also working to cover up early evidence that global warming is caused by human activity; specifically, the combustion of fossil fuels.
By March of this year, Schneiderman's probe grew to a historic coalition of state attorneys general who have joined forces to investigate Exxon and defend President Obama’s Clean Power Plan against attacks from Big Oil. ExxonMobil has strenuously challenged investigations of the state AGs of Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin Islands. But while Texas U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade rejected the company’s attempt to block the USVI investigation, it was announced Wednesday that USVI Attorney General Claude Earl Walker agreed to withdraw his subpoena requesting four decades of Exxon's internal documents in exchange for the oil giant dropping a retaliatory suit.
There have been major international governmental and public actions to tackle climate change, such as last year’s Paris climate agreement, the EPA's Clean Power Plan and the growing global divestment movement (which recently included a divestment of ExxonMobile shares by the Rockefeller Family Fund, which called the oil giant “morally reprehensible”). Yet the company appears dead set on ignoring calls to address the climate threat: ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and Exxon’s board recommended the rejection of every single climate resolution brought to the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May.
Activists, environmentalists and corporate accountability advocates had used that meeting, held in Dallas on May 25, as an arena to call on ExxonMobil to reject climate disinformation, adapt its business to the realities of climate change and take regulation seriously. A similar effort was taken up at Chevron’s shareholders meeting, held in San Ramon, Calif., on the same day. While ExxonMobil is the primary focus of official investigations, the entire oil and gas industry has come under greater scrutiny.
poster iceberg
“These multibillion dollar global organizations have potentially bilked the American people out of financial stability, national security, and the health and safety of our future generations by creating a false debate designed to protect their profits,” said Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA executive director.
Party politics
While the state attorneys general maintain their ongoing fraud investigation into ExxonMobil, pressure is mounting across the nation for elected officials and candidates to support these and similar investigations. More than half a million people have signed the #ExxonKnew coalition's petition supporting the fraud investigation, which has been expanding in scope—the Department of Justice recently referred the case to the criminal branch of the FBI. The case is also shaping up to be a pitched partisan conflict on Capitol Hill and beyond.
The National Review accused the attorneys general of “trampling the First Amendment.” Characterizing the Exxon probe as an example of the “authoritarianism” he argues is ingrained in progressivism, Post columnist George F. Will called Schneidermann and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)—who supports using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to criminalize Big Oil's climate denial apparatus—"garden-variety authoritarians ... eager to regulate us into conformity.”
However, the investigations are receiving strong support from leading environmental groups and Democrats.
“These attorneys general are doing their jobs to investigate whether or not this massive fraud has occurred, and we stand with them,” said Greenpeace’s Leonard, in a statement to press. “If Exxon, its allies, enablers, and congressional yes-men are afraid of an open inquiry into allegations of fraud, then the American people should be even more suspicious of what they’ve been up to in the decades they’ve been peddling climate denial. It was fraud when Big Tobacco did it; it’s time to find out if this Exxon scheme was fraud, too.”
Evidence that Exxon knew
The evidence suggests that, for many years, Exxon attempted to cast doubt on the scientific findings regarding climate change in the public mindset by purchasing newspaper advertisements questioning the science and funding climate deniers through an intricate network of conservative think-tanks, including the American Legislative Exchange Council. The allegations of fraud also stem from a massive trove of internal corporate documents revealing Exxon was fully aware of the dangers to climate posed by the extraction and use of its primary product: fossil fuel.
One damning piece of evidence is an email—written as a response to an inquiry regarding business ethics from the Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics at Ohio University—unearthed last year from Lenny Bernstein, a climate expert working for Exxon. He wrote, “Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia. ... This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2." According to Bernstein, that awareness was seven years ahead of not just other oil companies, but the general public.
“What it shows is that Exxon knew years earlier than James Hansen’s testimony to Congress that climate change was a reality; that it accepted the reality, instead of denying the reality as they have done publicly, and to such an extent that it took it into account in their decision making, in making their economic calculation,” the director of the institute, Alyssa Bernstein (no relation), told the Guardian.
But Exxon’s knowledge of the impact its business had on the global climate dates much earlier, to a report two pollution experts prepared for the American Petroleum Institute in 1968. The authors, Elmer Robinson and R.C. Robbins of the Stanford Research Institute, contended that carbon dioxide emissions produced by the combustion of fossil fuels was as critical an issue as the soot and smog that was the primary pollution concern at the time.
"If the earth's temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis," they wrote.
They regarded the focus on local-based pollution concerns as a case of missing the forest for the trees:
It seems ironic that in our view of air pollution technology we take such a serious concern with small-scale events such as the photochemical reactions of trace concentrations of hydrocarbons, the effect on vegetation of a fraction of a part per million of sulfur dioxide, when the abundant pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, carbon dioxide, and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious worldwide environmental changes.
Robinson and Robbins also noted the view of Roger Revelle, one of the first scientists to warn that the growing amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide created by fossil fuel combustion may cause global warming over time. “In summary,” they wrote, “Revelle makes the point that man is now engaged in a vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the earth. Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climactic changes.”
Adapt or die
Kathy Mulvey, who manages the climate accountability campaigns at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was one of the many environmentalists, activists and scientists who attended the ExxonMobil shareholders meeting in May. Part of the grassroots activist effort is to get the fossil fuel industry to recognize the choice it now faces: Adapt or die.
"Major fossil fuel companies must also begin to align their business models with a carbon-constrained world, acknowledging the political reality and moral imperative of the agreement made by world leaders in Paris last December,” she said.
The writing is on the wall about the downfall of dirty energy. Nafeez Ahmed recently wrote on AlterNet that signs indicate we are in the midst of the death of the fossil fuel industry:
Although the world remains heavily dependent on oil, coal and natural gas—which today supply around 80 percent of our primary energy needs—the industry is rapidly crumbling. This is not merely a temporary blip, but a symptom of a deeper, long-term process related to global capitalism’s escalating overconsumption of planetary resources and raw materials. ... In February, the financial services firm Deloitte predicted that over 35 percent of independent oil companies worldwide are likely to declare bankruptcy, potentially followed by a further 30 percent next year—a total of 65 percent of oil firms around the world. Since early last year, already 50 North American oil and gas producers have filed bankruptcy.
And in April, Bloomberg’s Joe Carroll and Asjylyn Loder reported on ExxonMobil's historic credit downgrade:
The worst oil crash in a generation has cost Exxon Mobil Corp. the gold-plated credit rating it had held since the Great Depression. … The downgrade will not only raise Exxon’s cost to borrow money but may also erode its status among oil-rich governments as a premier partner with which to do business. As Exxon Vice President of Investor Relations Jeffrey Woodbury said in February, the company’s AAA rating was a key selling point when competing for drilling licenses.
When ExxonMobil had advance knowledge of global warming, it attempted to hide the details from the public and its shareholders to protect its future business. Since then, it has made hundreds of billions of dollars year after year. It appears now there is strong evidence that the company has committed fraud, and even as its profit outlook is grim, it is still trying to dodge reality.
"Half a century ago, Exxon discovered climate change and quickly learned all there was to know well before the rest of us,” said 350.org’s Boeve. “Instead of urging action and becoming a part of the solution, the company's executives poured their resources into sowing doubt and disinformation among the public. The last twelve months have set record-busting temperatures, yet Exxon is still attempting to distract us from the fight for climate justice.”
Big Oil: Worse than Big Tobacco?
The unfolding drama has been compared to the Department of Justice's successful lawsuit, almost two decades ago, against Big Tobacco over fraud regarding the health risks of smoking and marketing its harmful products to the public. In 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a racketeering lawsuitagainst several major tobacco companies for "fraudulent and unlawful conduct and reimbursement of tobacco-related medical expenses."
Federal district court Judge Gladys Kessler found the tobacco companies liable for violating RICO by intentionally committing fraud through an elaborate coverup of the health risks associated with smoking, writing in her opinion that the defendants “crafted and implemented a broad strategy to undermine and distort the evidence indicting passive smoke as a health hazard. … [and] attempted to deceive the public, distort the scientific record [and] avoid adverse findings by government agencies."
ExxonMobil is accused of using the same tactics Judge Kessler deemed fraudulent in the tobacco industry coverup. If the Exxon probe is as similar to the DoJ's tobacco suit as it appears to be, then Exxon and its Big Oil peers should be prepared to be found guilty. However, the impact of Big Tobacco's fraud is quite different from that of Big Oil. Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr., founder of the American oil giant Standard Oil Company, from which ExxonMobil was born, recently announced she was divesting her shares in the company. She told AlterNet:
In the large picture, however, tobacco and fossil fuel emissions are quite different. Tobacco kills people one by one. Climate change will increasingly cause events like hurricanes that will destroy large swathes of property, kill numbers of people, make many homeless.
While it can be argued that smoking tobacco is a matter of individual choice, the production and use of fossil fuels is more obviously a social issue. In the long run, producers of fossil fuels will have to lose. The only question is how much the people and ecologies of the world will lose before our economies cease to make the situation worse.
“One thing that occurs to me," said Bernstein of the Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics, "is the behavior of the tobacco companies denying the connection between smoking and lung cancer for the sake of profits, but this is an order of magnitude greater moral offense, in my opinion, because what is at stake is the fate of the planet, humanity and the future of civilization.”
Reynard Loki is AlterNet's environment and food editor.
6/16 fuel fix bs
A campaign by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to end the investigation into ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies over false statements on climate change is gaining support among other state law enforcement officials.
Attorneys general from 13 states signed an open letter Wednesday, arguing that climate change is a public policy debate, not a criminal matter, and urging law enforcement officials in other states to “stop policing viewpoints.”
“We all understand the need for a healthy environment, but we represent a wide range of viewpoints regarding the extent to which man contributes to climate change and the costs and benefits of any proposed fix,” the letter reads. “Nevertheless, we agree on at least one thing—this is not a question for the courts.”
Attorneys general from Alabama, Michigan, Texas, Alaska, Nebraska, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and South Carolina signed the letter.
Paxton made headlines last month when he and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange filed a motion seeking to block a subpoena by the U.S. Virgin Islands for ExxonMobil’s internal documents related to climate change. Paxton called the the probe a “a fishing expedition of the worst kind.”
AG Coalition Resp Letter 2016-06-15
Irving-based ExxonMobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) launched a counteroffensive against the ongoing effort to target American energy companies for presumed politically incorrect viewpoints by left wing attorneys general. The Texas energy giant accused Massachusetts AG Maura Tracy Healey of violating its civil rights in federal court Wednesday.
In a strongly-worded, 33-page complaint brought by the Texas energy company, ExxonMobil accused General Healey of violating several civil rights protections and unlawful interstate commerce intervention while colluding with other attorneys general and private third parties. Without a permanent injunction and other granted forms of financial relief from the federal courts, the company expects to only be further harmed, according to documents obtained by Breitbart Texas.
A critical moment in ExxonMobil’s case civil against General Healey centers on a meeting in March 2015, when she and 19 other attorneys general comprising the “Green 20” declared their collective intent to target the company and others like it with subpoenas and related political actions. The complaint alleges that Healey’s promise of an investigation into the company was prejudiced by her expectation that it would “reveal ‘a troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew’ and what it ‘chose to share with investors and with the American public’.” The pleading repeatedly makes note of Healey and her associates’ political biases as the primary driver for their legal pursuits.
The State of Massachusetts’ effort to probe whether ExxonMobil “committed consumer or securities fraud by misrepresenting its knowledge of climate change” was summarily deemed “a weak pretext for an unlawful exercise of government power to further political objectives,” according to the document. The company claims that it has “for more than a decade” recognized the “risk of climate change and its potential impacts”.
On April 19, ExxonMobil was served a subpoena to further study energy and securities sales potentially occurring within the Commonwealth. The company claims that it neither sold fossil fuel products nor owned and operated a single retail location there in at least five years. Further, it sold no equity to the public there during the same time period. The complaint argues that the demands for documents related to activities outside of the Commonwealth were out of bounds.
General Healey’s “effort to silence, intimidate, and deter those possessing a particular viewpoint” rises to the level of a claimed First Amendment violation, according to the court filing. ExxonMobil argues that Massachusetts’ 40-year timeline for document demands “constitutes an abusive fishing expedition” in violation of its Fourth Amendment protections while Healey’s public commentary about the company presents an addition due process concern – leaving ExxonMobil doubting it is on the receiving end of a “disinterested prosecution”. The company raises additional issues of interstate commerce regulation and procedural violations as well.
The lawsuit hopes to halt the enforcement of Massachusetts’ subpoena and be granted other forms of relief the court feels ExxonMobil is entitled to, including the costs of litigation.
The Irving company’s docket is not limited to Massachusetts, however. Breitbart Texas previously reported on how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to intervene in a then-state court battle brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker in May. Texas decried the Virgin Islands’ similar “abusing the power of the subpoena” and warned that if left unchecked, “anyone can be criminally investigated” for viewpoints not acceptable to incumbent political powers. In response, the Virgin Islands relocated its case to a federal district court, where the parties continue to disagree on jurisdiction and venue for the matter, according to the complaint.
Outside of the courtroom, ExxonMobil has been fending off attempts from activist investors to force internal climate policy reforms. A May 2016 shareholders meeting ended when investors voted in large margins against the hiring of new climate experts and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) disclosures, according to a separate Breitbart Texas report.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a U.S. Senate candidate and member of the Green 20, recently brought criminal charges against Houston-based Plains All-American Pipeline L.P. (NYSE: PAA) after a leak was discovered downstream from ExxonMobil plants near Refugio State Beach.
ExxonMobil’s lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division. A copy of the complaint has been provided below.
Logan Churchwell is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. You can follow him on
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http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/06/17/wsjs-kimberley-strassel-pushes-illogical-conspiracy-theory-about-exxon-climate-investigations/211024
The Wall Street Journal’seditorial board has tried every trick in the book to wrongly defend ExxonMobil against allegations that the company intentionally misled shareholders and the public about the science of climate change. Now one member of the editorial board is pushing yet another defense of Exxon so riddled with errors that it completely falls apart upon a basic review of the facts.
In a June 16 column, the Journal’s Kimberley Strassel alleged that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s recent subpoena of ExxonMobil shows that the attorneys general investigating Exxon aren’t really concerned with whether the company’s climate science denial constitutes fraud. Rather, Strassel declared, “The real target is a broad array of conservative activist groups that are highly effective at mobilizing the grass-roots and countering liberal talking points.”
As supposed proof, Strassel pointed to Healey’s request for Exxon’s communications with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Strassel asserted that Healey targeted ALEC because it is “one of the most powerful forces in the country for free-market legislation,” an argument she based on the false premise that “ALEC doesn’t now, and hasn’t ever, taken a position on the climate.”
The truth is that ALEC has crafted model legislation that misrepresents the science of climate change and hosted prominent climate science deniers at its conferences, and ALEC officials – including CEO Lisa Nelson – have refused to acknowledge or outright denied the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels and other human activities are causing climate change. ALEC, a corporate front group that connects fossil fuel industry executives with legislators to serve industry interests, has also pushed model bills that would mandate teaching climate science denial in public schools. So it’s not hard to understand why Healey would want to know whether Exxon and ALEC have teamed up to undermine climate science.
Strassel similarly claimed that Healey targeted the oil billionaire Koch brothers’ front group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) because “its 2.3 million activists nationwide are highly effective in elections.” This must be true, Strassel argued, because “AFP confirms it has never received a dime from Exxon.”
However, as Climate Hawks explained in response to a Daily Caller article that made the same claim, “Americans for Prosperity's predecessor Citizens for A Sound Economy got hundreds of thousands from ExxonMobil,” meaning that “the group in question simply went by another name when it was funded by ExxonMobil.”
Moreover, it remains an open question whether Exxon is continuing to funnel money to AFP via DonorsTrust and the Donors Capital Fund, dark money groups largely backed by the Koch brothers. In October, InsideClimate News reported that a group of Democratic senators wrote a letter to Exxon “questioning Exxon's contributions to Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, which provide a conduit between well-heeled contributors and various conservative public policy organizations, including many at the forefront of climate science denial.” InsideClimate News further noted that the senators cited research from Robert Brulle of Drexel University, who provided evidence that Exxon may have engaged in an effort to “simply reroute its support” of climate denial organizations:
Brulle is a leading sociologist who has been published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature on the climate denial movement.
In material supplementing one of his studies, Brulle documented Exxon donations directly to climate denial groups such as the Heartland Institute, up until about 2008. At about the time Exxon scaled back its giving to those groups, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund stepped up their donations to them.
Americans for Prosperity “frequently provides a platform for climate contrarian statements,” as the Union of Concerned Scientists has noted. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation has received approximately $23 million in combined contributions from Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund since 2008.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/05/26/1531184/-New-ExxonKnew-Document-Database
exxonMobil’s shareholder meeting is bringing even more attention to the company, with the Guardian alone running four separate stories on it: attempted censorshipof scientists back in 2001 under in the Bush administration; (failed) shareholder proposals to recognize climate’s impacton Exxon's future; an op-ed from someone whose “father warned Exxon about climate change in the 1970s"; and the fact that Exxon denied the Guardian accessto its annual meeting. (Apparently its First Amendment fealty does not extend to freedom of the press.)
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With all this new information swirling around, it can be tricky to remember the basics of what the #ExxonKnew campaign is about. With investigations coming out of different institutions and primary source documents housed in various places, it’s a lot harder to source claims than it is to tweet the hashtag.
But for those seeking out the truth, a new website has emerged as a clearinghouse of new and old Exxon and fossil fuel industry documents: ClimateFiles.com. Announced with a post at the Climate Investigations Center highlighting the Top Ten #ExxonKnew Documents, the new site is a great source for anyone curious about what, exactly, Exxon and others have said and done. From the early ‘80s warning of climate change, to the industry-wide misinformation efforts of the '90s to the “op-ad” series, lobbying and public relations regulatory fights of the ‘00s, the documents make a compelling case for further investigation.
http://www.climateinvestigations.org/top-ten-documents-every-reporter-covering-exxon-should-know
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three basic phases to this story.
What Exxon knew and when they knew it- The crux of what was revealed in the fall and winter of 2015 by the Inside Climate Newsinvestigation and the Columbia University/ Los Angeles Times collaboration is extensive new evidence that Exxon and the rest of the oil industry had a more thorough understanding of climate science in the 1970s and 1980s than had previously been realized. And that they also understood the policy and economic implications of the climate threat. Further revelations by DeSmog in April 2016 confirmed Exxon's unequivocal knowledge in the late 1970s that "there is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage" were problematic for climate, and that these facts were known across Exxon's global operations. This serves as a new backdrop for what happened next.
What Exxon did to block rising concern about climate change- This phase starts in the late 1980s, heats up in the mid 1990s and extends into the late 2000s, changing shape and tone with increased governmental attention to the climate threat. Here there are key documents showing Exxon's (and Mobil's and later ExxonMobil's) ringleader role in driving the corporate campaign against advancing national and international policies to avert dangerous climate change.
What Exxon would like hide from investigators now - Exxon executed a turn about a decade ago with clever PR tactics, declaring that they had always known about climate change but had been "misunderstood". This is detailed extensively in Steve Coll's increasingly important book Private Empire (see chapter 15 "On my honor"). Between 2006 and 2008, the company began to mark its words on climate change more carefully and abruptly stopped funding multiple non-profit organizations and front groups it had been coordinating to apply pressure in the public policy arena by attacking climate science, climate scientists and elected officials who took up the charge. This campaign ramped up after the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and escalated during the first 5 years of the Bush Administration.
KEY DOCUMENTS:
1. 1998 American Petroleum Institute Global Climate Science Communications Plan
This leaked plan was launched the year after the Kyoto Protocol was signed. It was developed by representatives from the API, Exxon, Southern Company, Chevron and a team of people free market organizations along with communications professionals. The plan includes a multimillion dollar, multi-year budget to install “uncertainty” in the public policy arena. Target audiences are detailed including media, policy makers and science teachers and the plan includes an objectives list titled “Victory will be achieved…” itemizing the measurable goals of the plan. Multiple groups Exxon would subsequently fund are named in the plan.
2. 1980 Imperial Oil’s Review of Environmental Protection Activities for 1978-1979
A 1980 report, “Review of Environmental Protection Activities for 1978-1979,” produced by Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, again suggests that Exxon knew that CO2 was a harmful pollutant in the atmosphere in the 1970s. The distribution list for the Imperial Oil report indicates that it was disseminated to managers across Exxon’s international corporate offices, including in Europe.
3. 1981 Letter from Esso scientist on impact of Natuna Gas Project CO2 emissions
February 3, 1981 letter from Gilbert Gervasi, scientist at Esso Eastern to G.A. Northington, Exxon Research and Engineering regarding CO2 calculations for the Natuna Gas Project finding “the total release of CO2 from producing Natuna gas and burning of LNG manufactured from the gas would be almost twice that emitted by burning the equivalent amount of coal.”
There are multiple other key documents on Natuna in the ClimateFiles archive. The majority of these were illuminated by the Inside Climate News team.
4. 1995 Global Climate Coalition draft primer Predicting Future Climate Change a Primer
This document contains a "final draft" of a to-be-published document by the Global Climate Coalition responding to the IPCC Second Assessment. It has been edited by Lenny Bernstein a Mobil Oil scientist (page 2). The document contains a back section with extensive rebuttals of major counter-arguments used by climate deniers. This part was never published.
5. 1996 Exxon publication "Global Warming - Who's Right?"
Exxon Corporation’s Spring 1996 Publication, “Global warming: who’s right? Facts about a debate that’s turned up more questions than answers,” includes a statement by then Exxon CEO Lee Raymond trumping up uncertainty in the science behind global warming as well as the cost of a carbon-restricted market. The publication cites to Exxon funded climate change deniers.
In this speech, delivered in October 1997, weeks before the Kyoto Protocol final negotiations commenced, Raymond launches attacks on climate science and policy proposals. He exclaims that proposed international climate change policies will adversely affect Asian countries desiring economic growth.
7. 1998 ExxonMobil Pamphlet: Global Climate Change - everyone’s debate
This pamphlet, circulated to both U.S. and international policy-makers questions whether climate change is man-made and if so, the extent of contribution of fossil fuels to the problem. Although statements in this pamphlet are partially true in that Exxon “carefully studied” the science behind climate change, it contradicts its own internal early climate change research and findings and instead emphasizes unknowns in the “honest debate.”
In April 2000, Exxon published a collection of Op Eds it had submitted across the country in order to influence public understanding of the risks of climate change and proposed solutions. The series here includes articles entitled “Do No Harm,” “Unsettled Science,” “The Promise of Technology,” and “The Path Forward on Climate Change.” Each of these propaganda pieces highlights uncertainty regarding impacts and paints Exxon as a key to the solution for global climate change rather than the problem. Readers can review highlighted excerpts and the rhetoric used in 2000 with Exxon political activity at the time.
9. 2001 FOIA-ed memo from Exxon Mobil’s Randy Randol to Bush Administration
This fax and memorandum datedFebruary 6, 2001 from Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol to John Howard at the White House Center for Environmental Quality makes recommendations for changing the U.S. team working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment and Synthesis Report and delaying IPCC proceedings.
Another 2002 memo from Randy Randol to the Bush Whitehouse outlined what would eventually become the Bush ClimateScience.gov program
This meeting invitation and agenda illustrate the ongoing ringleader role ExxonMobil played in organizing asymmetrical attacks on the Clean Air Act and other environmental protections laws. The meeting was hosted by Heartland Institute which received a $115,000 grant from ExxonMobil that year. The meeting was held at the offices of DCI Group, a public relations firm contracted by ExxonMobil.
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