Rockefeller Family Fund

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NYT

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She Inspired Laws to Hold the Fossil Fuel Industry Accountable. Now She’s a Target.

A conservative group is suing for emails of a law professor who helped create legislation to force oil, gas and coal companies to pay for climate damage.

By Coral Davenport

March 27, 2025

Fresh out of law school in 2022, Rachel Rothschild wrote a memo laying out the legal justification for a new strategy to fight climate change: States could force oil and gas companies to pay for the damage caused by extreme floods and wildfires that are made worse by the use of their products.

Ms. Rothschild’s work was foundational. It provided the basis for the nation’s first “climate superfund” laws, which were passed in New York and Vermont last year and could be adopted by as many as six more states as soon as this year. If implemented, they could cost oil companies billions of dollars.

Her work made Ms. Rothschild a target. She is one of a number of lawyers, law professors and judges who have been the focus of a campaign to discredit them led by a conservative group with ties to the fossil fuel industry and the Trump administration.

Shortly after the passage of the Vermont law last June, the group sued the University of Michigan, where Ms. Rothschild now teaches, after the university refused its request for Ms. Rothschild’s emails related to “climate superfunds.” As a public institution, the university is subject to the state’s public records law. The group, called Government Accountability and Oversight, has also sought to have Ms. Rothschild undergo a deposition.

The university, which has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, maintains Ms. Rothschild’s communications are not subject to public records requests because they were written on her private email account. Still, the university told Ms. Rothschild that she must comply with the request for a deposition.

Experts said the actions against Ms. Rothschild seemed designed to discourage her or others from similar work.

“Legal actions and public records requests may be used in a manner that can intimidate or silence scholars, and when that happens, it threatens not only the targeted individuals but also the progress of knowledge and informed debate,” Kyle Logue, the interim dean of the University of Michigan Law School, said in a statement.

The actions regarding Ms. Rothschild appear to be part of a campaign by the fossil fuel industry to quash new legal tools for holding companies accountable for climate pollution. As President Trump moves to end federal efforts to fight climate change, the new state-level “polluter-pays” laws and lawsuits are seen as the next frontier in the battle over global warming.

Image

Protesters unfurl a banner sign outside an office building that shows the Statue of Liberty partially submerged in rising waters. The sign says, "Gov. Hochul: Sign or Sink! Make Polluters Pay!"

Climate activists held a rally outside New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office in Manhattan to deliver thousands of petitions asking her to sign the Climate Change Superfund Act last year.Credit...Erik McGregor/Sipa USA, via Reuters Connect

Executives from nearly two dozen oil and gas companies raised their concerns about the climate superfund laws at a meeting last week with President Trump at the White House. They want the Justice Department to file briefs in support of their litigation against the state laws, said two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the private meeting.

The campaign is being waged by a group that has largely been funded by the foundation created by Joseph Craft III, chief executive of the nation’s third largest coal company and an ally of and campaign donor to President Trump.

Ms. Rothschild’s initial memo — now making its way through statehouses — laid out the case for states to use the model of the 1980 Superfund law, which requires polluters to pay to clean abandoned toxic waste sites, and apply it to the climate damage caused by emissions from the burning of oil, gas and coal. Lawmakers in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Connecticut are now considering climate superfund legislation.

In addition, more than 30 lawsuits have been filed by states and municipalities aimed at forcing oil and gas companies to pay for repairs or adaptations linked to damage from climate change. Many of those cases, some of which could end up before the Supreme Court, argue that the companies knew for years about the dangers of climate change linked to their products but concealed that information.

The approach is similar to those of past lawsuits that led to landmark settlements with the tobacco industry and opioid manufacturers.

The fossil fuel industry counters that climate change is a global problem and that individual state laws are an unconstitutional attempt to assert control over the nation’s energy system.

“These extraordinary, unprecedented laws impose massive retroactive penalties going back decades for lawful, out-of-state conduct that was regulated by Congress,” said Daryl Joseffer, executive vice president and chief counsel for the litigation arm of the United States Chamber of Commerce, which has sued both New York and Vermont to overturn the climate superfund laws.

Twenty-two other states, led by their Republican attorneys general, are challenging the New York law in federal court.

Ryan Meyers, senior vice president and general counsel at the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group that is also fighting to overturn the climate superfund laws in New York and Vermont, said they were part of “a coordinated campaign against an industry that is vital to everyday life and serves as the engine of America’s economy.”

A key player in the campaign to stop the effort to hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable for damages is Christopher Horner, a lawyer and conservative activist who served on the transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency during Mr. Trump’s first term.

For years, Mr. Horner has used public records laws to unearth emails of climate scientists and disseminate them in ways that aim to undermine their work.

“Chris Horner is the nation’s most prolific user of FOIA and its state equivalents to go after anyone fighting climate change who works for a public entity,” said Michael Gerrard, an expert in climate law at Columbia University.

In 2011, the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science complained that Mr. Horner was making “unreasonable, excessive Freedom of Information Act requests for personal information and voluminous data that are then used to harass and intimidate scientists.”

When President Barack Obama tried to pass a climate law, allies of Mr. Horner worked to spread the emails of climate scientists, gathered by Mr. Horner, to Republicans in Congress.

In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Horner said that had helped kill the bill.

Now, Mr. Horner and his allies are focused on the architects behind the “polluter pays” laws.

Mr. Horner did not respond to several requests for comment.

From 2018 to 2021, Mr. Horner served as a board member for Government Accountability and Oversight, the group that filed suit against Ms. Rothschild. As recently as January, Mr. Horner wrote an article for The Washington Reporter, a conservative media website, in which he said he represented the Government Accountability and Oversight group in federal and state open records matters.

According to public records, a major donor to the group is a nonprofit foundation formed by Mr. Craft, the chief executive of Alliance Resource Partners, the country’s third largest coal company. The Joseph Craft III Foundation contributed $300,000 a year to the Government Accountability and Oversight group from 2020 to 2023, for a total of $1.2 million, according to its public tax filings. That appears to make it a major funder of the group’s activities: During those years, G.A.O.’s total annual revenue averaged $576,172.

Mr. Craft and his wife, Kelly, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in the first Trump administration, have given nearly $3 million to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns, the Republican Party and a Republican super PAC.

Image

Joseph Craft III, dressed in a dark sports jacket, white shirt, dark pants and sunglasses, walks on a brick sidewalk next to Kelly Craft, who is wearing a white blouse, a black and white polka-dot skirt and pointy shoes.

Joseph Craft III with his wife, Kelly, in Washington in 2018.Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Craft foundation and Alliance Resource Partners did not respond to requests for comment.

Matthew Hardin, who serves on the board of Government Accountability and Oversight, wrote in a statement, “Like all nonprofits, G.A.O. relies on contributions from donors to fulfill its independent, charitable mission of seeking transparency in public institutions and educating the public.”

The group’s interest in Ms. Rothschild appears focused on her communications with Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a philanthropy that has supported efforts to sue oil companies over what it calls climate deception.

It was Mr. Wasserman who first wondered if lawmakers could combine the old Superfund law with new penalties for climate polluters.

Mr. Wasserman brought the idea to the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonprofit research organization that is housed in New York University’s law school, where Ms. Rothschild was then working as a fellow. She researched whether the idea could stand up legally. The Rockefeller Family Fund donated $50,000 to the Institute for Policy Integrity to fund her research, which led New York and Vermont lawmakers to propose legislation.

When it comes to climate and environmental matters, states often rely on academics for legal advice because many private law firms represent fossil fuel companies, which can create a conflict of interest.

After writing her memo, Ms. Rothschild joined the faculty at the University of Michigan, where she continued to work on climate superfund legislation in her free time, briefing lawmakers and testifying before legislative committees.

“I’m proud of the fact that I do a lot of pro bono work in areas where I have particular expertise, and I was glad I could help states like Vermont and New York draft these laws,” she said in a statement.

Ms. Rothschild’s pro bono work was “critical” to passage of the law in New York, said Justin Flagg, director of environmental policy for Liz Krueger, a Democratic New York state senator who sponsored the legislation. “This was something that had not yet been tested in court,” he added. “So we really hung our hat on her analysis.”

Environmental law professors at other public universities have been targets of similar campaigns. During the Biden administration, Mr. Horner used the state public records law to obtain the emails of Ann Carlson, who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ms. Carlson, who had consulted on climate damage lawsuits, was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to run a federal agency that writes rules aimed at reducing climate-warming tailpipe pollution — a position requiring Senate confirmation.

Government Accountability and Oversight gave Ms. Carlson’s emails to Fox News, which published stories about her on its website including one titled, “Biden nominee coordinated dark money climate nuisance lawsuits involving Leonardo DiCaprio.”

Image

Ann Carlson, who has shoulder-length wavy brown hair and large glasses, looks into the distance.

Professor Ann Carlson at the University of California, Los Angeles.Credit...Joyce Kim for The New York Times

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, used the emails to fight Ms. Carlson’s confirmation, at one point calling her an “ethically challenged, environmental zealot.” He introduced an amendment on the Senate floor to strip the salary from her position.

While the amendment failed, she ultimately withdrew her nomination, although she did end up serving in the role in an acting capacity.

“It was ruthless, relentless and baseless,” Ms. Carlson said of the experience of having her emails used against her. “This is a tactic designed to dissuade people from working on important climate policies.”

The campaign has extended to at least one judge. In 2023, Mark Recktenwald, the chief justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court, wrote a unanimous decision that the local government in Honolulu could move forward with a climate liability lawsuit against major oil companies.

Justice Recktenwald gave a remote presentation to the Environmental Law Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that runs seminars on environmental litigation.

Conservative media outlets including as The Daily Caller and Fox News ran stories noting that a member of the institute’s board had worked at a law firm that defended the climate law in the Honolulu case. The stories did not mention that oil executives also serve on the institute’s board. Justice Recktenwald had also asked both parties in the Honolulu lawsuit for any concerns about his plans to speak at the seminar, and neither side had objected.

But in virtually every story, a group called Energy Policy Advocates, which has named Mr. Horner as its lawyer, charged that Justice Recktenwald’s participation showed improper bias.

Justice Recktenwald declined to comment. The effort to devalue the legal scholars involved in the climate cases reflects the potential impact of the new laws and litigation, experts said.

“These new state laws and this avalanche of lawsuits are threatening the survival of these fossil fuel companies,” said Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.

Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

Coral Davenport covers energy and environment policy, with a focus on climate change, for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on March 29, 2025, Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Her Work Inspired Climate Superfund Laws. Now She’s a Target..

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

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

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

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WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change

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

By Christopher M. Matthews

and Collin Eaton

Sept. 14, 2023

2487 RESPONSES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT’S NEWS

Exclusive: Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change

Tillerson declined to comment through a representative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 2013

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

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

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

adviser wrote:

“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seminal warning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public shift

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Skeptic arguments’

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

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

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

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

May 2012

Exxon researchers met regularly about developments in climate science

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

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

scientists, one researcher said:

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

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

and worthy of further investigation?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 2015

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

researchers and in some instances asked about uncertainty in

climate-change modeling. An Exxon executive wrote Kheshgi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

effects in their climate models and projections of future temperatures and

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

major or minor source of uncertainty?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

: 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8}:

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

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BUSINESS

Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Were Hacked, Prosecutors Say

Private documents stolen during an extensive scheme appear to have been used to undermine investigations into the oil giant’s knowledge of climate change, prosecutors say.

Erin Mulvaney

October 12, 2023 07:07 pm ET

Appeared in the Oct 13, 2023 , print edition as 'Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Hacked'

:{federal prosecutors said private documents stolen during an extensive hacking-for-hire scheme appear to have been used to undermine investigations into:{Exxon Mobil’s knowledge of climate change.}:

The documents, taken from people involved in climate change advocacy, were among the intelligence collected as part of a five-year hacking campaign targeting thousands of individual victims and companies, according to sentencing documents filed Thursday by the Justice Department.

An Israeli private detective, Aviram Azari, who prosecutors say played a critical role, pleaded guilty in April 2022 to participating in the conspiracy. He is due to face sentencing in a New York federal court next week.

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office says clients hired Azari to manage various projects that were characterized as intelligence gathering, but were instead hacking efforts, stealing user credentials through spear-phishing messages that appeared to targets to have come from a trusted source. They say Azari was paid $4.8 million between November 2014 and September 2019 for his role in the scheme.

Prosecutors didn’t accuse anyone of hiring Azari in the court filing. In a court filing last year, prosecutors said his clients “included Israeli, European, and U.S. companies.” His lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Wall Street Journal previously reportedthat hackers hired by Azari had successfully gained access to accounts belonging to environmentalists and others seeking to hold Exxon and other big oil companies accountable for their alleged deceptions about climate change.

“It was intimidating,” Kert Davies, a climate advocate identified by prosecutors as a target of the scheme, said in an interview. He now works for the Center for Climate Integrity, but at the time worked for the Climate Investigations Center, both supporting campaigns to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change.

“Exxon is not named as a culprit, but their interests were served by this criminal,” he said.

Exxon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

An Exxon spokeswoman told the Journal in a March statement that the company “has no knowledge of Azari, had no involvement in any hacking activities and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. To be clear, Exxon Mobil has done nothing wrong.”

The prosecutors said the scheme successfully hacked at least 100 victims, including a climate scientist involved in “a climate accountability campaign that sought to spotlight the role of major fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil.”

Other victims include individuals and companies critical of the now defunct German payment processor

Wirecard A.G

., Mexican politicians, African government officials, and others, prosecutors said. They say the true volume of individuals and entities, however, have yet to be identified, are likely in the thousands and span the globe.

Hacked documents were stolen from victims that were related to New York and Massachusetts attorneys general’s investigations into Exxon’s knowledge about climate change and subsequently leaked to the press, according to prosecutors.

The state investigations alleged the fossil fuel industry lied about climate change and should be held accountable for their role in it. Dozens of lawsuitsare moving forward in state court against the largest players in the industry, and are supported by some nonprofits linked to the hacking scheme.

Prosecutors say the news articles about hacked documents “appeared designed to undermine the integrity” of the investigations.

The Journal previously reported that the Rockefeller Family Fund was among the targets. The charity, created by heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s forebear Standard Oil, has been involved in the efforts that argue Exxon hid the extent of what it knew about the effects of climate change. The Journal also reported Greenpeace, 350.org and Public Citizen were targets.

According to the court filing, climate scientist Peter Frumhoff’s work email account was successfully hacked and received repeated deceptive emails. He told prosecutors, “the spearphishing campaign had an inevitable chilling effect” on efforts to combat climate change.

Another target was Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, who according to the court filing said a private email from January 2016 was leaked to the press that included an agenda and attendees of a meeting held at the Rockefeller Family Fund office in Manhattan. The email indicated that the meeting was meant to discuss how to sway public opinion against Exxon.

After the meeting was described in a news article, Exxon cited it in its court filings defending itself against lawsuits brought by the attorneys general.

Write to Erin Mulvaney at erin.mulvaney@wsj.com

87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the October 13, 2023, print edition as 'Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Hacked'.

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Exxon’s Climate Opponents Were Infiltrated by Massive Hacking-for-Hire Operation - WSJ

In the midst of perpetrating what federal prosecutors say was a massive corporate hacking campaign, Israeli private detective Aviram Azari in 2017 received welcome news.

A group of hackers in India wrote him to say they had successfully infiltrated the email and social-media accounts of a group of environmental activists campaigning against

“On a happy note I would like to report some success below: Project Name Rainbow,” the hackers wrote in electronic messages that were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The messages included evidence of the successful intrusions, including screenshots of compromised email inboxes.

The messages along with court records reveal new details about the hacking campaign, including that thousands of individuals and companies were targeted and at least some of the attacks resulted in the hackers successfully gaining access to the private accounts of the victims and obtaining their passwords.

Among the targets was the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity created by some of the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s forebear Standard Oil. The fund has for years been involved in campaigns arguing that Exxon hid from the public the full extent of what it knew internally about climate change and the role fossil fuels played in causing it.

Exxon has long denied those allegations.

An Exxon spokeswoman said in a statement that the company “has no knowledge of Azari, had no involvement in any hacking activities and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. To be clear, ExxonMobil has done nothing wrong.”

Mr. Azari pleaded guilty in April 2022 to participating in a hacking conspiracy, wire fraud and identity theft. After several delays, his sentencing was set for late March in federal court in New York, but was delayed once more last week at his request.

Federal agents arrested Mr. Azari in 2019 while he was on a family vacation in Florida. Since then, he has been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn and the mystery has lingered about who Mr. Azari’s clients were.

Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan haven’t accused anyone of hiring Mr. Azari to hack the environmentalists and no one else has been charged publicly in connection with the case. In a court filing last year, prosecutors said his clients “included Israeli, European, and U.S. companies.”

Last year, prosecutors notified some of the activist groups, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, that they were targeted or successfully infiltrated, according to documents viewed by the Journal and people familiar with the matter.

It couldn’t be determined if the fund was successfully hacked. The hackers were able to access accounts belonging to employees of other groups that have also campaigned against Exxon, including Greenpeace, Public Citizen and 350.org, among others, according to the documents.

Mr. Azari’s attorney, Barry Zone, said his client isn’t cooperating with the investigation. The probe is ongoing, according to people familiar with the matter.

:{:{Ted Wells}:

“My client accepted responsibility for what he did and he’s sorry for the people who were affected,” Mr. Zone said. “In terms of the level of magnitude of hacking, I consider my client to be a very small player in that realm.”

Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said he hoped Mr. Azari would disclose who hired him. “This defendant did not decide on his own to follow and target climate advocates in the U.S. from halfway around the world. He was clearly working for corporate actors in this country,” Mr. Wasserman said.

According to court documents, Mr. Azari would provide the Indian hackers with information on the main targets for each hacking project as well as on individuals who were connected to the main targets, such as family, friends or co-workers.

The hackers would then send Mr. Azari periodic updates on their efforts. Through target lists and emails related to successful hacks obtained by investigators, prosecutors say they have determined Mr. Azari targeted thousands of individuals and entities.

In addition to climate-change activists, Mr. Azari also targeted hedge funds and other financial institutions.

:{Mr. Azari has admitted to prosecutors that one of his clients was the now-insolvent German payments company:{Wirecard}:

, according to a person familiar with the case. The Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity group at the University of Toronto, said it found that hackers engaged in sustained targeting of short sellers, journalists and investigators working on topics related to Wirecard. In a previous statement, Wirecard said it “has at no time been in direct or indirect contact with a hacker group from India.”

The government “does not know whether its information is complete,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing. “Indeed, there are likely to be thousands of additional individuals and entities who were targeted during the course of the spearphishing and hacking scheme.”

A common tactic of hackers, spear phishing is the use of phony messages designed to solicit personal information that can then be used to access private accounts.

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has focused some of its investigation on how a private email from Jan. 5, 2016, from one of the activists to other members of environmental groups, was eventually posted online, according to people familiar with the matter.

The email was sent to 16 people about a meeting that was to be hosted on Jan. 8, 2016, by the Rockefeller Family Fund to discuss efforts to sway the public that “Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

The gathering was held as some of the groups were advising the New York attorney general on a lawsuit it later filed against Exxon in 2018 accusing the oil giant of misleading investors about the risks that climate-change regulations posed to its business.

Others who attended the meeting included climate activist and author Bill McKibben, a co-founder of 350.org, and representatives of Greenpeace and Public Citizen.

According to Citizen Lab, all of the email recipients were the target of spear phishing attempts shortly after the January meeting. The hacking attempts were conducted by an Indian company called BellTroX, according to Citizen Lab. BellTroX was also the firm hired by Mr. Azari, people familiar with the matter said.

The meeting was subsequently described in media reports, including in a Journal article in April 2016. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet, later published a copy of the private email about the January meeting on its website.

Recipients of the email told the Journal that they believed it was obtained through hacking and that everyone on the email had attested they didn’t share it with a wider audience.

“We were pretty strict on who was joining and what we were sharing,” said Jamie Henn, a co-founder and former communications director for 350.org who received the email and attended the January meeting. “We knew this was explosive material.”

Eliana Johnson, the Washington Free Beacon’s editor in chief, said in an email that the outlet stood by its reporting.

Exxon eventually cited the email on its website as evidence of “a coordinated campaign perpetuated by activist groups with the aim of stigmatizing ExxonMobil.” Exxon’s lawyers have also cited the email in briefings in court cases, arguing it demonstrated improper influence by the campaigners on prosecutors pursuing investigations into Exxon.

In his opening statement in the trial stemming from the New York attorney general’s lawsuit, Exxon lawyer Ted Wells quoted the email and said it was part of a “vilification agenda.”

“They want to talk about how they can get [activist groups] involved to advance that false agenda to try to perpetrate something false,” said Mr. Wells, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, during the 2019 trial, in which a New York state judge cleared Exxon of fraud claims. “It’s almost like the Russians, trying to interfere with the election.”

Mr. Wasserman, the Rockefeller Family Fund director, said Exxon has repeatedly used the email “to develop a convoluted and completely false story about how citizens working together to address climate change are somehow conspirators—a fairytale meant to deflect attention from Exxon’s internal corporate documents about the climate catastrophe they knowingly helped cause. It’s like the arsonists trying to pin blame on the firefighters.”

Exxon called Mr. Wasserman’s statement “completely false.”

Write to Christopher M. Matthews at christopher.matthews@wsj.com

Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8}:

Appeared in the March 30, 2023, print edition as 'Hackers Infiltrated Exxon Critics'.

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Why Exxon hates the Rockefellers, its founding family

By Maxine Joselow | 05/04/2021

Exxon Mobil Corp. has a strategy for firing back at supporters of climate change litigation against the oil giant: Blame the Rockefellers.

In recent court filings and public statements, Exxon has accused people who support climate liability lawsuits of engaging in a conspiracy bankrolled by members of the elite Rockefeller family.

The allegations, which pit one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies against one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, are more than a little ironic.

For one thing, Exxon is the largest descendant of Standard Oil Co., the business that John D. Rockefeller founded in 1870. The family’s wealth today largely stems from the 19th-century oil tycoon.

For another, the climate liability lawsuits accuse Exxon itself of engaging in a far-reaching conspiracy to obscure the scientific consensus on climate change and block global efforts to rein in planet-warming emissions.

To climate activists, the oil giant is trying to flip the script on the allegations it’s battling in court.

"If there’s ever been a conspiracy, it’s abundantly clear what it is. It’s been a conspiracy over many decades of Exxon and its ilk covering up the greatest threat that human civilization has ever faced," author and activist Bill McKibben said in an interview with E&E News.

"The results," McKibben said, "will be obvious in the geological record of planet Earth for millions of years to come."

To Exxon and its allies, however, a paper trail from the Rockefellers’ charities paints the picture of a tangled conspiracy stretching from journalists to activists to lawyers.

The paper trail starts in 2015, when the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — a New York City-based philanthropic foundation created and run by members of the Rockefeller family — donated $200,000 to InsideClimate News.

That same year, the RockefellerFamily Fund — a separate charitable entity — gave $200,000 to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Both donations funded bombshell investigations published in InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times that revealed Exxon privately knew about climate change in the 1970s but that the company publicly denied the scientific consensus for decades. The investigations spawned the hashtag #ExxonKnew and fueled a wave of climate litigation against the oil giant.

Today, five states and more than a dozen municipalities have filed lawsuits alleging that Exxon and other oil companies misled the public about the climate risks of burning fossil fuels. The complaints ask the industry to help cover the costs of addressing floods, wildfires and other disasters fueled by rising global temperatures.

From 2015 to 2019, the latest year for which data is available, the Rockefellers’ charities donated more than$3 million to organizations that have supported the climate liability lawsuits through advocacy, research or litigation, according to data compiled for E&E News by Anna Massoglia, an investigative researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics.

That includes more than $1 million to 350.org, the environmental group co-founded by McKibben, and $175,000 to EarthRights International, a nonprofit organization involved in a climate liability lawsuit in Colorado.

"The #ExxonKnew campaign is extremely well-funded and includes paid media coverage, legal support, activist groups and academic research," Exxon wrote in a February post on its website. "Foundations providing financial support for the campaign include: Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Rockefeller Philanthropy."

Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said the philanthropic efforts have struck a nerve at the oil supermajor.

"Exxon has accused us and other advocates of conspiracy, which is obviously a very loaded term," Wasserman, who is not a Rockefeller, said in an interview with E&E News.

"In America, of course, it’s considered noble when citizen organizations band together to address major societal concerns, not a conspiracy," he continued. "But I guess if you’re Exxon, the world looks a little different to you."

In a phone call with E&E News, Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton questioned why this story was newsworthy. Norton didn’t respond to follow-up requests for comment.

‘Morally reprehensible’

Standard Oil controlled more than 90% of petroleum production in America within a few decades of its founding. By the time John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, he was the richest man in the world, leaving behind a fossil fuel fortune for his descendants.

Today, there are more than 70 heirs of the oil tycoon with a combined net worth of $8.4 billion, according to Forbes. Many of them have become increasingly concerned about climate change — and increasingly uneasy about the source of their wealth.

One of those heirs, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, co-sponsored a resolution at Exxon’s annual shareholder meeting in 2008 demanding that the company study the risks it faces from climate change.

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The resolution failed. But the battle was just beginning.

In 2016, after unsuccessfully trying to persuade Exxon’s top brass to take climate change more seriously, Goodwin went public with her discontent. She penned an opinion piece in the LA Times announcing that she was selling her shares in the company and donating the $400,000 in proceeds to the Rockefeller Family Fund’s environmental program.

"I was really disgusted with the lying that the company had been doing. And I just didn’t feel good about maintaining a relationship with this company, which had been started, of course, by my great-grandfather," Goodwin, an economist at Boston University, said in an interview with E&E News.

"I don’t say he was doing the wrong thing to start that company. In his day, that was the progressive thing to do," she added. "But looking back, we know that human extraction and use of fossil fuels has done enormous damage to the planet and to our species’ future."

Around the same time, the Rockefeller Family Fund announced that it would divest its portfolio from fossil fuels in a scathing statement that singled out Exxon.

"We would be remiss," the leaders of the fund wrote, "if we failed to focus on what we believe to be the morally reprehensible conduct on the part of ExxonMobil."

Consultants and lawyers

The Exxon-Rockefeller feud is not a new phenomenon. The New York Times detailed the controversy in a 2016 piece titled "Exxon Mobil Accuses the Rockefellers of a Climate Conspiracy."

But in the five years since then, the mud-slinging has intensified, as Exxon has funneled its attacks on the Rockefellers through a network of high-powered consultants and lawyers.

FTI Consulting Inc., a global firm whose fossil fuel industry clients include Exxon, has written a flurry of posts blasting the Rockefellers on Energy in Depth, a news and media site run by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

In a 2019 post titled "How the Rockefellers Manufactured the Climate Liability Campaign,"FTI’s Spencer Walrathwrote that backers of the climate liability lawsuits "have all been bankrolled by the Rockefellers, a wealthy family that owes its riches to the very company it is now seeking to destroy."

Asked for comment, William Allison, a spokesman for Energy in Depth and a senior director at FTI, said in an emailed statement: "For nearly a decade, members of the Rockefeller family have openly spent tens of millions of dollars to support plaintiffs’ attorneys, activist groups, academics and journalists who advocate for lawsuits that they fully admit will do absolutely nothing to address climate change."

Allison added, "Governments, energy companies, investors and labor unions are focused on solutions, while the Rockefellers are increasingly on an island — wasting time, money and resources on a campaign that everyone else knows is a failure."

In addition to FTI, Exxon has hired Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a New York City-based law firm that represents the oil company in several climate liability cases.

In a recent presentation in the climate liability case brought by Massachusetts officials, Paul Weiss partner Justin Anderson pointed out that climate activists held a 2016 meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund.

The participants in the meeting "referred openly to an Exxon campaign, the goals of which were to create scandal, force officials to disassociate themselves from the company and delegitimize Exxon Mobil as a political actor," Anderson told Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Karen Green at a March hearing in the case.

Paul Weiss lawyers also dismissed the 2015 investigations into Exxon by InsideClimate News and the LA Times as "so-called investigative journalism" in a 2018 court filing in the climate liability lawsuit brought by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D).

"ExxonMobil has unambiguously alleged that the Attorneys General relied on this so-called journalism to provide a convenient pretext for their unlawful exercise of state power to discriminate based on viewpoint," the lawyers wrote.

Asked for comment, David Sassoon, founder and publisher of InsideClimate News, said in an email to E&E News: "We published a nine part series based on Exxon’s own internal documents, and our work, which has proven itself to be bulletproof, speaks for itself. To claim it’s the result of conspiracy is silly and baseless."

Sassoon added that Exxon has never asked the news outlet to issue a correction.

‘A conspiracy to end world hunger’

From 2015 to 2019, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund donated $700,000 to the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, according to the data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The Rockefeller Family Fund gave an additional $75,000.

Until last month, the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development housed the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a Washington-based group that seeks to raise public awareness of the climate liability lawsuits through a "Pay Up Climate Polluters" campaign.

FTI has accused CCI Executive Director Richard Wiles of supporting a "larger coordinated scheme to attack energy companies and force the industry to pay for global warming."

Wiles responded sarcastically when asked about these allegations.

"I suppose if there is a conspiracy, it’s like a conspiracy to end world hunger," he said. "Yes, we’re guilty of talking to each other about the oil industry’s role in causing and then lying about climate change. I’m guilty of talking to my colleagues. It’s true."

Wiles argued that Exxon has sought to deprive climate activists of theirFirst Amendment rights to criticize the oil giant — while at the same time seeking to preserve its own First Amendment rights to communicate about climate change to the public.

"They think that the First Amendment allows them to lie about their role in causing climate change, but it does not allow advocates to talk to each other about how to deal with that," Wiles said. "So it’s an interesting interpretation of the Constitution."

Rockefeller funding has supported the Center for Climate Integrity’s work "across all program areas," he added, including staff salaries, legal assessments and the ExxonKnews newsletter.

From 2015 to 2019, the Rockefeller Family Fund provided $175,000 toEarthRights International, a nonprofit organization that says it combines "the power of law and the power of people in defense of human rights and the environment."

:{:{}:

EarthRights helped three Colorado communities — the city of Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County — bring climate liability lawsuits against Exxon and SuncorEnergy Inc. in 2018.

FTI has described Earthrights as a "shadowy group" that has "connections to all the major anti-fossil fuel players backed by wealthy environmentalist foundations."

Marco Simons, general counsel at EarthRights International who is on the legal team representing the three Colorado governments, said the Rockefellers don’t exert control over his work.

"We never allow funders to interfere with our attorney-client relationships or call the shots in terms of litigation strategy. That would be a serious ethical violation," Simons said.

"On a more general level, I’m not sure why it’s surprising that people who care about climate change are funding work on climate change," he added. "So if that’s a conspiracy, I don’t know what to say."

Saying adieu to ads

Many of the climate liability lawsuits against Exxon have been tied up in procedural wrangling over whether they belong in state or federal court.

The Supreme Court is expected to soon decide BP PLC v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, a narrow technical dispute stemming from Baltimore’s climate liability lawsuit that could help settle the venue question (Climatewire, Feb. 23).

In the meantime, Goodwin, the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, counts a small victory outside the courtroom.

Goodwin said that although her early meetings with Exxon were largely unproductive, she was able to convince the company to stop running advertorials in The New York Times touting its commitment to fighting global warming.

"We had been having some dialogue, and we discovered that the company was not talking with us in good faith at all. Basically what we realized was we were meeting with their [public relations] people and it wasn’t going anywhere," Goodwin said.

"But I told them, ‘That ad is making you look really silly,’" she added. "And the ad disappeared and never appeared again. That’s the one success that those conversations had.’"

Many of the climate liability lawsuits cite Exxon’s advertorials in the Times as an example of deceptive messaging to consumers, including the complaints brought by Delaware and Minnesota.

Exxon’s advertorials, which appeared in the Times every Thursday from 1989 to 2004, effectively "misled the public" about the scientific consensus on global warming, Harvard University researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran concluded in a 2017 paper.

The Harvard researchers, too, have faced pushback from Exxon. Vijay Swarup, the company’s vice president of research and development, has accused the researchers of using "cherry-picked" data, while FTI has called out the paper’s partial funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund.

"My broad reaction is that as the saying goes, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," Supran said in an interview with E&E News.

"I see this stage right now as the fighting," he added. "In other words, the evidence that the fossil fuel industry endangered the public by misleading it about climate science has become so overwhelming that Exxon is coming out swinging with everything they’ve got."

Rockefeller funding

Grantor Recipient 2019 amount 2018 amount 2017 amount 2016 amount 2015 amount Total 2015-2019

Rockefeller Brothers Fund 350.org $200,000 $0 $200,000 $200,000 $250,000 $850,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development $75,000 $75,000 $150,000 $73,877 $326,123 $700,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Lost Light Projects Inc. for InsideClimate News $0 $0 $0 $0 $200,000 $200,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors for Climate Nexus $195,159 $0 $0 $0 $0 $195,159

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Climate Accountability Institute $0 $30,000 $30,000 $30,000 $37,000 $127,000

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Better Future Project Inc. for Divest Harvard $100,000 $0 $0 $0 $0 $100,000

Rockefeller Family Fund Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism $50,000 $0 $155,000 $0 $200,000 $405,000

Rockefeller Family Fund EarthRights International $105,000 $0 $70,000 $0 $0 $175,000

Rockefeller Family Fund Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development $75,000 $0 $0 $0 $0 $75,000

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors 350.org $300,500 $0 $0 $0 $0 $300,500

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Union of Concerned Scientists $19,000 $15,000 $0 $0 $0 $34,000

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Center for International Environmental Law $0 $0 $25,000 $0 $0 $25,000

           :{TOTAL: $3,186,659:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

Anna Massoglia/Center for Responsive Politics

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Exxon Mobil Corp. has a strategy for firing back at supporters of climate change litigation against the oil giant: Blame the Rockefellers.

In recent court filings and public statements, Exxon has accused people who support climate liability lawsuits of engaging in a conspiracy bankrolled by members of the elite Rockefeller family.

The allegations, which pit one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies against one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, are more than a little ironic.

For one thing, Exxon is the largest descendant of Standard Oil Co., the business that John D. Rockefeller founded in 1870. The family’s wealth today largely stems from the 19th-century oil tycoon.

To climate activists, the oil giant is trying to flip the script on the allegations it’s battling in court.

"The results," McKibben said, "will be obvious in the geological record of planet Earth for millions of years to come."

To Exxon and its allies, however, a paper trail from the Rockefellers’ charities paints the picture of a tangled conspiracy stretching from journalists to activists to lawyers.

That same year, the Rockefeller Family Fund — a separate charitable entity — gave $200,000 to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Both donations funded bombshell investigations published in InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times that revealed Exxon privately knew about climate change in the 1970s but that the company publicly denied the scientific consensus for decades. The investigations spawned the hashtag #ExxonKnew and fueled a wave of climate litigation against the oil giant.

From 2015 to 2019, the latest year for which data is available, the Rockefellers’ charities donated more than $3 million to organizations that have supported the climate liability lawsuits through advocacy, research or litigation, according to data compiled for E&E News by Anna Massoglia, an investigative researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics.

Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said the philanthropic efforts have struck a nerve at the oil supermajor.

"Exxon has accused us and other advocates of conspiracy, which is obviously a very loaded term," Wasserman, who is not a Rockefeller, said in an interview with E&E News.

In a phone call with E&E News, Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton questioned why this story was newsworthy. Norton didn’t respond to follow-up requests for comment.

‘Morally reprehensible’

Standard Oil controlled more than 90% of petroleum production in America within a few decades of its founding. By the time John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, he was the richest man in the world, leaving behind a fossil fuel fortune for his descendants.

Today, there are more than 70 heirs of the oil tycoon with a combined net worth of $8.4 billion, according to Forbes. Many of them have become increasingly concerned about climate change — and increasingly uneasy about the source of their wealth.

The resolution failed. But the battle was just beginning.

In 2016, after unsuccessfully trying to persuade Exxon’s top brass to take climate change more seriously, Goodwin went public with her discontent. She penned an opinion piece in the LA Times announcing that she was selling her shares in the company and donating the $400,000 in proceeds to the Rockefeller Family Fund’s environmental program.

Around the same time, the Rockefeller Family Fund announced that it would divest its portfolio from fossil fuels in a scathing statement that singled out Exxon.

"We would be remiss," the leaders of the fund wrote, "if we failed to focus on what we believe to be the morally reprehensible conduct on the part of ExxonMobil."

Consultants and lawyers

The Exxon-Rockefeller feud is not a new phenomenon. The New York Times detailed the controversy in a 2016 piece titled "Exxon Mobil Accuses the Rockefellers of a Climate Conspiracy."

But in the five years since then, the mud-slinging has intensified, as Exxon has funneled its attacks on the Rockefellers through a network of high-powered consultants and lawyers.

In a 2019 post titled "How the Rockefellers Manufactured the Climate Liability Campaign," FTI’s Spencer Walrath wrote that backers of the climate liability lawsuits "have all been bankrolled by the Rockefellers, a wealthy family that owes its riches to the very company it is now seeking to destroy."

In addition to FTI, Exxon has hired Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a New York City-based law firm that represents the oil company in several climate liability cases.

Paul Weiss lawyers also dismissed the 2015 investigations into Exxon by InsideClimate News and the LA Times as "so-called investigative journalism" in a 2018 court filing in the climate liability lawsuit brought by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D).

Asked for comment, David Sassoon, founder and publisher of InsideClimate News, said in an email to E&E News: "We published a nine part series based on Exxon’s own internal documents, and our work, which has proven itself to be bulletproof, speaks for itself. To claim it’s the result of conspiracy is silly and baseless."

Sassoon added that Exxon has never asked the news outlet to issue a correction.

‘A conspiracy to end world hunger’

FTI has accused CCI Executive Director Richard Wiles of supporting a "larger coordinated scheme to attack energy companies and force the industry to pay for global warming."

Wiles responded sarcastically when asked about these allegations.

Wiles argued that Exxon has sought to deprive climate activists of their First Amendment rights to criticize the oil giant — while at the same time seeking to preserve its own First Amendment rights to communicate about climate change to the public.

Rockefeller funding has supported the Center for Climate Integrity’s work "across all program areas," he added, including staff salaries, legal assessments and the *ExxonKnews* newsletter.

From 2015 to 2019, the Rockefeller Family Fund provided $175,000 to EarthRights International, a nonprofit organization that says it combines "the power of law and the power of people in defense of human rights and the environment."

EarthRights helped three Colorado communities — the city of Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County — bring climate liability lawsuits against Exxon and Suncor Energy Inc. in 2018.

FTI has described Earthrights as a "shadowy group" that has "connections to all the major anti-fossil fuel players backed by wealthy environmentalist foundations."

Marco Simons, general counsel at EarthRights International who is on the legal team representing the three Colorado governments, said the Rockefellers don’t exert control over his work.

"We never allow funders to interfere with our attorney-client relationships or call the shots in terms of litigation strategy. That would be a serious ethical violation," Simons said.

Saying adieu to ads

Many of the climate liability lawsuits against Exxon have been tied up in procedural wrangling over whether they belong in state or federal court.

The Supreme Court is expected to soon decide BP PLC v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, a narrow technical dispute stemming from Baltimore’s climate liability lawsuit that could help settle the venue question (Climatewire, Feb. 23).

In the meantime, Goodwin, the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, counts a small victory outside the courtroom.

Goodwin said that although her early meetings with Exxon were largely unproductive, she was able to convince the company to stop running advertorials in The New York Times touting its commitment to fighting global warming.

"But I told them, ‘That ad is making you look really silly,’" she added. "And the ad disappeared and never appeared again. That’s the one success that those conversations had.’"

Many of the climate liability lawsuits cite Exxon’s advertorials in the Times as an example of deceptive messaging to consumers, including the complaints brought by Delaware and Minnesota.

Exxon’s advertorials, which appeared in the Times every Thursday from 1989 to 2004, effectively "misled the public" about the scientific consensus on global warming, Harvard University researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran concluded in a 2017 paper.

"My broad reaction is that as the saying goes, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," Supran said in an interview with E&E News.

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https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Inside-Exxon-Mobil-s-fight-to-stop-climate-12994450.php

BUSINESS

Inside Exxon Mobil’s fight to stop climate change litigation in its tracks

James Osborne

Staff Writer

June 15, 2018

[FILE - In this May 31, 2006 file photo, an ice sculpture fashioned by protesters, to demonstrate their view of how the company's policies are affecting the environment, slowly melts outside the Exxon Mobil shareholders meeting in Dallas. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday, April 13, 2018, that Exxon Mobil must hand over documents for Attorney General Maura Healey's probe into whether the company misled investors and consumers about what it knew about the link between fossil fuels and climate change. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)]

WASHINGTON — Imagine this storyline: One of the largest oil companies in the world becomes the victim of a left-wing conspiracy, funded by wealthy liberals who convince Democratic attorneys general across the nation to sue the company to stop it from offering different views about climate change.

What sounds like the stuff of a bad Hollywood thriller is, in fact, the narrative Exxon Mobil’s attorneys are telling as they seek to defend the company from mryiad lawsuits and investigations into what oil companies knew about climate change and when they knew it. With a surprising procedural victory in a Texas court recently, Exxon is attempting to gain greater latitude in what it and other oil companies can say — or not say — about climate change and the impact on their businesses, seeking to build on legal rulings that have expanded corporations’ rights of free speech in recent years, legal scholars say.

The U.S. government has long limited First Amendment protections for corporations, prohibiting them from making false statements to further business interests — a staple of U.S. consumer protection laws going back to the days of snake-oil salesmen peddling so-called magic elixirs. But Exxon’s case could test how far the courts are willing to go to uphold governments’ ability to regulate commercial speech.

Exxon is arguing that the state and local governments suing the company have gone too far, trying to impose an Orwellian code of conduct to drown out those who call attention to uncertainties about how climate change will play out over the long term and affect the global economy.

“Exxon is framing (climate change) as a legitimate political debate in which they are a participant, rather than a for-profit company trying to make a buck,” said Tamara Piety, a law professor at University of Tulsa. “There has been a growing movement (among corporations) to raise the First Amendment. If something can be proven to be unconstitutional it’s completely off the table”

Over the past two decades, companies have successfully used the free speech strategy to challenge government regulations on everything from the placement of workplace signs explaining employee rights to the distribution of patients’ medical data. A key win for corporate America came in 2010 Citizens United case, when the Supreme Court ruled that limits on corporate spending in political campaigns violated companies’ free speech rights.

Now Exxon is seeking to expand corporate rights one step further, arguing that the government legal action, based on the company’s past statements, is little more than leverage to get oil companies to agree to a wide-arching climate change deal that would restrict what they can say about the issue — in violation of “of Exxon Mobil’s constitutional rights.” That includes investigations launched by the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general into whether Exxon lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of climate change to the environment and its business, and lawsuits filed by cities and counties in California and Colorado, which are seeking damages from Exxon and other oil companies for the costs of rising sea levels and increased wildfires.

Exxon in January asked a state court in Fort Worth to order more than a dozen city and county officials from California to sit for depositions by Exxon’s attorneys to determine whether they are conspiring with plaintiffs’ attorneys and environmentalist activists to force Exxon into accepting a deal. A New York federal judge in March dismissed a similar request by Exxon to depose the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general, ruling it was based on “extremely thin allegations and speculative inference,” but the Texas judge, R.H. Wallace Jr., decided to give the company more room to prove its claim, ruling in April that Exxon could begin making requests to depose specific officials.

Exxon declined to comment. But James Coleman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a contributor to the conservative Federalist Society, said Exxon, which has come out in support of the Paris climate accords and a national carbon tax, is simply protecting its First Amendment rightsto communicate about climate change and the effects on its finances as it sees fit.

“It’s an unusual claim (by Exxon) but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” he said. “The government can make you give accurate information, but the government can’t force you to say things you disagree with. For instance, the government couldn’t make Exxon say climate change is the defining challenge of our time, even if they consider it a fact.”

San Francisco and other California communities are challenging Wallace’s ruling in the Texas 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, potentially setting the case on a path to the Texas Supreme Court. And considering the political makeup of the state’s high court, Exxon stands a good chance of winning its argument, said Tom McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who sits on an advisory board to the California plaintiffs.

“It presents a very sympathetic venue,” he said. “It’s a pro-business Supreme Court.”

Conspiracy

The case in Texas comes three years into a legal campaign against Exxon and other oil companies. In Exxon’s telling, it all stems from meeting of environmental activists in the beach town ofLa Jolla, California, in 2012.

Activists and attorneys discussed a strategy for addressing climate change based on the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, which successfully argued tobacco companies were liable for smokers’ deaths because executives knew the risks but still claimed publicly they did not, according to an account of the meeting published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group that helped organize the event

If Exxon and other oil companies could be shown to have known the risks to health and safety of climate change but did nothing to warn the public and investors, then perhaps activists could create a groundswell of public outrage to change the political and economic landscape for oil companies, much as they had for tobacco companies.

“We wrote up a report so other lawyers and policymakers could pick up on those lessons (from tobacco) and use them, like you would any science you would hope is actionable,” said Peter Frumhoff, head of policy and science at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The first tenet of good science is being transparent.”

But the activists also gave Exxon a potential weapon to counterattack.

The company’s lawyers have focused on one line in the Union of Concerned Scientists account, in which activists describe how they could could use litigation for “maintaining pressure on the industry that could eventually lead to its support for legislative and regulatory responses to global warming.” That game plan, Exxon lawyers said, was then adopted by government prosecutors, including former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who recently resigned amid allegations of sexual abuse.

Wallace, the Texas judge, agreed with the company lawyers, writing that environmentalists who attended the La Jollameeting “aimed to chill and suppress Exxon Mobil’s speech.”

California and Colorado officials dismiss Exxon’s legal maneuvers as little more than intimidation tactics aimed at frightening and bogging them down in paperwork. A spokesman for the New York Attorney General’s Office called Exxon’s strategy an attempt to “distract and deflect from the facts at hand.”

Public opinion

Within conservative circles, Exxon’s conspiracy message seems to be gaining traction.

:{:{}:

Earlier this year, David Bookbinder, an attorney with the libertarian Niskanen Center, filed suit against Exxon and the Canadian oil company Suncor,claiming they were responsible for the costs sustained by Colorado local governments in fighting wildfires and other effects of climate change.

:{:{}:

A few weeks later, he began seeing his name pop up on conservative websites, including theDaily Caller and one owned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Articles suggested Bookbinder and his colleagues were part of a conspiracy funded by theRockefeller Brothers Fund, a New York charity with more than $800 million in assets that is overseen by the descendants of the late oil tycoonJohn D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was the precursor to Exxon Mobil.

The claim was based on a $200,000 grant the Niskanen Center received shortly before the Colorado lawsuit was filed. Bookbinder said the grant had nothing to do with the lawsuit and scoffed at the idea his plaintiffs were part of a conspiracy to damage Exxon.

:{:{}:

“My clients don’t want Exxon out of business,” he said. “Then they don’t get paid.”

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund said in a statement that it does consider a willingness to take oil companies to court in awarding grants to climate activists. “Litigation is one tool that can help to level the playing field by leaning into legal standards that are meant to serve the common good,” the statement said.

In its legal filings, Exxon maintains that the Rockefellers and the hedge fund billionaireTom Steyer, who is funding a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump, are behind the wave of litigation. Exxon lawyers cited a $30,000 campaign donation Steyer made to a former mayor of San Francisco shortly before that city filed suit, as well as a Columbia Journalism School investigation into how Exxon’s past statements questioning climate science conflicted with what its scientists were saying internally.

The Rockefeller Family Fund, another charity controlled by Rockefeller descendants, funded the Columbia investigation.

There’s nothing illegal about using money to try to influence a company’s behavior. But that’s besides the point for Exxon. Just as climate activists succeeded in convincing more Americans that climate change is a large and growing threat, Exxon wants to promote the idea of a liberal conspiracy to undermine a fossil fuel industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people and literally fuels the U.S. and global economies.

Exxon is now considering an appeal of a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that found the state’s attorney general’s office had not violated the company’s constitutional rights when it demanded the company turn over documents. Such an appeal would go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Exxon’s success in convincing the public of its liberal conspiracy narrative could make the difference between winning and losing.

“I don’t think the Supreme Court is completely oblivious to public opinion,” said Piety, the Tulsa law professor, “and the more Exxon can marshal public opinion, the better chance they have of convincing the courts.”

---

evil but not wrong?

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/rockefeller-family-fund/

no lnx

Rockefeller Family Fund is the nonprofit organization supporting the philanthropy of the great-grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller and the grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The “cousins,” as Rockefeller Jr.’s grandchildren came to be known, were major supporters of left-wing counterculture causes as early as the 1960s.[1] In 1992, the Rockefeller Family Fund became a public charity, and today the organization is a leading financial supporter of environmentalist organizations.

CONTENTS

History

Controversies

Oil Divestment

ExxonMobil

References

Directors, Employees & Supporters

Associated Organizations

Donor Organizations

Donation Recipients

Form 990 Information

History

Thanks to trusts established by Rockefeller, Jr., these great-grandchildren (known as the “cousins”) never had to look for work. The cousins proved to be left-wing from as early as the 1960s: They “poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into movement causes ranging from Ramparts magazine and the film Millhouse to the [Castro regime-front] Venceremos Brigade and Vietnam Veterans Against The War.”[2]

The Rockefeller Family Fund was created in 1967, but was enlarged in 1971 when Rockefeller, Jr.’s widow, Martha Baird Rockefeller, died and left her $72 million estate to charity, including $10 million to the Rockefeller Family Fund. In an internal memorandum for the other cousins, Laurance Rockefeller’s daughter Marion said “the task as we see it is to attack the very political and economic forces which perpetuate the tax deductible contribution…We think the Fund has an obligation to seek out organizations likeAmerican Friends Service Committee, Friends of the Earth, Pacifica stations, American Documentary Films et al. and support them regardless of their tax status.”[3]

In 1992, the Rockefeller Family Fund became a public charity.[4] Today, the Fund supports grants in three areas:

Environment, which, “since 2006” has focused “almost entirely on climate change,” including grants to block or close coal-fired power plants.[5]

Institutional Accountability and Individual Liberty, with an emphasis on “enacting legislation to provide automatic and permanent registration to all voters.”[6]

Economic Justice for Women, whose principal program is lobbying to increase the number of mandated paid sick days for working women.[7]

In 2017, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) gave over $1 million to environmental advocate group the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) as part of their efforts to litigate against energy companies over climate change costs. [8] In addition, the RFF helped fund a 2017 study by IGSD project the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which claimed that the state of Florida would face up to $76 billion in climate change costs by 2040. [9]

Controversies

OIL DIVESTMENT

In 2016, the Rockefeller Family Fund announced it would divest its endowment of all stocks related to oil and gas. “John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, and ExxonMobil is Standard Oil’s largest direct descendant,” the fund’s president, David Kaiser, and its director, Lee Wasserman, noted in an article in the New York Review of Books. “In a sense we were turning against the company where most of the Rockefeller family’s wealth was created.”[10]

EXXONMOBIL

In 2015, Rockefeller Family Fund grants to InsideClimate News and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism supported reports in InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times describing a tranche of internal documents from ExxonMobil scientists, mostly from 1977-1986. InsideClimate News charged that ExxonMobil published many advertisements in newspapers questioning the idea that the production and consumption of fossil fuels led to global warming while their scientists said that the connection between fossil fuel consumption and increases in the earth’s global temperature were more certain.[11]

A second grant, to Harvard graduate student Geoffrey Supran and Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes, led to the publication of an article in Environmental Research Letters in August 2017 that analyzed the documents unearthed by InsideClimate News and compared them to ExxonMobil paid advertisements, charging that the company had covered up findings about human-caused climate change.[12]

The publication of these documents led to investigations of ExxonMobil by the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which remain ongoing.

As part of their campaign against ExxonMobil, the Rockefeller Family Fund held a meeting at their offices in January 2016, which included representatives from Greenpeace, the Working Families Party, Public Citizen president Rob Weissman, and author and environmentalist Bill McKibben. Kenny Bruno of the New Venture Fund, in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, said the purposes of the meeting included establishing “in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm,” “to force officials to disassociate themselves from Exxon, their money, and their historic opposition to climate progress, for example by refusing campaign donations, refusing to take meetings, calling for a price on carbon, etc.” and “to drive Exxon and climate into center of 2016 election cycle.”[13]

Writing in the blog for climate skeptics Watts Up With That, Eric Worrall noted that Exxon scientists predicted a rise of between 1.5 and three degrees Celsius as a result of fossil fuels. “The lower range of Exxon’s estimate is an unequivocal ‘no action required.’ The upper range of Exxon’s estimate is ‘we might need to do something about it in the future.” Worrall said, “In my opinion, Exxon’s actions and communications with the public were proportionate and reasonable.”[14]

References

Martin Morse Wooster, “The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund,” Foundation Watch, January 2005 http://www.capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/pubs/pdf/FW0105.pdf ^

Martin Morse Wooster, “The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund.” ^

Ron Arnold, “The Rockefeller Family Fund: Puppet Master for Leftist Front Groups.” Foundation Watch, January 2005 http://www.capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/pubs/pdf/FW0105.pdf ^

http://www.rffund.org/programs/environment/ ^

http://www.rffund.org/programs/institutional-accountability-and-individual-liberty/ ^

http://www/rffund.org/programs/economic-justice-for-women/ ^

Walrath, Spencer. “Revealed: Foreign Billionaire Behind the Group Pushing American Cities to Sue Energy Producers.” Energy In Depth, January 8, 2020. https://eidclimate.org/revealed-foreign-billionaire-behind-the-group-pushing-american-cities-to-sue-energy-producers/. ^

Wilson, Kirby. “Florida could face $76 billion in climate change costs by 2040, report says.” Tampa Bay Times, June 21, 2019. https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/06/20/florida-could-face-76-billion-in-climate-change-costs-by-2040-report-says/ ^

David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, “The Rockefeller Family Fund vs. Exxon,” New York Review of Books, December 8, 2016 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/the-rockefeller-family-fund-vs-exxon/ ^

Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, and David Hasemyer, “Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago,” InsideClimate News, September 18, 2015, https://www.insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming ^

Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications (1977-2014), Environmental Research Letters, August 23, 2017, http://www.iopscience.iop.org/article/10.10881748_9326/aa815f. Dino Grandoni, “ExxonMobil Urged People To Read The Documents, So These Harvard Researchers Did,” Washington Post, August 24, 2017, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/08/24/exxon-mobil-urged-people-to-read-the-documents-so-these-harvard-researchers-did/ ^

Alana Goodman, “Memo Shows Secret Coordination Effort Against ExxonMobil By Climate Activists, Rockefeller Fund,” Washington Free Beacon, April 14, 2016 http://www.freebeacon.com/issues/memo-shows-secret-coorfination-effort-exxon-mobil-climate-activists ^

Eric Worrall, “Study: Naomi Oreskes And Claims ExxonMobil Misled About Climate,” Watts Up With That, August 24, 2017, http://www.wattsupwiththat/2017/08/24/study-naomi-oreskes-claims-exxon-mobil-misled-about-climate/ ^

Directors, Employees & Supporters

Paul Growald

FORMER BOARD MEMBER

Lee Winkelman

DIRECTOR

Lisa Guide

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR (2003-PRESENT)

Christopher Meyer

CONSULTANT

Lee Wasserman

DIRECTOR (1999-PRESENT)

Alida Messinger

BOARD MEMBER

Anne Bartley

BOARD MEMBER

John Gilroy

FORMER PROGRAM ASSOCIATE

Naomi Oreskes

GRANT RECIPIENT

Associated Organizations

Rockefeller Brothers Fund (Non-profit)

Rockefeller Foundation (Non-profit)

Donor Organizations

Bloomberg Family Foundation (Bloomberg Philanthropies) (Non-profit)

Blue Moon Fund (Cassiopeia Foundation) (Non-profit)

Chorus Foundation (Non-profit)

Flora Family Foundation (Non-profit)

Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment (Non-profit)

Growald Family Fund (Non-profit)

JPB Foundation (Non-profit)

Kresge Foundation (Non-profit)

McKnight Foundation (Non-profit)

NEO Philanthropy (Non-profit)

NoVo Foundation (Non-profit)

Oak Hill Fund (Non-profit)

William B. Wiener Jr. Foundation (Non-profit)

Winslow Foundation (Non-profit)

Wyss Foundation (Non-profit)

Donation Recipients

1000 Friends of Wisconsin (Non-profit)

1Sky (Non-profit)

20/20 Vision Education Fund (Non-profit)

Anti-Defamation League Foundation (ADLF) (Non-profit)

Campaign Legal Center (Non-profit)

Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) (Non-profit)

Center for Digital Democracy (Non-profit)

Center for Public Interest Research (Non-profit)

Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) (Non-profit)

Committee on States (Other Group)

#Cut50 (Non-profit)

Democracy North Carolina (Non-profit)

Demos (Non-profit)

Electronic Privacy Information Center (Non-profit)

Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) (Non-profit)

Everybody Benefits Coalition (Other Group)

Fair Elections Center (Non-profit)

Family Forward Oregon (Non-profit)

Family Values @ Work (Non-profit)

Government Accountability Project (GAP) (Non-profit)

Institute for Women’s Policy Research (Non-profit)

Kentucky Coalition (Non-profit)

MapLight (Non-profit)

Medical Students for Choice (Non-profit)

National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE) (Non-profit)

Ohio Environmental Council (OEC) (Non-profit)

Resources for the Future (RFF) (Non-profit)

Sustainable Markets Foundation (Non-profit)

Trust for America’s Health (Non-profit)

U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US-PIRG) Education Fund (Non-profit)

U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US-PIRG) (Non-profit)

RePower Fund (Wellstone Action Fund) (Non-profit)

West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy (Non-profit)

Western Conservation Foundation (Non-profit)

Western Organization of Resource Councils Education Project (Non-profit)

Working Families Organization (WFO) (Non-profit)

Nonprofit Information

Accounting Period: December - November

Tax Exemption Received: March 1, 1968

Available Filings

---

https://eidclimate.org/bombshell-rockefeller-family-fund-behind-the-pay-up-climate-polluters-campaign/

BOMBSHELL: ROCKEFELLER FAMILY FUND BEHIND THE “PAY UP CLIMATE POLLUTERS” CAMPAIGN

JANUARY 15, 2020 | SPENCER WALRATH

In 2017, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) gave the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) over $1 million to launch an aggressive climate litigation campaign against America’s top energy producers, according to a new Energy In Depth analysis of New York state tax disclosures. IGSD’sCenter for Climate Integrity (CCI)is the nexus for lobbying efforts, studies, amicus briefs, events, and social media campaigns aimed at pressuring states and municipalities tosueenergy companies for the costs of climate change.

Over the years, RFF has made numerous attempts to conceal their grantees; they have no public grantee database and have failed to post a complete federal tax return, including all donations, since 2013. However, our analysis of New York state tax disclosures reveals RFF’s highly coordinated effort to fund an aggressive climate litigation campaign against energy producers.

The Center for Climate Integrity’s Million Dollar Launch

Before launching CCI in August of 2017, IGSD was receiving just under $4 million in grants annually. RFF’s $1,020,000 grant marked a huge influx of funding to the organization – all earmarked for CCI or the Climate Education & Litigation Project (CCI’s original name). This grant was also RFF’s largest donation to a single organization, excluding other charitable funds, that year.

Since the launch of CCI, IGSD’s grant revenue has more than doubled to nearly $10 million. The organization does not disclose its full list of funders, but a recent investigation by RealClear Investigations revealed that CCI received a $7 million grant from a foreign billionaire in 2018. CCI has dodged questions about its institutional funders when pressed by reporters.

While obscuring its funding, CCI has become the public face of the campaign to sue American energy producers for the costs of climate change. CCI’s aggressive public relations efforts have included billboards, a podcast, social media, events in cities like Boulder and Honolulu to promote climate litigation, and a “study” encouraging public officials to seek damages from energy companies. In addition, the organization hired a lobbyist to arrange meetings between city officials and plaintiffs’ attorneys on climate litigation and submitted an amicus brief in support of an ongoing climate case.

RFF is Directly Funding Litigation, Astroturfing, and Journalism Too

RFF’s grant to IGSD isn’t their only recent contribution to climate litigation. Since 2016, the organization has provided at least $525,0000 to three nonprofit organizations pursuing climate litigation against energy companies – the Conservation Law Foundation, EarthRights International, and the Niskanen Center. Since 2014, RFF has given at least $140,000 to Resource Media, an organization hired by plaintiffs’ firm Sher Edling to provide public affairs and media consulting services for their climate lawsuits against energy producers.

Other notable grants include:

$430,000 to InsideClimate News and the Columbia School of Journalism between 2015-2016, coinciding with the pair’s “investigative” series into ExxonMobil and launch of the “Exxon Knew” campaign
$30,000 in 2017 to 350.org, the architect of the #ExxonKnew social media campaign
$50,000 in 2016 to the Nebraska Easement Action Team“to build a public education campaign to support a state investigation on Exxon’s deception about climate change”
$10,000 in 2017 to the Sunrise Movement, an organization that distributed a forged press release maligning a Colorado energy company earlier this year.

RFF’s Obsession with Attacking American Energy Companies

RFF’s recent contributions to climate litigation provide additional evidence that the Rockefeller family manufactured and continues to wage asmear campaignagainst America’s energy producers. RFF and its sister organization, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, have been backing organizations pursuing climate litigation against energy companies for years. In 2016, the pair even hosted a strategy session at their joint New York headquarters in 2016 to “delegitimize” ExxonMobil and develop a coordinated social media and messaging campaign to damage the company’s reputation. Later that year, David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, president and director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, released a series of articles to falsely malign the company.

Despite the Rockefellers’ best efforts, ExxonMobil and other energy companies continue to prevail in the courtroom.

In December, New York Supreme Court Justice Barry Ostrager highlighted ExxonMobil’s exemplary conduct in his verdict, ruling in favor of the company in their legal battle with the New York attorney general:

“The Office of the Attorney General offered no testimony from any investor who claims to have been misled… What the evidence at trial revealed is that ExxonMobil executives and employees were uniformly committed to rigorously discharging their duties [to max profit?] in the most comprehensive and meticulous manner possible.”

In dismissing climate lawsuits brought by San Francisco and Oakland, Judge William Alsup explained that litigation is inappropriate for addressing climate change.

“The dangers raised in the complaints are very real. But those dangers are worldwide. Their causes are worldwide. The benefits of fossil fuels are worldwide. The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.”

For all their talk about solving climate change, perhaps the Rockefellers should invest their millions into climate solutions, rather than politically-motivated campaigns that do nothing to further climate progress.

SEE EID 2 BS

spencer walrath

https://**eid**climate.org/obscure-activist-emerges-as-key-player-in-climate-litigation-campaign/

ref

aug 2018 obscure...

In recent months, a newcontroversial climate activisthas surfaced in the media. Richard Wiles has quickly become the go-to commentator for news stories surrounding a series of copycat lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies liable for the effects of climate change. On the surface, Mr. Wiles appears to be a well-meaning climate expert. But an Energy In Depth investigation reveals his involvement in the larger coordinated scheme to attack energy companies and force the industry to pay for global warming.[WHICH IS REAL?]

Wiles is involved in all aspects of the climate litigation campaign – from running a news outlet dedicated to promoting the lawsuits and coordinating a social media effort to attack the industry, to overseeing the research utilized in many of the lawsuits and pressuring additional cities to bring cases of their own.

Richard Wiles heads Climate Liability News (CLN), a dark-money “news” site set up in 2017 to promote climate lawsuits across the country. Though CLN doesn’t disclose its funders, its founding editor is Lynn Zinser, a transplant from InsideClimate News who worked on the original #ExxonKnew articles, which were paid for by the Rockefeller Family Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Rockefellers are key players behind both the #ExxonKnew and climate litigation campaigns. Coincidentally, CLN just happens to have a unique page on its website dedicated to advancing this fringe environmentalist effort.

Kert Davies and Alyssa Johl, a former attorney for theCenter for International Environmental Law (CIEL), serve alongside Wiles on the CLN board of directors. Davies and members of CIEL attended a secret meeti**ng at the Rockefeller Family Fund in January 2016,which sought to “delegitimize” ExxonMobil and portray it as a, “corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

Behind the scenes, Wiles facilitates this “news” site through a 501(c)3 organization called Climate Communications & Law. Established in 2017, the organization has no website and no publicly available financial disclosures to the IRS (form 990s). It appears to serve as a shell organization for other powerful players to funnel undisclosed funds to CLN, which means it serves as a de facto public relations component of #ExxonKnew. CC&L is operated out of Wiles’ own home.

Wiles also directs the Center for Climate Integrity, a project that “supports meritorious climate cases aimed at holding fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters liable for the damages they have caused.” This support includes coordinated social media posts with #ExxonKnew, an initiative by 350.org, and a PR campaign that is pressuring other cities like Houston and Miami to bring lawsuits of their own. These tactics seem to stem directly from the agenda at the aforementioned Rockefeller Family Fund meeting in 2016:[doc wiget?]

Not only is Wiles leading a PR campaign in support of these lawsuits, he also oversaw the research utilized in many of the cases seeking damages from fossil fuel companies. Wiles is the founder of Climate Central, a Rockefeller-funded organization that researches and reports on the impacts of climate change. Between 2008-2017, Wiles served as the organization’s Sr. Vice President for Strategic Communications and Research, where he supervised numerous studies cited in the lawsuits represented by Sher Edling.

Climate Central has been involved in the conspiracy to delegitimize the fossil fuel industry from the very beginning: Claudia Tebaldi, a climate statistician for Climate Central, attended thenow infamousLa Jolla conference on behalf of the organization in 2012.

Portrayed by the media as a dispassionate expert, Richard Wiles is a deeply ingrained collaborator in the climate conspiracy against the energy industry. He is facilitating a coordinated PR campaign and running a “news” organization to further these baseless attacks, alongside some of the most well-documented #ExxonKnew conspirators. He even oversaw research conducted after the La Jolla Conference that was later used in the very lawsuits he continues to promote.

Wiles has managed to operate multiple facets of the campaign to undermine the industry, while maintaining a public perception as an outside expert. It’s unclear if Mr. Wiles has any other notable affiliations with the climate litigation campaign, but additional investigation may yet reveal more to this story.

---

2018-03-29

EXXON MOBIL CORPORATION, Plaintiff, v. Eric Tradd SCHNEIDERMAN, Attorney General of New York, in his official capacity, and Maura Tracy Healey, Attorney General of Massachusetts, in her official capacity, Defendants.

https://casetext.com/case/exxon-mobil-corp-v-schneiderman

Ralph H. Duggins, Alix Dean Allison, Philip A. Vickers, Pro Hac Vice, Ralph Hereford Duggins, Cantey Hanger LLP, Fort Worth, TX, Daniel E. Bolia, Patrick Joseph Conlon, Pro Hac Vice, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Houston, TX, Daniel John Toal, Pro Hac Vice, Michele S. Hirshman, Pro Hac Vice, Theodore Von Wells, Jr., Pro Hac Vice, Paul Weiss, New York, NY, Justin Anderson, Pro Hac Vice,Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP, Washington, DC, Nina Cortell, Pro Hac Vice, Haynes & Boone LLP, Dallas, TX, for Plaintiff.

Christophe Courchesne, Pro Hac Vice, Melissa Ann Hoffer, Richard Alan Johnston, Pro Hac Vice, I. Andrew Goldberg, Pro Hac Vice, Massachusetts Attorney General's Office,Richard A. Johnston, Pro Hac Vice, Wilmerhale, Boston, MA, Douglas A. Cawley, Richard Alan Kamprath, McKool Smith PC, Peter D. Marketos, Tyler J. Bexley, Reese Gordon Marketos LLP, Jeffrey Mark Tillotson, Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox, LLP,Dallas, TX, Peter Charles Mulcahy, Pro Hac Vice,Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, Worcester, MA, Leslie Byrne Dubeck, S. Jason Brown, Andrew Rhys Davies, Eric Del Pozo, Roderick Leopold Arz, New York State Office of the Attorney General, John Daniel Castiglione, Smith Valliere PLLC, New York,NY, for Defendants.

VALERIE CAPRONI, United States District Judge

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...2. Exxon's Lawsuit

At this stage, the Court assumes as true the factual allegations in the Complaint and the SAC.

Exxon brought this lawsuit on June 15, 2016, two months after receiving the CID and eight months after receiving the Subpoena. The Complaint alleges that the CID and the Subpoena are part of a conspiracy to "silence and intimidate one side of the public policy debate on how to address climate change." Compl. at 1. The overt portion of this campaign is a coalition of state attorneys general, including Healey and Schneiderman, called the"AGs United for Clean Power" or "Green 20." Compl. ¶ 27. The AGs United for Clean Power held a conference andpress event with former Vice President Al Gore in New York on March 29, 2016, to announce a plan to take "progressive action to address climate change." Compl. ¶ 27.

Schneiderman spoke at the March 29, 2016, press event and said that the conference's purpose was to "com[e] up with creative ways to enforce laws being flouted by the fossil fuel industry and their allies...." Anderson Decl. Ex. A (Tr. of March 29, 2016, press conference) at 1.

He described climate change as the "most important issue facing all of us," and described the conference as a "collective of states working as creatively, collaboratively and aggressively as possible." Anderson Decl. Ex. A at 2. Schneiderman also linked the AGs United for Clean Power conference to inaction at the federal level to address climate change: "[W]e know that in Washington there are good people who want to do the right thing on climate change but everyone ... is under a relentless assault from well-funded, highly aggressive and morally vacant forces...." Anderson Decl. Ex. A at 4.

Schneiderman went on to explain that his office had recently reached a settlement with Peabody Energy, a coal company, which agreed to restate its financial disclosures to provide clarification regarding Peabody's internal modeling of the cost to its business of government regulation of emissions. Anderson Decl. Ex. A at 3. Schneiderman said that the NYAG was pursuing a similar theory against Exxon. Anderson Decl. Ex. A at 3. Seemingly anticipating this lawsuit, Schneiderman stated:

There have been those who have raised the question: aren't you interfering with people's First Amendment rights? The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, does not give you the right to commit fraud. And we are law enforcement officers, all of us do work, every attorney general does work on fraud cases.And we are pursuing this as we would any other fraud matter. You have to tell the truth. You can't make misrepresentations of the kinds we've seen here.

Anderson Decl. Ex. A at 3-4. The transcript of the March 29, 2016 conference is quoted extensively in the Complaint.

According to the SAC, Schneiderman has previously made public statements regarding the "importance of ‘challenging those who refuse to acknowledge that climate change is real.’ " SAC ¶ 28 (quoting Anderson SAC Decl. Ex. S5 at 7).

Healey also spoke at the March 29, 2016, press conference and said that "[c]limate change is and has been for many years a matter of extreme urgency.... Part of the problem has been one of public perception, and it appears, certainly, that certain companies, certain industries, may not have told the whole story, leading many to doubt whether climate change is real and to misunderstand and misapprehend the catastrophic nature of its impacts." Anderson Decl. Ex. A at 12; Compl. ¶ 32.

Referencing Schneiderman's earlier comments regarding Exxon's disclosures (quoted supra n. 6), Healey said "[t]hat's why I, too, have joined in investigating the practices of [Exxon].We can all see today the troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew, what industry folks knew, and what the company and industry chose to share with investors and with the American public." Anderson Decl. Ex. A at 12; Compl. ¶ 37.

In a wild stretch of logic, Exxon contends that the AGs' "overtly political tone," Compl. ¶ 38, and comments on public "confusion" relative to climate change show that their intent is to chill dissenting speech, Compl. ¶ 31; see also id. ¶ 31 ("To [Schneiderman], there was ‘no dispute but there is confusion and confusion sowed by those with an interest in profiting from the confusion and creating misperceptions in the eyes of the American public....’ ").And, Exxon alleges, the AGs' comments demonstrate that they have prejudged the outcome of their investigations, presuming Exxon's guilt from the get-go. Compl. ¶¶ 36-37.

The Attorneys General involved in the AGs United for Clean Power coalition have entered into a common interest agreement, which includes a confidentiality provision. Compl. ¶¶ 52-53. Exxon contends, ipse dixit , that the AGs' interest in confidentiality is evidence of the coalition's intent to chill protected speech. Compl. ¶ 53.

The Complaint alleges that the March 29, 2016, conference was the culmination of a behind-the-scenes push by climate change activists. Among the activists allegedly involved are Peter Frumhoff, Director of Science and Policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Compl. ¶ 42, who previously contributed to a report titled "Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air: how ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science," Compl. ¶ 44. Also allegedly involved is Matthew Pawa, a self-described specialist in "climate change litigation." Compl. ¶ 45.

The Complaint describes the development by Pawa, Frumhoff, and the private Rockefeller Family Fundof a strategy to promote litigation against fossil fuel producers, including, in particular, Exxon. Compl. ¶¶ 46-49. Pawa and Frumhoff allegedly made presentations to the AGs United for Clean Power at the March 29, 2016, conference, Compl. ¶¶ 44-45, but when Pawa was asked for comment by a Wall Street Journal reporter, a member of the NYAG's office requested that he "not confirm" his attendance at the conference. Compl. ¶ 50.

The SAC adds detail to the Complaint's allegations regarding Pawa and Frumhoff and the Rockefeller Family Fund. According to the SAC, Pawa, Frumhoff, and others hatched a scheme to promote litigation against Exxon at a June 2012 conference in La Jolla, California.SAC ¶ 44.

These activists saw litigation as a means to uncover internal Exxon documents regarding climate change and to pressure fossil fuel companies like Exxon to change their stance on climate change. SAC ¶ 45.

In January 2016, at a conference at the offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the activists discussed the " ‘the main avenues for legal actions & related campaigns,’ including ‘AGs,’ ‘DOJ,’ and‘Torts,’" and which options "had the ‘best prospects’ for (i) ‘successful action,’ (ii) ‘getting discovery,’ and (iii) ‘creating scandal.’ " SAC ¶ 53 (quoting Anderson SAC Decl. Ex. S1 at 1-2).

Exxon connects this strategy to a few meetings attended by staff from various state attorneys general, SAC ¶¶ 39, 46, 48, and records of communications and information-sharing between the activists, the NYAG, and other state attorneys general, SAC ¶¶ 48, 56-58, 67-69.

For example, there was a conference atHarvard Law School in April 2016 entitled "Potential State Causes of Action Against Major Carbon Producers: Scientific, Legal and Historical Perspectives," which included an hour-long session on "state causes of action" such as "consumer protection claims" and "public nuisanceclaims." Anderson SAC Decl. Ex. S47 at 1-2.

The other two meetings at which Exxon alleges there was commingling of environmental activists and staff from the AGs occurred in June 2015 and on the day of the March 29, 2016, conference.

The Complaint also alleges the document requests themselves demonstrate that the investigations are politically motivated. Exxon contends that the AGs' legal theories are so flawed—in terms of a factual or jurisdictional basis—that the only rational explanation is that the AGs are motivated by animus towards Exxon, rather than by a good faith belief that Exxon may have violated state law. It argues, for example, that the statutes cited by the NYAG have six-year statutes of limitations at most, but the Subpoena requests documents dating to 1977. This is evidence, according to Exxon, of an intent to harass rather than to conduct a good faith investigation of potential violations of law. Compl. ¶¶ 62-63.

And, according to Exxon, with limited and irrelevant exceptions, it has not sold any products or securities in Massachusetts during the applicable limitations period. Compl. ¶ 70; see also Compl. ¶¶ 68, 71 (alleging the Subpoena and CID seek documents with no connection to Exxon's activities in New York and Massachusetts). Both the Subpoena and CID demand Exxon's communications with oil and gas interest groups, which, according to Exxon, demonstrates the AGs' political bias because communications with private parties have no relevance to Exxon's public disclosures. Compl. ¶¶ 66, 73.

Exxon believes that the NYAG's shift in theories—from whether Exxon made misleading disclosures regarding its knowledge of climate change to whether it appropriately disclosed the value of assets likely to be stranded or impaired because of climate change—is evidence of an investigation in search of a crime, further demonstrating the NYAG's improper purpose. Compl. ¶ 76.According to Exxon, the stranded assets theory is also inconsistent with SEC guidance regarding disclosure of proved reserves. Compl. ¶¶ 77-81.

Based on these allegations, Exxon alleges the NYAG and MAG are retaliating against Exxon for its speech relative to climate change and the "policy tradeoffs of certain climate initiatives." SAC ¶ 123; see also SAC ¶¶ 120-124 (elaborating on Exxon's current position regarding climate change).

Exxon asserts seven causes of action: for conspiracy to deprive Exxon of its constitutional rights pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1985, Compl. ¶¶ 105-08; for violations of Exxon's free speech rights pursuant to the First Amendment, and right to be free from unreasonable searches pursuant to the Fourth Amendment, Compl. ¶¶ 109-11, 112-14;for violations of Exxon's right to due process pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, Compl. ¶¶ 115-17;

for violations of the Dormant Commerce Clause, Compl. ¶¶ 118-21; preemption of Massachusetts and New York law to the extent they conflict with applicable SEC regulations, Compl. ¶¶ 122-26; and common law abuse of process, Compl. ¶¶ 127-28. As revised in the SAC, Exxon demands broad relief, including a declaratory judgment that the AGs' investigations violate Exxon's constitutional rights, SAC at 58, and an injunction "halting or appropriately limiting the investigations," SAC at 59.

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