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EXXON 2

new node 6/13 maybe use to clarify?

see also exxon tag, tillerson

capt 118

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exxon bust

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mccain obit:

Kert Davies, originally published on ClimateInvestigations.org 

*InsideClimate News*’ Marianne Lavelle published a long piece this weekend, chronicling Senator John McCain’s rise and fall as a climate leader. The story highlights a campaign I worked on in 2000, where we asked all the presidential candidates the simple and still pertinent question, “What’s Your Plan?” on global warming.McCain was one of the only candidates that took it on. He went back to Washington in the middle of 2000, having been defeated by George W. Bush in the primaries, and immediately started holding hearings on climate change science.

As always, there is more to the story.  When McCain emerged as “Captain Climate”in the early 2000s, and introduced the first serious bipartisan legislation to cut emissions, he became the target of a multifaceted attack by anti-regulatory free market organizations.  It turns out, many of these organizations and front groups were quietly being funded by ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers.

This pressure may partly explain why McCain later abandoned climate change when he ran for President in 2008 and attacked his colleagues’ efforts during the 2009 push for climate legislation.  By that point McCain had succumbed to the now standard Republican talking points on climate.  Oh, and lest we forget, he also picked Sarah Palin as a running mate and starting down the “Drill, Baby, Drill” path (the opposite of sane climate policy) and the rest is history.

No one has really explained how this turn away from climate leadership really happened. Most commentators attribute it to political choices McCain himself made, without really analyzing the outside pressure that closed in on McCain from 2000 to 2008.

*InsideClimate News* notes briefly that there was a coordinated effort to oppose McCain’s efforts run by corporate-funded entities.  Climate Investigations Center went back and looked at our records for documentation of thecampaign to the kill the McCain-Lieberman climate legislation as it gained momentum. First introduced in 2001 by the two Senators, The Climate Stewardship Act (S.139) was the first national, bipartisan legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas pollution. This bill eventually became the ground-zero target for climate deniers and corporate interests.

Unfortunately, a month after the first McCain-Lieberman bill was introduced, the attacks on September 11th changed everything. McCain and Lieberman, a neo-con Democrat at the time, were among the first to lead the charge to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, well ahead of the Bush Administration according to many accounts from that time.

By 2003, McCain and Lieberman got back to thinking about climate change together and leveraged the first full Senate vote on their bill by forcing Majority Leader Bill Frist’s handon an energy bill he was trying to pass.

The McCain-Lieberman bill garnered surprising support but lost 43-55, well short of the 60 votes needed to avoid an override under Senate rule.  Corporations saw this as a close call and began a concerted effort to kill the momentum in 2004 (see below). In 2005, the bill was renamed The Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, and in McCain style, stubbornly brought up for another vote where it lost by a bigger margin, 38 Yea to 60 Nay votes.

I know for a fact that they got blindsided on this.  They thought they had paved the way for success. In a meeting with a McCain staffer after the second vote, I showed them an ExxonSecrets map (similar to the one below) of the organizations and individuals that worked to kill the bill. The staffer knew there were various organizations and companies lobbying against the bill, but had no idea the level of coordination, nor the ExxonMobil funding channels.

[secrets chart]

Was the Exxon Denial Machine built to fight Sen. McCain?

It has always been interesting that our database of ExxonMobil climate denial funding shows a dramatic increase in spending after 2000, which coincides with McCain emerging as a climate champion.

The graph above shows the yearly totals of ExxonMobil’s grants to climate denying non-profit organizations and breaks out the total grants specifically earmarked for climate change between the years of 1997-2006.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that corporate polluters thought they were off the hook with the Bush-Cheney victory over Gore-Lieberman.  Yet ExxonMobil’s funding of climate denial organizations ballooned to its highest levels between 2000 and 2005 as the McCain-Lieberman legislation gained momentum. Between 2003-2005, Exxon wrote grants totaling more than $3.3 million dollars each year to climate-denying organizations.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the leader of the**Cooler Heads Coalition**(CHC) and recipient of over $2 million dollars total from ExxonMobil between 1997-2005, aggressively fought Sen. McCain’s climate leadership in the early 2000s. Aleaked 2003 email from **Myron Ebell**, Director of Global Warming Policy at CEI, lays out a target list for lobbying against the “McLieberman” bill. FOIAed documents show communications in 2003 between Myron Ebell and the Bush White HouseCouncil on Environmental Quality, where Ebell details the campaign against McCain.  CEI also put out press releases against the legislation, held eventsto debate it, and used the CHC network of climate deniers to wage their campaign.

The Exxon-funded groups were also being funded by the Koch brothers and their foundations.  In January 2003, CEI co-authored a letter with the Koch-funded Citizen’s for Sound Economy to the Bush Whitehouse decrying the McCain-Lieberman legislation.  ExxonMobil gave CEI $465,000 that year according to Exxon documents, the largest Exxon haul by CEI in any year.An unredacted CEI IRS 990 for 2003 lists a $100,000 donation from David Koch himself and only $180,000 from ExxonMobil (probably an accounting anomaly).

United 4 Jobs, DCI Group and Exxon cash

[banner] patriotic hard hat

Following the 2003 vote on McCain Lieberman bill, the corporate forces got their act together.  In 2004, a front group coalition was set up called United4Jobs.org, complete with an American Flag and a hard hat.  Here’s some of what we know:

The United for Jobs website in 2004 said it was “a project of” the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), which received $50,000 from ExxonMobil in 2004, and the National Association of Neighborhoods, which also received $50,000 from ExxonMobil Foundation in 2004 (including $25,000 earmarked for “Climate Change Issues.”) along with the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council).

[bs about]

Kochtopus Tentacles Ensnare McCain

...

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Attorneys for ExxonMobil have revealed a plan to ratchet up pressure on state attorneys general who have vowed to hold Exxon and fossil fuel companies accountable for their conduct on climate change.

Exxon attorney Theodore Wells told a New York judge that the company is working on deposing at least 17 attorneys general and their staffs who earlier this year joined with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman under the banner of AGs United for Clean Power.  

By pulling those attorneys general into the fight, Exxon could trigger years of legal wrangling over disclosure of its understanding of climate risks.

That plan came to light during a hearing in Exxon's battle with Schneiderman over his office's investigation into whether the company violated consumer fraud laws in connection with climate change-related disclosures.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is locked in a court battle with Exxon in Texas over her investigation of the company, said Exxon's legal strategy is "calculated to initiate no-holds-barred discovery" against the attorneys general, according to a motion her office filed in the Texas case.

Neither an Exxon spokesman nor company lawyers returned calls for comment.

This recent round of saber rattling is the latest in a year of escalation since the New York attorney general's office hit Exxon with a subpoena for records spanning four decades of Exxon's research findings and communications about climate change. The subpoena came in the wake of reporting, including an InsideClimate News investigative series, that the company was warned by its own researchers in the late 1970s about the possible catastrophic consequences of climate change and then led efforts to block solutions.

Schneiderman was first to open an investigation under the state's consumer protection laws. Massachusetts' Healey and Claude Walker, attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, followed, although Walker has since suspended his investigation.

The three are part of a coalition announced  by Schneiderman during a news conference in  March. Members of the coalition—known as the Green 17—also include the attorneys general from California, Maryland, Vermont, Oregon and nine other states and the District of Columbia.

Although until recently Exxon had been cooperating with New York investigators, turning over 1.2 million pages of records, it now seeks to block the investigation through the same Texas court where it is battling Massachusetts.

Now Exxon is using a discovery order issued by the judge overseeing the Texas case as a weapon in a possible wide-ranging attack on its opponents.

In a ruling last month, Judge Ed Kinkeade said Healey may have acted in "bad faith" when she issued a criminal investigation demand, an order  similar to a subpoena, to the oil company for 30 years of documents.

To allow Exxon the opportunity to explore whether Healy was prejudiced against the company, Kinkeade granted the company's request for the discovery order.

That appeared to set the stage for an extensive review of Healey's internal records associated with her investigation.

But Wells, the Exxon lawyer, told a New York judge last month that the company was interpreting Kinkade's order more broadly.

"Right now we have the right, as we read the order, to take the deposition of both the Mass. AG, people and really everybody, as we read it, that was at that March 29th conference," Wells said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

"We are going to try to take depositions of the state AGs."

Wells was speaking during a hearing to contest a subpoena Schneiderman's office issued to the company's auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), for records related PWC's review of Exxon's books.

Exxon wanted to prohibit disclosure of the documents based on auditor-client privilege, but the New York judge ordered PWC to comply with the subpoena. The decision has been appealed by Exxon and PWC.

So far Exxon has only targeted the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general and their staffs, but Healey predicts other state attorneys general will "vigorously object" if Exxon uses the Texas ruling to go on a wider fishing expedition.

If the court endorses Exxon's effort, Healey said in her latest motion in Texas court, it will likely achieve "Exxon's goal of putting off as long as possible any investigation into the critically important question of whether Exxon broke the law and deceived consumers and investors about the role of its products in causing climate change."

The company has also instructed non-governmental groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, to keep communications related to climate change they have had with the attorneys generals coalition, other environmental groups, former Vice President Al Gore and the media.

"We believe that you may have documents that are relevant to pending and potential litigation involving the investigations of ExxonMobil, including but not limited to materials concerning the events and communications leading up to the investigations," according to the letter to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112016/exxon-climate-change-investigation-research-scandal-state-attorneys-general

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vs green 17

13 AG:

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At its annual meeting in Dallas, Texas, ExxonMobil shareholders rejected a series of resolutionsWednesday calling for climate action, including resolutions backed by CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, as well as New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and the Church of England. Shareholders did pass a measure to let minority shareholders nominate outsiders for seats on the board, raising the possibility that a climate activist could someday become a director at Exxon.

It was the first Exxon annual meeting since a series of revelations that for decades the companycovered up its own scientific findings linking rising carbon emissions to dangerous climate change. At the shareholders meeting, the granddaughter of a former Exxon scientist questioned the CEO of Exxon about the company’s record. We speak to the woman, Anna Kalinsky.

Nermeen Shaikh: At its annual meeting in Dallas, Texas, ExxonMobil shareholders rejected a series of resolutions Wednesday calling for climate action, including resolutions backed byCalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System,as well as the New York [state] Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and the Church of England. Shareholders did pass a measure to let minority shareholders nominate outsiders for seats on the board, raising the possibility that a climate activist could someday become a director at Exxon. It was the first Exxon annual meeting since a series of revelations that for decades the company covered up its own scientific findings linking rising carbon emissions to dangerous climate change. At the shareholders meeting, the granddaughter of a former Exxon scientist questioned theCEO of Exxon about the company’s record. This is part of what she said.

Anna Kalinsky: It’s good to have the opportunity to speak to you. So, my name is Anna Kalinsky. And my grandfather, James F. Black, was a scientist for Exxon for over 40 years. He started with Standard Oil during World War II, later earned dozens of patents for Esso and, later, Exxon. In 1977, he briefed the company’s top executives on the scientific realities of climate change. He said that present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical, like you acknowledged on your slides. This is over 30, almost 40, years ago.

Amy Goodman: That was Anna Kalinsky, who is the granddaughter of James Black, who was a scientist for Exxon for over 40 years. We’re going to hear Rex Tillerson’s answer, the CEO of Exxon, in a moment. But first to Anna herself, who’s joining us now from Dallas along with350.org co-founder Bill McKibben.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Anna McKibben—Anna Kalinsky, let’s begin with you. Talk about what your grandfather found as an Exxon scientist.

Anna Kalinsky: Absolutely. So, like I said, my grandfather worked for Exxon for about 40 years. And in 1977, he gave a presentation to top Exxon management. And he laid out very clearly that the planet was warming, that this was because of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and that those levels were rising because of the burning of fossil fuels. And at the time, he told Exxon that humankind had five to 10 years to start really making the hard decisions regarding climate change or else the situation could become dire.

Nermeen Shaikh: And, Anna Kalinsky, how many other scientists at Exxon at the time, in the 1970s, were doing comparable research, research comparable to what your grandfather, James F. Black, did?

Anna Kalinsky: So, I don’t have an exact number for you, but we know that at the time there were other scientists at Exxon doing climate research and that other organizations, in addition to Exxon, were receiving similar briefings.

Amy Goodman: I want to play Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s response to your question at Wednesday’s meeting.

Rex Tillerson: We will continue to engage in the policy discussions, as we currently do, with a number of broad-based groups on all sides of these issues and we’ll continue to be active in the discussions legislatively in Washington and elsewhere, including through the IPCC, on what we think are thoughtful, sensible policy actions that accommodate both our need for economic growth as well as addressing these risks, which are going to be very, very daunting.

Amy Goodman: So that’s Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon. Anna Kalinsky, your response to his answer to your question?

Anna Kalinsky: I find it incredibly frustrating. To say that we’re looking at all sides of the climate change issue is ignoring that there has been global consensus on the realities of climate change for years and that Exxon has now, at this point, had four decades of knowledge about climate change, has their own scientists working, who know about these sorts of things. And for CEO Tillerson to say that Exxon wouldn’t be taking decisive action either to cut ties with groups which deliberately spread climate change misinformation, groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC] and that Exxon also, even though they acknowledged during their shareholders meeting that climate change is real and that burning of fossil fuels has an effect, that it was more important for them to focus on their immediate bottom line, it’s incredibly disheartening.

Nermeen Shaikh: Well, your grandfather, James F. Black, presented his climate research findings to Exxon executives in July 1977, as you pointed out to the Exxon CEO. He concluded by saying, quote, “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels. A doubling of carbon dioxide is estimated to be capable of increasing the average global temperature from 1 degree to 3 degrees centigrade, with a 10 degree centigrade rise predicted at the poles.” Anna, that was your grandfather’s report in 1977 to senior Exxon executives. So could you say a little about what you think the situation would be today, had Exxon executives listened to the advice of your grandfather?

Anna Kalinsky:Absolutely. And something I think that’s important to note is that Exxon actually did for a while take what my grandfather said seriously. He gave that initial briefing in 1977 and in 1978 Exxon had him give a similar briefing to a larger group. And for a while, they actually were funding climate change research. And for a few years, Exxon really was on the cutting edge of climate change science. And then, that spun around to the situation we’re at today, where Exxon publicly and anonymously is funding these groups that spread climate change misinformation. But I think that had my grandfather been listened to back in the ’70s and had an organization like Exxon really taken action, we would be much closer or already at a much more greener climate, an economy of greener energy sources instead of our continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Amy Goodman: Anna—

Anna Kalinsky:And I—yes?

Amy Goodman:Can you talk about the petition you delivered at the Exxon shareholders meeting and when you came to understand, as you were growing up, how significant your grandfather was in this whole climate change issue in exposing the large fossil fuel companies, like Exxon and how you decided to speak out yourself?

Anna Kalinsky: So, I came down as a volunteer with ClimateTruth.org, which is a group that works against the spread of climate change denial, climate change disinformation. And when I went to the shareholders meeting, I delivered a petition with almost 35,000 signatures asking—or demanding, rather, that Exxon leave ALEC, that they cut associations with ALEC, one of those groups which spreads climate change misinformation.

But as for my relationship with my grandfather growing up, he died a few years before I was born, so I never actually had the opportunity to meet him. But I was the only scientist growing up in my family. I graduated last year with an undergraduate degree in chemistry, just like he did. And so, he was always a mythological sort of figure for me. He was the person where my love of science came from. And so, I grew up with stories from my mother about things that my grandfather did, his research. The climate change was one of the things that I learned about.

And then, this past fall, when InsideClimate News started publishing the articles about how Exxon has known about climate change since the ’70s and how he was featured very strongly in that, it was something that gave me a lot of pride. I was really excited that my family was a part of this. And as time has gone on, you know, I’ve continued to feel that way. So, when ClimateTruth.org asked me to come down here, I was really proud to carry on the family legacy of speaking out against Exxon and speaking kind of on behalf of science and not political rhetoric.

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http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/27/granddaughter-exxon-scientist/

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/climate-deception-investigations-gain-momentum-exxonmobil-plays-victim

With several state attorneys general now investigating whether ExxonMobil misled its shareholders and the public about climate change risks, it was more than a little ironic when the company recently cried foul.

“Collaboration, collusion, conspiracy,” charged ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers, “pick a word.”

Pick a word? How about nonsense? If anyone could be accused of collusion and conspiracy, it’s ExxonMobil. But more on that later.

What prompted Jeffers’ ludicrous allegation was a meeting that took place on March 29. My colleague Peter Frumhoff, lead climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and environmental attorney Matt Pawa briefed a handful of state attorneys general, including New York’s Eric Schneiderman, who launched an investigation of ExxonMobil last November. Later that day, Schneiderman and 16 other attorneys general joined former Vice President Al Gore at a press conference to declare their support for more aggressive government action on climate change. During the event, AGs from the U.S. Virgin Islands and Massachusetts announced that they, too, would initiate investigations of ExxonMobil.

On April 15, Reuters broke the story that Frumhoff and Pawa had met behind closed doors with the state prosecutors before the press conference. The news organization had obtained emails disclosing the meeting through an open records request filed by a group called theEnergy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal).

“The previously unknown level of coordination with outside advisers offered a glimpse behind the scenes in an increasingly pitched battle between Exxon and environmental groups,” Reuters reported. “Exxon has said it has been unfairly singled out and that climate activists are conspiring to rally public opinion against it.”

Unfortunately, not only did the Reuters story fail to adequately identify E&E Legal, it also mischaracterized what amounted to a routine meeting in an ongoing legal investigation.

Confidentiality is standard operating procedure

Reuters described E&E Legal, a small, three-person nonprofit, as a “free-market think tank with ties to the Competitive Enterprise Institute [CEI], whose website says it opposes U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.” What it didn’t mention is that E&E Legal — which could hardly be called a think tank — is at least partly funded by the coal industry and has repeatedly harassed prominent climate scientists, including Katharine Hayhoe and Michael Mann, by filing intrusive open records requests that have tied them up for weeks and wasted hundreds of thousands of public university dollars.

What’s more, the story didn’t explain that the group’s connection with CEI is through CEI staff attorney Chris Horner, who handles E&E Legal’s open records filings. CEI has been peddling lies about climate science on behalf of fossil fuel interests for decades, and Horner is associated with other climate science denier groups as well as the coal industry, a relationship that was recently revealed by coal company bankruptcy filings.

More important, Reuters failed to clarify that the attorneys general were merely doing their jobs. By their very nature, legal investigations can entail gathering information privately from a wide variety of sources.

This is a key point. State attorneys general have the authority to meet with anyone they choose — be it a scientist, an environmental lawyer or a corporate official — in the course of an investigation on a confidential basis. In other words, there was no hint of collusion or conspiracy. Meeting privately with experts is part of the legal discovery process. Moreover, in New York — under the state’s Martin Act — the attorney general can initiate a completely confidential investigation of potentially fraudulent practices.

But that didn’t stop FoxNews.com, the Daily Caller, the Washington Examiner and the Washington Times — the climate science denial echo chamber — from providing ExxonMobil and E&E Legal a platform to make bogus charges about “collusion” and “conspiracy” in subsequent stories.

ExxonMobil’s disinformation network

Schneiderman’s investigation, and one launched in January by California’s attorney general, followed the release of documents by the Union of Concerned Scientists and reporters atInsideClimate Newsand Columbia Journalism School revealing that Exxon scientists conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and warned top management of the potentially catastrophic risks posed by global warming. Schneiderman’s staff is now reviewing the company’s statements to investors regarding those risks to see if they contradicted what it was hearing from its own scientists.

The New York AGs office also is taking a close look at ExxonMobil’s support for a network of think tanks and advocacy groups that has been spreading disinformation about climate science for nearly 20 years. Here is where questions about “collusion” and “conspiracy” come into play.

That network was exposed back in 2007 when UCS documented that ExxonMobil had spent at least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 on more than 40 climate science denier groups. The group that got the most money? CEI, which received more than $2 million. Despite the fact that it had no scientists on its staff, CEI established itself as the go-to group to provide “the other side” of a manufactured scientific debate. It is perhaps best remembered for reassuring Americans that global warming is nothing to worry about in a TV commercial extolling the virtues of carbon dioxide. The spot’s unforgettable tagline: “They call it pollution. We call it life.”

ExxonMobil publicly ended its direct support for CEI in 2005, but the company continues to spend millions of dollars annually on denier groups and congressional climate science denier political campaigns. CEI, meanwhile, may have lost ExxonMobil as a benefactor, but according to the most recent available tax records, it is still receiving money from billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, co-owner of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

In any case, it is difficult to determine just where CEI gets its funding these days. Much of it comes from a secretive, pass-through foundation called Donors Trust and its affiliate Donors Capital Fund. Since 2002, the intertwined funds have laundered more than $457 million from anonymous corporations, foundations and individuals and distributed that money to hundreds of anti-regulation groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, and of course, CEI.

The First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud

As one of ExxonMobil’s top climate science denier grantees, CEI now finds itself in the hot seat. U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker not only launched an investigation of ExxonMobil for defrauding investors and the general public, he also subpoenaed communications between ExxonMobil and many of its denier network groups. He specifically asked CEI for all its climate change and energy policy materials, as well as its donor lists, over a 10-year period beginning in 1997.

CEI has filed to quash the subpoena and pushed back in an April 23 op-ed in the Washington Post. CEI president Kent Lassman and his general counsel, Sam Kazman, insisted that their organization and ExxonMobil are being unfairly harassed for exercising their First Amendment rights. A week later, the Wall Street Journal editorial board chimed in, calling Walker’s subpoena of CEI documents “a form of harassment” and “a dangerous turn for free speech.” 

But the real issue is not CEI’s or ExxonMobil’s First Amendment rights. CEI, which has been exercising its right to mislead the public about climate change for quite some time, is being investigated to determine the extent to which it functioned as ExxonMobil’s paid surrogate. ExxonMobil, meanwhile, is being investigated to ascertain if it is guilty of fraud. As Attorney General Schneiderman has noted, “The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, doesn’t give you the right to commit fraud.”

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AN

http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxon-using-tobaccos-failed-free-speech-defense-decades-deception-climate-change

The past week has seen a barrage of opinion pieces carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, defending against the ongoing fraud investigations. The Washington Post had two pieces, Newsweek had one and the Financial Times had an editorial, in addition to op-eds in a couple of other conservative outlets. Of those six, half were penned by groups funded at least in part by fossil fuel companies.

The arguments are all by and large the same, claiming that the investigations infringe on fossil fuels companies’ right to free speech while steadfastly ignoring the fact that ExxonMobil funded climate denial to protect their business model.Only the Financial Times editorial actually acknowledges the “misleading claims from fossil fuel interests and their allies” but concludes that it is “because the stakes [of the debate] are so high that all arguments must be heard.” While that sounds fair at first Glantz, it quickly sounds silly when applied to a recent example: the tobacco industry’s denial of the fact that its carcinogenic product is addictive.

All but one of the pieces similarly ignored the tobacco industry precedent and the only person who mentioned it was one of the few voices not plugged into the professional denial apparatus.

As for the pros, Newsweek ran a blog post from the Hoover Institution, which rambled on about climate science that’s supposedly still uncertain, lamenting that fair debate is impossible if one side can bring the other to court. Not mentioned is how a fair debate can be possible if one side launches multi-million dollar PR campaigns to mislead the public about the science.

Feds Refer Exxon #Climate Investigation to FBI: https://t.co/MS5BfY7PNp via @EcoWatch pic.twitter.com/mBWybUPmVb

— DeSmogBlog (@DeSmogBlog) March 7, 2016

Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky’s piece in the Washington Times misses the tobacco precedent, but went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition for his First Amendment fear mongering. George Will used his column in the Washington Post to offer a lesson on how this campaign is part of a larger progressive strategy to shut down debate. But apparently it’s Will that needs a history lesson, as he uses as evidence a story about a 2013 IRS investigation accusing the agency of targeting conservatives. But that investigation “found no evidence” that the IRS actions were politically motivated. No doubt his column is similarly bereft of evidence.

The Washington Post also gave space to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)to defend itself by pretending it is being investigated for political dissent, not its years of Exxon funding for climate denial. Worth noting CEI’s careful phrasing about its relationship with Exxon, which CEI says “publicly ended its support for us after 2005.” With Donors Trust and others making it possible to anonymize giving, the key word is “publicly.”

Ironically, despite the admission that its Exxon funding is a perfectly legitimate reason to look into its communications, CEI considers its subpoena to be a fishing expedition. Meanwhile, CEI’s own coal-funded Chris Horner continues to engage in nuisance FOIAs for climate scientists.

Exxon’s defense is a hot topic in denierland, as it advances the narrative that the fossil fuel industry is an embattled population facing government persecution. But here’s a reality check: Before Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered on March 2, she reported receiving 33 death threats after years of intimidation. Instead of investigating a man who had previously bragged about his plans to murder her, authorities claim the prime suspects are two of her fellow activists.

Heartbreaking@GoldmanPrize Activist Berta Cáceres Murdered in Honduras https://t.co/Zj97cmwQi3 @FoEint @greenpeace pic.twitter.com/tAujvEGtMR

— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) March 3, 2016

Looks like the fossil fuel industry isn’t the one facing persecution after all.

3/16

http://www.alternet.org/environment/rockefeller-family-fund-divest-exxonmobil-says-oil-giant-morally-reprehensible

It’s been a really rough few days for ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company.

First, on Wednesday, the Rockefeller Family Fund announced it would divest from the oil giant,saying it would “eliminate holdings" of Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM.N) “effective immediately,” asserting that the company associated with the family fortune has misled the public about the risks of climate change.

Because of the long-established threat posed to the planetary ecosystem by fossil fuel extraction and use, the fund said “there is no sane rationale for companies to continue to explore for new sources of hydrocarbons.”

    Man! Rockefeller Family Fund sells all Exxon stock, citing company's 'morally reprehensible conduct.' #exxonknew https://t.co/S7uwXsI26V

    — Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) March 24, 2016

In a letter posted on its website, the fund slammed Exxon's conduct as "morally reprehensible." They write:

    Evidence appears to suggest that the company worked since the 1980s to confuse the public about climate change’s march, while simultaneously spending millions to fortify its own infrastructure against climate change’s destructive consequences and track new exploration opportunities as the Arctic’s ice receded.

Exxon tried to frame the fund’s move as unsurprising. In a statement, Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said, "The Rockefeller Family Fund provided financial support to InsideClimate News and Columbia University Journalism School which produced inaccurate and deliberately misleading stories about ExxonMobil's history of climate research.”

But Stacy Feldman, executive editor of InsideClimate News, stands by those stories. "Exxon has never specified what is inaccurate or misleading in the series, nor has it requested any corrections," she said in a statement. "But our investigation of Exxon's climate duplicity has won five national journalism awards."

The day would only get worse for the multinational energy firm, as the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered a vote on a shareholder resolution that would require the firm to disclose how climate change—or regulations meant to combat it—would impact the stability of the company’s finances.

    Govt securities watchdog orders ExxonMobil shareholder vote on #climate data https://t.co/KfS425w05d #ExxonKnew #divest

    — climatehawk1 (@climatehawk1) March 24, 2016

The SEC’s move comes just weeks after an investigation by the Government Accountability Project, which revealed that, for years, Exxon had lied to the SEC in its 10-K filings.

“Exxon has done a masterful job of hedging its bets, both by omission and commission: omitting mere mention for many years, and then grossly understating, the vast array of direct and indirect risks it faces as a result of climate change,” said Climate Science & Policy Watch, a GAP program that promotes governmental integrity in the use of climate science. “Even worse, Exxon has overtly and flagrantly overstated possible financial and economic risks associated with regulating carbon and other GHGs, both here in the U.S. and in nations around the world."

:{

On Thursday, Exxon got even more bad news. New Jersey State Senator Raymond Lesniak called on Acting Attorney General Robert Lougy to join an investigation launched by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. California Attorney General Kamala Harris opened a similar probe.}:

The investigations just keep piling up. The FBI’s criminal investigation unit is currently conducting an initial review of evidence that Exxon knew about the “catastrophic” impacts of climate change.

While the problems and negative press continue to mount for Exxon, traders remains fairly bullish on XOM stock.

“Even if oil prices would retreat in the upcoming weeks, it is still not the right time to sell Exxon shares,” research analyst Arie Goren wrote Monday on Seeking Alpha. “In my opinion, XOM's stock is an excellent long term investment. … Although Exxon's dividend yield is lower than that of the other supermajor integrated oil & gas companies, it is sustainable, in my view.”

But sustainability on the stock market is very different from sustainability in the environment, and ethical investors increasingly want nothing to do with the oil industry.

The Rockefeller Fund’s announcement follows the recent decision to divest by a prominent Rockefeller, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, who serves as the co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. In my interview with Goodwin last month, she noted the patently illogical stance that may undergird the decision-making at Exxon and other fossil fuel firms that continue to put profit above the planet:

    From casual observation it appears that there are people with a reasonable sense of morality who steer their companies to do pretty immoral things. Evidently such people erect a firewall between their personal and business ethics.

Goodwin also points out that a more sustainable and sensible alternative to doing business exists:

    There is a slowly growing movement to point out the ways in which what is commonly accepted as decent morality is also good for business. For example, the “Porter hypothesis” suggests that good environmental ethics tend to be efficient and cost-saving for business. There is considerable evidence that this is correct. Other kinds of ethics may be less clearly related, positively or negatively, to profits. An important role for government is to create an environment in which socially good behavior does not hurt the company, and in which the kind of behavior that creates what economists call “negative externalities” is not profitable.

In its letter, the Rockefeller Family Fund emphasizes its support for the overwhelming science on the effects of climate change and what must be done to prevent its worse potential impacts:

    The science and intent enunciated by the Paris agreement cannot be more clear: far from finding additional sources of fossil fuels, we must keep most of the already discovered reserves in the ground if there is any hope for human and natural ecosystems to survive and thrive in the decades ahead.

“For decades, Exxon has done everything in its power to cover up the impact climate change would have on its business and the planet—those chickens are finally coming home to roost,” said Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org. “Exxon is increasingly caught in its own web of deception. Instead of addressing climate change when they first found out about it decades ago, the company has aggressively pursued a business path that is incompatible with a livable planet. That’s opened them up to divestment, regulation, and now, potential prosecution.”

All of this activity centering around Exxon’s malfeasance suggests that the momentum is growing behind the #ExxonKnew campaign, which is calling on state AGs across the nation to join New York and California in opening investigations into the energy giant.

With total assets at nearly $350 billion, ExxonMobil is one of the world’s biggest companies. It has the resources to change the script; to invest more heavily in renewable energy and green jobs to help move the nation and the world toward a low-carbon future. But will it? As the pressure mounts for the company on multiple fronts, it may have to.

"If Exxon doesn’t show how it plans to adapt its business to a carbon constrained world, it’s time for shareholders to divest," said Henn. "There’s no other responsible option.”

“Climate change will increasingly cause events like hurricanes that will destroy large swathes of property, kill numbers of people, make many homeless,” Goodwin told me. “In the long run, producers of fossil fuels will have to lose. The only question is how much the people and ecologies of the world will lose before our economies cease to make the situation worse.”

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http://www.desmog.uk/2016/02/26/major-investors-pressure-exxonmobil-consider-climate-impacts

For the first time, in my memory, we are actually seeing oil and gas majors talk about climate change as an existential threat. Today for example the minister for oil and gas for Saudi Arabia, Ali Al-Naimi, actually got up on stage in front of this entire group and said that climate change is more of an existential threat to the industry than any down cycle.”

This is what Shannon Cleveland, head of :{Ceres’ :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:Carbon Asset Risk Initiative, told DeSmog from Houston where she is attending the premier annual oil industry gathering known as CERAweek. 

“That is just a message  — that even with things as bad as they were in 2015 — no one was talking about here at CERAweek last year,” Cleveland continued. “I think there is actually an opportunity for this industry to start shifting.”

Ceres is a group that, according to its website, works with investors “to weave sustainable strategies and practices into the fabric and decision-making of companies, investors and other key economic players.”

Another sign of the shift was Al-Naimi saying that, “Solar is definitely going to be the answer to energy’s future.” This hasn’t been the typical messaging at past CERAweek events. However, the question that is critical for addressing climate change is — how far in the future?

Because Al-Naimi also noted that Saudi Arabia is exploring fracking technology to produce oil and gas and promised that, “We will produce it one of these days.” It’s unlikely Al-Naimi will join the “keep it in the ground” movement any time soon. 

ExxonMobil Still Fighting Climate Change Action

==

BUSTED SUM  bill mck

http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/19/exxon-climate-change-crime/

Read page 1

... Of course, heTILLERSON  immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate and in any event entirely manageable. His language was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.”

Add to that gem of a comment this one: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.”

Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S., when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah and just before Hurricane Sandy.

He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.”

In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend—somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton—wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry.

But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon—which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice.

Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money, organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes.Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet.

The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, who made a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon.

The Never-Ending Big Dig

Even that’s not the deepest problem.

The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12 percent in 2015 to $34 billion and another 25 percent in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons—$4 million a day, every day.

As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola and Nigeria. “The strength of our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion.

But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet—an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn about another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years.....

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Oil giant ExxonMobil moved to reject a shareholder proposal calling for the company to assert moral leadership on climate change and pledge to work toward limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less.

In a letter to securities regulators, the company said the resolution filed by a faith-based organization is "vague and indefinite." Exxon also said it’s unnecessary for shareholders to consider the proposal at the annual stockholders meeting on May 25 because the company has already taken steps to tamp down global warming. The resolution was filed by the New Jersey-based Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment.

While social responsibility groups have been demanding action on climate change from Exxon for decades, the Tri-State resolution is the first to call on the company to acknowledge moral responsibility. Over the past 25 years, shareholders have submitted 62 climate change-related proposals to Exxon, according to an InsideClimate News review of shareholder resolutions. Of those, 22 were either withdrawn or blocked by the company. None of the remaining 40 got enough votes to pass.

Management often urges the Securities and Exchange Commission to bar shareholder proposals from the proxy statements they publish for annual investor meetings.

Sister Patricia Daly of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., one of the sponsors of the resolution, called Exxon’s move "arrogant and dangerous."

"This challenge demonstrates that ExxonMobil plans to continue to cling to an unsustainable paradigm that severely harms our planet, without reflecting on the moral dimensions of a ‘business as usual’ scenario," she said. "I wonder what management fears will be revealed if they allow this resolution to go to a vote.

"They don’t see the moral imperative," she said. "They are dodging the 2 degrees."

The resolution declares, “We believe that ExxonMobil should assert moral leadership with respect to climate change.” It also calls on Exxon to adopt policies consistent with limiting the average global temperature increase to 2 degrees since the beginning of the Industrial Age and to acknowledge urgency in meeting that goal. The Tri-State Coalition represents nearly 40 Roman Catholic groups with pension funds that hold shares of Exxon.

A spokesman for Exxon declined to comment. The Tri-State proposal was among the first of:{ seven 2016 shareholder resolutions:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: to be filed with Exxon addressing climate change.

Exxon asked the SEC to allow the company to dismiss the resolution because it does not spell out exactly what actions Exxon would have to take to comply.

"The Proposal’s request that the company commit to ‘support the goal’ of limiting warming to less than ‘2° C’ is vague and misleading," according to Exxon’s letter to the SEC.

"The meaning and implications of this reference to ‘2° C’ are not defined or explained in the proposal and are likely only understood and appreciated by shareholders with a significant level of knowledge and expertise regarding climate change science and policy," Exxon said in the letter.

The company argued that there is disagreement in the scientific community over how to define or reach a 2-degree target, so it would be impossible for the company to do so.

The goal of holding global warming to 2 degrees or less was embraced by 196 countries during the Paris climate talks last year. The resulting agreement aims to reduce  greenhouse gas emissions, which are the largest contributor to global warming.  

Exxon also said it has taken numerous steps to reduce the risk of climate change. 

"The Company's past and current actions and initiatives compare favorably with the shareholder proposal’s essential objective of having the Company publicly support the goal of addressing climate change risk," according to the Exxon letter.

It cited steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions at its own operations and to conduct and support research on new technologies. Exxon said it also has urged governments, private companies and consumers to embrace climate policy solutions.

The sponsors of the proposal said Exxon's objections show that it is out of step with the rest of the industry and the world. Daly said the moral dimensions of climate change are clear and have been articulated in statements from world leaders and faith leaders, including Pope Francis in his environmental encyclical, Laudato Si’.

Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, said he understands Exxon's argument that the resolution is vague. He said the resolution’s sponsors could have specified how Exxon should contribute to the 2-degree limit, or how much in greenhouse gas emissions Exxon should curtail.

"Without the specificity, you end up with all the varying interpretations," said Brulle, who has studied the funding behind climate change denial campaigns mounted by the fossil fuel industry, including Exxon. "What Exxon is doing is using that discussion to muddle the issues."

As for Exxon's contention that it has already met its responsibility, Brulle called it "laughable."

"They say 'Oh yeah, we've met that goal,'" he said. "But what have they really done?"

Published Under:

Business and Accountability

==

http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/03/exxon-lawsuit

For the past few months, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been investigating ExxonMobil to determine if the world’s largest publicly traded international oil and gas company lied to the public or investors about the risks of climate change to its future business, based on the firm’s own internal studies. In November, Schneiderman issued a subpoena demanding a wide range of documents, including emails and financial documents.

The New York Times reported that the inquiry “would include a period of at least a decade during which ExxonMobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science, even as its in-house scientists were outlining the potential consequences—and uncertainties—to company executives.”

Kenneth P. Cohen, the company’s vice president for public affairs, vehemently denied the accusations. He said, “We unequivocally reject the allegations that ExxonMobil has suppressed climate change research.” He added that the company had “funded mainstream climate science since the 1970s, had published dozens of scientific papers on the topic and had disclosed climate risks to investors.”

California’s AG, Kamala D. Harris, launched a similar investigation, suggesting that other states may follow Schneiderman’s lead, possibly expanding the probe into other fossil fuel companies. Several high-profile current and former lawmakers, including Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Al Gore, have called for criminal investigations based on the media reports.

The growing inquiry has been compared to the lawsuits that have bedeviled tobacco companies, which concealed from the public research about the health effects of smoking cigarettes in the 1950s and ’60s.

“This could open up years of litigation and settlements in the same way that tobacco litigation did, also spearheaded by attorneys general,” Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said. “In some ways, the theory is similar—that the public was misled about something dangerous to health. Whether the same smoking guns will emerge, we don’t know yet.”

I had a chance to ask Katherine Sawyer, international organizer at Corporate Accountability International, a Boston-based non-profit, about Schneiderman’s investigation and what it might mean for Exxon and the fossil fuel industry in general.

Reynard Loki: Since the investigation isn’t public, it remains unclear what exactly Attorney General Schneiderman hopes to find in the reams of documents he ordered Exxon to produce. What exactly is he looking for? Could there be a smoking gun?

Katherine Sawyer: What he’s looking for is proof that Exxon knew about the catastrophic dangers of climate change and chose to suppress that science—proof that the corporation made the purposeful and calculated decision to hide the truth. In addition, the investigation will look at whether or not Exxon properly notified its investors of the business risks associated with climate change.

In other words, did Exxon let its investors know that climate change will inevitably hurt its business or did it seek to obscure the truth?

Reynard Loki: In an op-ed piece in the Guardian, climate activist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben slammed Exxon, saying that “no corporation has ever done anything this big or bad.” Do you agree that the climate impact of Exxon’s alleged duplicity, if proven, make it the worst case of corporate malfeasance ever?

Katherine Sawyer: If it’s not the worst, it’s certainly close. The implications of Exxon and the rest of the industry’s denial and deception will have real life-and-death consequences for millions upon millions of people around the world. Certainly, the lies and deception of many industries, from Big Tobacco to Big Food, have had serious and deadly health consequences, but none will have such irreversible, global consequences for entire populations, communities and even countries.

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mann interview post bust summary

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/12112015/michael-mann-climate-change-scientist-interview-exxon-mobil-investigation-global-warming

...

Climate scientist Michael Mann has spent much of his career in the crosshairs of climate denialists. A professor of meteorology and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, Mann is best known for helping to develop the famous "hockey stick" graph, which reconstructed 1,000 years of global temperature data and showed the abrupt warming of the late 20th century.

Mann, who studied theoretical physics before taking up climate research, published the paper explaining the hocky stick graph in 1999, just three years after he completed his Ph.D.

The graph drew widespread public attention, especially after it appeared in the 2001 Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Mann soon became a target of climate contrarians and the institutions that support them, including those funded by ExxonMobil. He has received death threats, been accused of scientific fraud by people who don't accept climate science and targeted by politicians.

He recounted his many run-ins with the denialist movement in his 2012 book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars."

In 2003, as the U.S. Senate debated a bipartisan bill that would have forced the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases, a paper by economist Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre, a self-described "semiretired minerals consultant," claimed to debunk the science behind the hockey stick chart. According to Mann's book, the website Tech Central Station publicized the paper three days before the Senate vote. (The bill failed by a 55-43 vote.)

Tech Central was one of many Exxon-funded groups that helped sow doubt about the scientific consensus on global warming. In 2006, Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) wrote a letter asking ExxonMobil to stop funding groups like Tech Central, "whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth."

Mann said he was angry but not surprised by the recent revelations that Exxon spent years conducting serious climate research before starting its campaign to fuel doubt about global warming. He said the investigation by InsideClimate News has "suddenly refocused attention" on something the scientific community long suspected: that Exxon scientists were too smart to be ignorant of the early, emerging science of global warming.

Read the series, "Exxon: The Road Not Taken," on our website or as an ebook Kindle Single.

He also said he's curious to see what will turn up in the climate change-related probe of Exxon by the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. On Nov. 5, Schneiderman's office subpoenaed Exxon for documents on climate change spanning almost four decades. The investigation seeks to determine whether Exxon misled the public and investors about the risks posed by global warming.

Mann spoke to ICN via phone and email about Exxon's research history, its efforts to muddy climate science and Schneiderman's investigation. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

InsideClimate News:What was your initial reaction to ICN's Exxon series? Do you feel at all vindicated by the news?

Michael Mann: Well, frankly it confirmed things that we had long suspected. …[We knew] that Exxon had really bright scientists, and there's no way those scientists couldn't have known what the rest of the scientific community knew, that [climate change] was a real problem.

But nonetheless, it really proves that in some sense, the villainy that we long suspected was taking place within ExxonMobil really was. It wasn’t just a conspiracy theory. It was a legitimate conspiracy.

As I've described in my book, fossil fuel interests, including ExxonMobil in particular, have been waging a bad faith assault on me (and on other climate scientists) for decades now. It makes me angry that they would knowingly risk the degradation of our planet for future generations in the name of their own short-term profits.

ICN:Climate modeling is your specialty, and Exxon did extensive modeling in the 1980s. Do you have any thoughts on the company's modeling efforts?

Mann: They identified—they used the word "catastrophic" [effects]—in one of their internal discussions describing the potential impacts of climate change.

So not only did they know the science is real, they knew it was harmful to society, and they were sort of headed in the direction of doing the modeling to try to assess the degree of harm. And as you guys describe, they chose a different path...to fund a massive disinformation campaign, to hide the threat of their products. And the parallels then become rather striking with what the tobacco industry did.

ICN: One big difference between the tobacco and Exxon cases is that Exxon didn't hide its climate change research. Exxon scientists have published peer-reviewed papers and participated in government panels. How do you think that changes the situation?

Mann: Frankly, there was sort of a good cop/bad cop thing going on there...The cynic in me thinks that they were playing both sides. In fact, we know that they continued to have some scientists who participated in the IPCC process into the 2000s, while they were obviously engaged in massive funding of climate change disinformation, basically financing propaganda that was fundamentally inconsistent with the sort of work that their own scientists were doing....

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http://exxposeexxon.com/ 2005?

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

Long before the recent revelations that Exxon accepted global warming and strove to produce cutting-edge climate research, environmental activist Kert Davies had already unraveled an important chapter of the oil giant’s history: its bankrolling of a network of climate denial groups that helped stall for decades federal efforts to cut greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

Davies founded the research unit of Greenpeace USA in 2002 and two years later, it published the "ExxonSecrets" investigation. It was the first documentation of the millions of dollars Exxon spent on think tanks and advocacy organizations that put forward experts and reports to give climate denial the gloss of legitimacy.

Over the last 12 years, Davies, who now heads the watchdog group Climate Investigations Center, has continued to add detail and nuance to the picture of Exxon’s climate denial campaign.

According to ExxonSecrets’ most current data, the company donated nearly $31 million from 1998 to 2014 to pro-business, right-wing think tanks that "spread climate denial." The 69 recipients included conservative powerhouses such as the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation.

The project made Davies arguably the world’s foremost expert on Exxon’s climate change legacy.

The notoriety also made Greenpeace the target of harassment. "We learned many years after the fact that Greenpeace was likely infiltrated by spies hired by Exxon, because of the campaign we were running," Davies said "We learned this through a whistleblower in a complex plot that was revealed by Mother Jones in 2008. I had a reporter call me once and start the conversation "have you ever had interns that might not have been interns?"

Davies arrived at Greenpeace in 2000 when it merged with the group he was working for, Ozone Action. He said he focused on Exxon because it "was the biggest climate bully on the block." The company sent scientists to meetings of of international bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to argue against findings that pointed to fossil fuel emissions as the main driver of climate change. Chief executive Lee Raymond gave speeches casting doubt on climate science even has the research was growing more sophisticated and accurate.  Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute led the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of heavy industry and fossil fuel companies that worked to halt U.S. adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty to reduce climate-changing emissions.

Using publicly available documents, ExxonSecrets illustrated "with network maps the think tanks and organizations Exxon funded and calls out journalists for giving them a free ride without the parenthetical 'funded by Exxon' after quoting the so-called 'independent' climate experts," Davies said in an email. InsideClimate News' series about Exxon's early climate research from the late 1970s, based on thousands of pages of internal documents, confirmed suspicions that critics long held about the company, said Davies.

But the breadth and ambition of Exxon's early climate research surprised him nonetheless. "You know, quite frankly, my first reaction to the older documents ICN found was 'wow, I wish I had found these!' a little jealous and also just plain overjoyed," Davies wrote in an email. "It was like Christmas in September."

Davies spoke to InsideClimate News about the ICN investigation, how it has affected his perspective on his decades-long research into Exxon and new questions the articles have spawned about the oil industry.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ICN: How surprised were you by the stories and the new documents?

KD: I was incredibly surprised. I've spent most of my adult life focused on this company. I assumed there was a level of knowledge about climate science at Exxon. I had no idea that they had an internal research program, thatthey considered CO2 emissions when they planned the development of Natuna (gas field in Indonesia).That was mindblowing. Nobody knew this.

I have had radar up for all things Exxon and climate change and have built a pretty good larder of documents and intel.  Of course, I knew about Brian Flannery and Haroon Kheshgi [Exxon climate scientists] and their interventions within the IPCC process, but no one knew about the much deeper science program at Exxon or the extent of the internal briefings and conversation on various pathways the company could take.

This topic—corporations and climate denial—was a very small almost boutique conversation 10 or 15 years ago. Now it's front page news and presidential candidates are talking about it. It's kind of a trip and very humbling. I know now that it was worth it to file all those FOIAs, and gather documents and keep old files. Hoarding pays off!

ICN: How did these revelations fit with your work at Greenpeace on Exxon?

KD: They made what we learned that much more compelling. The most important question for me really is: what did they do with knowledge they'd gained? The more important thing is how they corrupted the political process [through the groups Exxon funded].

ICN: You have said the new information ICN unearthed has prompted you to look at your files again through a new lens. Anything click into place?

KD: The investigations revealed that we were more right than we knew when accusing Exxon of denial and deception in the late 1990s and through the 2000s. During that time period we put a lot of research and evidence in play showing that Exxon funded organizations, and [these] people engaged in climate denial. Now we have a completely different backdrop to those policy and science fights that got going in the late 90s, especially after Kyoto.

When we did the Greenpeace report Denial and Deception in 2002 [which documented ExxonMobil's efforts to foster doubt among the public about climate change], there was a basic assumption that Exxon must have known better on the science and was running these counter campaigns to derail policy action.  In other words, they must have read the IPCC reports like the rest of us and were smart enough to see the truth.  But we had no idea of the depth of their internal scientific knowledge.

There has been a "didn't we know that already?" reaction to the ICN and Columbia University investigations [Columbia's work was published in the Los Angeles Times after ICN’s series began] that made me realize that we are victims of our own success. The Exxon climate denial campaign has become a given, a fact, so much so that people assume that Exxon must have known better.

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

ICN: What are some of the major questions the new info has not answered?

KD: We're mainly interested in what they all knew, when they knew it.

How much did Exxon share what they were learning and analyzing in the 1970s and early 80s with others in the oil industry?  You answered that with the API article somewhat.Editor's note: [A Dec. 22 article by ICN detailed an American Petroleum Institute task force that studied CO2 emissions in the 1970s.]

We really need the nuts and bolts of the strategy to fund all the front groups after 1997: Who ran it and who authorized it?

ICN: What would you like to see happen next?

KD: I'd like to see continued investigations revealing more documents to add to this history with expansion to other companies and other industries.

ICN: How about Exxon itself?

KD: I don't know what we want Exxon to do. They need to come clean, own their legacy and work with the rest of the world to try to solve the climate crisis, and stop acting like a private empire, with interests apart from the rest of humanity.

==

tied w/ shell

http://www.desmog.uk/2016/01/20/exxonmobil-spent-least-8m-european-lobbying-and-corporate-donations-2014

exxonMobil has spent at least £5.6m($8.08 million) on lobbying the European Commission and in donations to European universities and organisations in 2014 according to the most recent figures available.

A DeSmog UK investigation into the oil giant’s European activities reveals much of this was spent lobbying on energy and environment issues in addition to donations to organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme and the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Last September, *Inside Climate News* revealed that ExxonMobil knew about the impacts of manmade climate change in the 1970s’ and ‘80s yet went on to fund numerous climate denial efforts. This prompted theNew York Attorney General to subpoena ExxonMobil to “determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how those risks might hurt the oil business.”

And now, the Church of England’s Commissioners (who run its £6.7bn endowment fund) has co-filed a shareholders’ resolution this week with the New York State Common Retirement Fund calling on ExxonMobil to publish an assessment of how its business portfolio would be affected by a 2C target as agreed in the Paris Agreement in December. Together, the group of investors hold more than $1bn in ExxonMobil shares.

So, while the oil giant has been getting a lot of heat in the U.S. for funding climate denial, DeSmog UKasks: what has ExxonMobil been up to in Europe?

EXXONMOBIL 2014 EU SPENDING BREAKDOWN

GRAND TOTAL: At Least£5.6m($8,083,406)

Lobbying:between £3.6m– £3.8m(between€4.75m –€4.99m /$5.2m– $5.5m)

Universities:£264,550 ($374,209)

Public Policy:£87,631($123,957)

Other (ex. health, environment):£1,682,587($2,380,000)

==

http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/12/14/exxonmobil-climate-denial-scandal-company-hiring-climate-change-researcher

Caught in the crosshairs of an ongoing New York Attorney General investigation exploring its role in studying the damage climate change could cause since the 1970's and then proceeding to fund climate science denial campaigns, ExxonMobil has announced an interesting job opening.

No, not the new lawyer who will soon send the “private empire” billable hours for his defense work in the New York AGprobe, though that's a story for another day. Exxon is hiring for a climate change researcher to work in its Annandale, New Jersey research park facility.

“We are seeking a candidate to advance research and assessment providing fundamental understanding on global climate change issues,” reads the job description.

It continues:

“The candidate would lead research in areas such as Earth systems science and the role of technologies and systems in managing the risks posed by global climate change. The successful candidate will develop collaborative research efforts, contribute significant publications, contribute to assessments (e.g., the IPCC) and demonstrate strong scientific leadership within both the corporation and external scientific community…Significant demonstrated experience in researching Earth systems science, integrated assessment and energy modeling is preferred. ”

It sounds a lot like a job description of a person who worked at the unit Exxon had at its disposal until the company cut 83 percent of its climate research budget and started funding denial to the tune of $31 million since 1998.

Exxon would proceed to fund think-tanks — such as Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute and awhole network of individual deniers — that ridiculed the same climate change models its researchers created — and that its new researcher will also create. Former CEO Lee Raymond also is on record berating the same models, as is the company via its ads.

And former Exxon lobbyist William O'Keefe, most recently CEO of the George C. Marshall Institute (recently rebranded as theCO2 Coalition), was recently exposed in a Greenpeace investigation detailing the willingness of certain academics togenerate industry-friendly testimony and op-eds on a for-hire basis. Exxon has served as a major funder of the George C. Marshall Institute.

Deep Cuts

In a story running two days after Exxon announced it would be hiring, InsideClimate news reported on the deep cuts in the 1980's to Exxon's climate research program.

“Facing a budget crunch and sensing that any government efforts to clamp down on carbon pollution were a long way off, Exxon terminated two especially innovative experiments,” detailed InsideClimate. “The cuts reversed the course that the company followed in the late 1970s, when top company scientists warned Exxon's management for the first time of the risks of climate change, and launched internal research programs unparalleled among its oil industry peers.”

InsideClimate published the memorandum in which ExxonMobil decided to make the cuts, and two other memos explaining which climate research programs would receive cuts.

Why cut climate research, though? The company calculated correctly — in large part due to its own lobbying and denial echo chamber efforts — that no strong regulations to curtail greenhouse gas emissions loomed on either the domestic or global level.

COP Writing on Wall or PR?

So why hire a climate researcher now? Perhaps Exxon sees the writing on the wall, as it did the first time around the block in the 1970's, that climate change is a global priority that demands attention.

....

In a recent blog post, Exxon claimed to support the cutting of a deal — a revenue-neutral carbon tax to be precise — at the United Nations climate summit in Paris.

“When it comes to COP21, we are hopeful that an agreement will be reached for meaningful action to address the risks surrounding climate change,” the company wrote. “We encourage those gathered in Paris to embrace a principled approach to climate change risk. Such an approach holds great promise for ensuring that effective action will be taken to meet this global challenge.”

The company has also spoken out about the climate change costs of not coming to a substantive deal in Paris.

Of course, Exxon continues to bankroll the campaigns of climate change denier politicians such as U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), U.S. Sen. Fred Upton (R-MI), U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and many others.

In fact, the company has already handed out $349,250 in traceable money to Republican congressional candidates so far in the 2016 electoral cycle. At this point in its history — though not always the case — the GOP has steeped itself in science denial and has railed against the Paris Agreement since nearly 200 countries agreed to it on Saturday.

Inhofe, recipient thus far of $7,500 in Exxon campaign cash during this cycle, delivered a recorded video keynote address at a Heartland Institute climate denial gathering held in conjunction with the Paris UN climate talks.

Exxon also has spent millions lobbying to lift the U.S. oil export ban, according to lobbying disclosure forms reviewed by DeSmog, a de facto form of climate denial given the greenhouse gas emissions implications of lifting the ban.

Considering these facts, the Exxon climate research hire appears much more likely to fit under the umbrella of Exxon's ongoing crisis communications PR plan, as the company continues to spend big lobbying for status quo (industry friendly) climate and energy policies.

==

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/31/the_people_vs_exxon_as_fossil

CINDY BAXTER: My name is Cindy Baxter, and I’m author of the website called ExxonSecrets.org, and I’ve spent the last 15, 20 years researching the fossil fuel industry’s funding of climate denial campaigns.

NAOMI KLEIN: Based on this research, did Exxon draw inspiration from the tobacco industry and its track record of denying the link between smoking and cancer?

CINDY BAXTER: Oh, absolutely. I think—I think Exxon and all the climate deniers that it worked with and the think tanks that it worked with were directly linked back to the tobacco industry’s—

NAOMI KLEIN: Tell us about that.

CINDY BAXTER: —its "doubt is our product." We have, for example—

NAOMI KLEIN: Wait, sorry, what was that?

CINDY BAXTER: The tobacco industry’s "doubt is our product" strategy. Doubt.

NAOMI KLEIN: "Doubt is our product."

CINDY BAXTER: Engineering doubt is the main thing that the tobacco industry did to try and create debate around the science, so that—of the science of smoking and cancer, so that—so that the public—so that the public wouldn’t be pushing for action on tobacco control.

NAOMI KLEIN: Now, those tobacco companies were eventually taken to court and held accountable for that. Based on what you’ve seen of the Exxon revelations, do you believe that we’re going to see similar lawsuits?

CINDY BAXTER: Well, I would like to see that. I’m not a lawyer, obviously. But I would like to, because I think—I think that if you know something, and we’ve seen that Exxon knew, and then we saw—and I’ve been very much looking at what Exxon did next. And what they did was, you know, extraordinary. They spent $30 million—$31 million from 1998 to 2014 funding climate denial campaigns run by think tanks and also denying the climate science themselves.

==

EXXONMOBIL CLIMATE DENIAL FUNDING 1998-2014

TOTAL $30,925,235

AEI American Enterprise Institute$3,770,000
CEI Competitive Enterprise Institute$2,005,000
ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council$1,730,200
American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research$1,729,523
Frontiers of Freedom$1,272,000
Annapolis Center$1,153,500
Atlas Economic Research Foundation$1,082,500
National Black Chamber of Commerce$1,025,000
US Chamber of Commerce Foundation$1,000,000
George C. Marshall Institute$865,000
Heritage Foundation$830,000
Manhattan Institute$800,000
National Taxpayers Union Foundation$700,000
Heartland Institute$676,500
Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy$665,000
National Center for Policy Analysis$645,900
CFACT Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow$582,000
Communications Institute$515,000
Washington Legal Foundation$455,000
Center for American and International Law (formerly Southwestern Legal Foundation)$452,150
FREE Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment$450,000
George Mason Univ. Law and Economics Center$445,000
National Center for Public Policy Research$445,000
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory$417,212
International Policy Network - North America$390,000
Citizens for a Sound Economy (FreedomWorks)$380,250
Mercatus Center, George Mason University$380,000
Acton Institute$365,000
Media Research Center (Cybercast News Service formerly Conservative News)$362,500
Institute for Energy Research$337,000
Congress of Racial Equality$325,000
Reason Foundation / Reason Public Policy Institute$321,000
Hoover Institution$295,000
Pacific Legal Foundation$275,000
Capital Research Center (Greenwatch)$265,000
Center for Defense of Free Enterprise$230,000
Federalist Society$225,000
National Association of Neighborhoods$225,000
National Legal Center for the Public Interest$216,500
Center for a New Europe-USA$170,000
American Council on Science and Health$165,000
Chemical Education Foundation$155,000
PERC Property and Environment Research Center (formerly Political Economy Research Center)$155,000
Cato Institute$125,000
Federal Focus$125,000
Fraser Institute, Canada$120,000
Media Institute$120,000
American Spectator Foundation$115,000
International Republican Institute$115,000
Center for the Study of CO2 and Global Change$100,000
Environmental Literacy Council$100,000
Tech Central Science Foundation$95,000
American Conservative Union Foundation$90,000
Landmark Legal Foundation$90,000
Independent Institute$85,000
Free Enterprise Education Institute$80,000
Texas Public Policy Foundation$80,000
:{Institute for Study of Earth and Man:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:$76,500
Independent Women's Forum$75,000
Consumer Alert$70,000
Mountain States Legal Foundation$60,000
Advancement of Sound Science Center$50,000
Free Enterprise Action Institute$50,000
Regulatory Checkbook$50,000
Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri$40,000
Institute for Senior Studies$30,000
Science and Environmental Policy Project$20,000
Lexington Institute$10,000
Institute for Policy Innovation$5,000

more busted:

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/exxon-knew-climate-change-was-coming-but-what-matters-is-what-exxondid/

This article was originally published by the Climate Investigations Center.

In the wake of Inside Climate News and Los Angeles Times investigations into ExxonMobil’s climate science, the company has been terribly busy telling the world that it stands by its scientific work.

In a classic example of Public Relations 101, ExxonMobil’s head of PR, Ken Cohen, has been huffing and puffing and standing up for climate science, pushing everybody’s focus onto the studies Exxon funded.

But this isn’t the point. Yes, it’s now clear that #ExxonKnew. As Neela Bannerjee of Inside Climate News said this week about her investigation:

“I came away with enormous regard for many of the Exxon scientists who researched climate change and for the managers and executives who gave them the resources and latitude to freely investigate a problem their own company was contributing to.”

What Exxon did next is what we think the New York state Attorney General should focus on in his investigation. If Exxon had climate scientists on the case, and it knew all that it did, then how could it have done what it did next?

Ken Cohen is, according to The Holmes Report, “a lifetime Exxon employee,” having been with the company since 1977. He’s the Vice President for Public and Government Affairs, a role he stepped into in 1999 after having been Legal Counsel. He was promoted into this role by Lee Raymond, company CEO and Chairman, who had long held skeptical views on climate change.

As part of his role, Cohen is Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the ExxonMobil Foundation, a position he has held since 1999 and still holds today according to the Foundation’s 2014 tax form.

:{

Let us be clear: contrary to media reports, ExxonMobil did not stop funding denial in 2008. It might like you to think it did, but it’s still funding denial today.}:And it’s the ExxonMobil Foundation that has portioned out a total of $30.9 million between 1998 and 2014 to think tanks running climate denial campaigns.

According to Steve Coll in his book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power:”

“Ken Cohen and his public affairs shop, in tandem with the K Street office in Washington, oversaw contributions to free-market advocates who published, spoke out and filed lawsuits to challenge policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or assess the long-term impact of global warming.”

To the public eye, Exxon’s “Public Information and Policy Research” section of its Worldwide Giving report, published every year on its website, looked like the company was just giving cash to right wing think tanks as many corporations did.

In the early 2000s, records show numerous grants that have descriptions indicating money dedicated to climate change work. We saw this in the 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004 Exxon Worldwide Giving reports.

In 2003, ExxonMobil earmarked more than $1 million worth of grants for climate change and, in 2004, listed over $1.6 million in climate specific grants among the $3.4 million given to groups who were engaged on the climate science and policy debate.

By “engaged” in the debate, we mean running full-on climate denial campaigns. These were the ExxonMobil-funded army of climate deniers.

For example, in 2003, “Frontiers of Freedom” received two ExxonMobil grants, $95,000 for “Global Climate Change Outreach” and $50,000 for “Global Climate Change Activities.”

In 2004, there is a “Climate Change” grant for $10,000 to Steve Milloy’s “Advancement of Sound Science Coalition” — the “junk science” organization set up by Philip Morris’s PR companies APCO and Burston Marstellar to challenge the science of second hand smoke. Milloy then moved to challenging global warming, ozone depletion, etc.

Also in 2004, the American Leglislative Exchange Council (ALEC) got $222,000 from ExxonMobil, $137,000 of which was earmarked for climate change issues. ExxonMobil is still funding ALEC today.

Others who were funded for climate change work that year were the George Marshall Institute, Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), all organizations that are, to this day, running denial campaigns.

CFACT, Heartland and some of the CEI staff are planning to head to climate talks in Paris this year, where they’ll be working with leading Republican denier, Senator James “global warming is a the biggest hoax perpetrated on the American People” Inhofe.

However, the following year things got strange. The public version of Cohen’s ExxonMobil Foundation’s grants contained no descriptions — instead vague, anodyne explanations (e.g “General Support”), whereas the forms the Foundation submitted to the IRS contained more detail about the grants. The public version is published in ExxonMobil’s Worldwide Giving Report, released each spring around the annual shareholders meeting, and officially filed with the IRS as a “990” form.

The 2005 990 lists a total of $996,500 in grants described as specifically for climate change-related work. The 2005 Worldwide Giving Report has none.

For example:

George Marshall Institute

The 2005 ExxonMobil IRS 990 Form lists $90,000 for “Climate Change & Energy”. The 2005 Worldwide Giving report lists $90,000 as “General Operating Support”.

CFACT

The ExxonMobil 990 for 2005 in the public Giving report lists $90,000 as “General Support”, whereas the 990 lists this grant as $90,000 for “Climate Change”.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute got $90,000 that year, listed as “General Operating support” in the public report, but specified as “environmental programs” in the 990. The following year, the CEI produced a video —“Carbon Dioxide is our Friend” that caused such an outcry ExxonMobil had to drop funding altogether.

ALEC

The ExxonMobil Foundation 990 lists two grants for climate, $80,000 for “Energy Sustainability Project (Climate Change)” and $21,500 for “Climate Change Environmental Outreach”.

The 2005 Worldwide Giving report lists the $80,000 grant as “Energy Sustainability Project” without the climate paranthetical and another grant for $71,500 for “General Operating Support” which appears to be a sum of the $21,500 grant for climate outreach and two grants totaling $50,000, listed in the 990 as “General Operating Support” and “Project Support.”

There is so much more. But we must ask this question of Ken Cohen:

If you knew all the science, if you stand for good science, why did the foundation you chair spend so much money on climate denial?

We have so many more questions:

Climate Hustle

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxonmobil-denial-about-climate-science-denial

various CTT

==

By Amy Goodman [1] / Democracy Now! [2]

December 2, 2015

Oil giant ExxonMobil is under criminal investigation in New York over claims it lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. Now Exxon is fighting back against the journalists who exposed how it concealed its own findings dating back to the 1970s that fossil fuels cause global warming, alter the climate and melt the Arctic ice.

Students at Columbia Journalism School collaborated with The Los Angeles Times on two of the exposés. Exxon accused the students of producing inaccurate and misleading articles. In its complaint, Exxon also referred to the "numerous and productive relationships" Exxon Mobil has with Columbia; Exxon has donated nearly $220,000 to the school.

On Tuesday, Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia journalism school, responded to Exxon’s critiques after an extensive review. Our guest Bill McKibben has been following the Exxon exposes closely. In October he was arrested after staging a one-man protest at a local Exxon station. He held a sign reading, "This pump temporarily closed because ExxonMobil lied about climate."

Below is an interview with McKibben, followed by a transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As we turn right now to the oil giant Exxon Mobil. It’s under criminal investigation in New York over claims it lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. Now Exxon is fighting back against the journalists who exposed how Exxon concealed its own findings dating back to the 1970’s that fossil fuels cause global warming, alter the climate, and melt the Arctic ice. Students at Columbia Journalism School collaborated with The Los Angeles Times on two of the exposés. Exxon accused the students of producing inaccurate and misleading articles. In its complaint, Exxon also referred to the "numerous and productive relationships" Exxon Mobil has with Columbia. Exxon has donated nearly $220,000 to the school. On Tuesday, Steve Coll, the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, responded to Exxon’s critique written to Columbia’s president after an extensive review. Coll wrote, "Your letter disputes the substance of the two articles in a number of respects, but consists largely of attacks on the project’s journalists. I have concluded that your allegations are unsupported by evidence. More than that, I have been troubled to discover you have made serious allegations of professional misconduct in your letter against members of the project even though you or your media relations colleagues possess email records showing your allegations are false," Coll wrote.

Well, our guest Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.org. He was arrested after staging a one-man protest at his local Exxon station in Vermont. He held a sign reading, "This pump temporarily closed because ExxonMobil lied about climate." Bill McKibben, you are a journalist yourself. Talk about the significance of ExxonMobil writing this letter of complaint to the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who then turned the letter over to Steve Coll, also a leading journalist, who did an investigation of Columbia Journalism School students.

BILL MCKIBBEN: So, Exxon is never very subtle and this was a particularly heavy-handed instance of it. Their letter to Columbia can only be described as thuggish. It carried every kind of implication about how they would do one thing or another to them if they did not get satisfaction. But I think they might think twice before they do it again. The letter that came back from Steve Coll at Columbia was a six page masterpiece of dissection. It sort of shows what happens when real reporters go up against PR people. It was remarkable, Amy.

==

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/25112015/exxon-deep-cuts-climate-change-research-budget-1980s-global-warming

Internal Exxon Corporation budget documents from the 1980s show that the oil giant sharply curtailed its ambitious program of innovative climate research in those years, chopping well over half from its annual budget for internal investigations into how carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels would affect the planet.

Facing a budget crunch and sensing that any government efforts to clamp down on carbon pollution were a long way off, Exxon terminated two especially innovative experiments. One involved oceanic observations during voyages of the Esso Atlantic, a supertanker. The other proposed to test vintage French wines for tell-tale traces of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels or other sources.

And then, in the late 1980s, Exxon ramped up a decades-long public relations campaign to sow uncertainty about the increasing scientific evidence for urgent action on climate change.

Exxon's pivoting from the cutting edge of early climate change science to the forefront of climate denial was described in a six-part series published by InsideClimate News beginning in September, based largely on primary sources including Exxon's own internal documents. Similar findings were reached independently by a team based at the Columbia Journalism School in partnership with the Los Angeles Times.

Exxon spokesman Ken Cohen has questioned ICN's reporting that the company "curtailed" its research program after a few years of unusually advanced experiments and modeling work in the 1980s.

But several documents uncovered by ICN show that the budget cuts during the 1980s were steep and sudden. The cuts reversed the course that the company followed in the late 1970s, when top company scientists warned Exxon's management for the first time of the risks of climate change, and launched internal research programs unparalleled among its oil industry peers.

ICN provided an Exxon spokesman copies of the documents being published today and requested any additional information about climate research spending during the 1980s, the period closely examined in ICN's series, "Exxon: The Road Not Taken." The spokesman, Alan Jeffers, declined to provide any additional budget numbers.

One of the documents, a June 18, 1982 memo to Harold Weinberg, a top research official, informed him that the year's budget for research into the looming CO2 problem was to be cut from  $900,000 to $385,000 immediately, and to just $150,000 the following year, an 83 percent cut....

==

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

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

The abstract and full text of the study can be found here: Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change. [7]

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

“The contrarian efforts have been so effective for the fact that they have made it difficult for ordinary Americans to even know who to trust,” Dr. Farrell told the Washington Post[8] which was first to cover the news of the study's release. “This counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own,” Dr. Farrell said....

==

busted

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/11/13/network-evening-news-programs-yet-to-address-wh/206839

In recent months, media investigations have revealed that Exxon Mobil peddled climate science denial for years after its scientists recognized that burning fossil fuels causes global warming, prompting New York's Attorney General to issue a subpoena to Exxon and all three Democratic presidential candidates to call for a federal probe of the company. But despite these developments, the nightly news programs of all three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have failed to air a single segment addressing the evidence that Exxon knowingly deceived its shareholders and the public about climate change.

Media Reports Revealed Exxon's Acceptance Of Climate Science Pre-Dated Its Funding Of Climate Denial, Prompting Calls For Investigations

Media Report: Email Shows"Exxon Knew Of Climate Change In 1981 ... But It Funded Deniers For 27 More Years."On July 8, InsideClimate News and The Guardian reported on an email from a former Exxon employee that was highlighted by the Union of Concerned Scientists. InsideClimate News noted that the email showed "Exxon scientists studied the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on global warming as far back as 1981," and that "company's early awareness of climate change and willingness to factor it into business decisions starkly contrasts with the path it took a decade later, when it led efforts to cloud public understanding of climate science and delay action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide." The Guardian similarly reported that ExxonMobil "knew as early as 1981 of climate change -- seven years before it became a public issue, according to a newly discovered email from one of the firm's own scientists. Despite this, the firm spent millions over the next 27 years to promote climate denial." The Guardian further reported:

[An] email from Exxon's in-house climate expert provides evidence the company was aware of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its bottom line, over a generation ago -- factoring that knowledge into its decision about an enormous gas field in south-east Asia. The field, off the coast of Indonesia, would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time.

[...]

However, Exxon's public position was marked by continued refusal to acknowledge the dangers of climate change, even in response to appeals from the Rockefellers], its founding family, and its continued financial support for climate denial. Over the years, Exxon spent more than $30m] on thinktanks and researchers that promoted climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Union of Concerned Scientists, [7/8/15; InsideClimate News,7/8/15; The Guardian,7/8/15]*

InsideClimate News PublishedSix-PartSeriesRevealing Exxon's Early Knowledge Of Climate ChangeAnd SubsequentShift ToPromotingClimate Denial.InsideClimate News published a six-part investigation in September and October detailing "how Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then, without revealing all that it had learned, worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed." InsideClimate's eight-month investigation was "based on primary sources including internal company files dating back to the late 1970s, interviews with former company employees, and other evidence." InsideClimate News, Exxon: The Road Not Taken,[accessed 11/13/15]

LA TimesInvestigationFurther Detailed HowExxon's Public Statements Contradicted Company's Research. The Los Angeles Times, in collaboration with Columbia University's Energy and Environmental Reporting Project, reviewed hundreds of documents and interviewed "dozens of experts, including former Exxon Mobil employees" for an ongoing series of reports on Exxon. An October 23 article in the series, headlined "How Exxon went from leader to skeptic on climate change research," illustrated how Exxon, "a leader in climate research, [became] one of its biggest public skeptics" because the company "feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies." *Los Angeles Times*,[10/23/15]

Democratic Presidential Candidates HaveAllCalledFor Federal Probe Of Exxon. Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, and Hillary Clinton have all called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether Exxon violated federal law by "allegedly hiding what it knew about climate change," asThe Hill reported. The Hill noted that the candidates' calls to investigate Exxon were prompted by the investigations at InsideClimate News and the Times. *The Hill*, [10/29/15]

New York Attorney GeneralIs Investigating Whether Exxon Lied To The Public About Climate Change.The New York Times reported on November 5 that New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman had "begun an investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business." As The Times reported, Schneiderman issued a subpoena to Exxon Mobil on November 4 "demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents." The Times also reported that, according to people with knowledge of the case, the attorney general's investigation into Exxon started a year ago, but "[n]ews reporting in the last eight months," including the Los AngelesTimes and InsideClimate News reports, "added impetus to the investigation." *The New York Times*, [11/5/15]

Major Broadcast Networks' Nightly News Shows Have Completely Ignored Exxon Developments

Evening News Programs On ABC, CBS, And NBC Have Yet To Address Exxon's Climate Deception.Nexis and Snapstream searches for "Exxon" and "ExxonMobil" revealed that the nightly news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC all failed to air a single segment about the growing Exxon story, covering neither the media investigations, the Democratic candidates' comments, nor the New York Attorney General's actions.

ABC And CBS Briefly Mentioned New York Attorney General Investigation On Morning News Shows.ABC's Good Morning America and CBS This Morning both briefly mentioned New York Attorney General Schneiderman's investigation into Exxon in news rundowns. ABC, *Good Morning America*, [11/6/15; CBS, CBS This Morning, 11/6/15]

By Contrast, Exxon Developments Have Received Widespread Coverage From Other Media Outlets

ManyMedia OutletsHaveCovered ExxonStory. In contrast to the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC, other media outlets, including PBS, NPR, and many large newspapers and wire services have reported on the presidential candidates' calls for a federal investigation of Exxon and/or the New York Attorney General's investigation into Exxon. These include:

PBS NewsHour: "Has Exxon Mobil Misled The Public About Its Climate Change Research?" [11/10/15]

NPR: "N.Y. Attorney General Investigates Whether Exxon Mobil Lied On Climate Change"[11/5/15]

The New York Times: "More Oil Companies Could Join Exxon Mobil As Focus Of Climate Investigations";"Exxon Mobil Investigated For Possible Climate Change Lies By New York Attorney General";"Exxon Mobil Accused Of Misleading Public On Climate Change Risks"[11/6/15, 11/5/15,10/30/15]

The Washington Post: "New York Is Investigating Exxon Mobil For Allegedly Misleading The Public About Climate Change"[11/5/15]

USA Today: "Exxonmobil Investigated Over Climate Change Statements"[11/5/15]

The Wall Street Journal: "Exxon Mobil Gets Subpoena From N.Y. Regarding Climate-Change Research"[11/5/15]

Associated Press: "Official: NYProbes Exxon, Peabody Climate Statements" [11/5/15]

Reuters: "New York Investigating Exxon Over Climate Statements: Source" [11/6/15]

wapo ~ LAT

The Washington Post editorial board claimed that ExxonMobil "deserves criticism for playing down the danger of climate change," but that the company's actions are "not a criminal offense." That conclusion is premature, given an ongoing investigation and evidence that Exxon knowingly deceived shareholders and the public about climate change. And this is not the first time the Posthas argued against the government pursuing a legal response to corporate malfeasance; in the early 2000s, the Post also criticized the Department of Justice lawsuit against tobacco companies that it is now citing to try to distinguish the tobacco companies' wrongdoing from that of Exxon.

Media Investigations Reveal Exxon's Climate Deception, Prompting NY AG To Subpoena Company Records

InsideClimate News Published Six-Part Series Revealing Exxon's Early Knowledge Of Climate ChangeAnd Subsequent Shift To Promoting Climate Denial.InsideClimate News published a six-part investigation in September and October detailing "how Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then, without revealing all that it had learned, worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed." InsideClimate's eight-month investigation was "based on primary sources including internal company files dating back to the late 1970s, interviews with former company employees, and other evidence." InsideClimate News, Exxon: The Road Not Taken,[accessed 11/16/15]

LA Times Investigation Further Detailed How Exxon's Public Statements Contradicted Company's Research. The Los Angeles Times, in collaboration with Columbia University's Energy and Environmental Reporting Project, reviewed hundreds of documents and interviewed "dozens of experts, including former Exxon Mobil employees" for an ongoing series of reports on Exxon. An October 23 article in the series, headlined "How Exxon went from leader to skeptic on climate change research," illustrated how Exxon, "a leader in climate research, [became] one of its biggest public skeptics" because the company "feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies." *Los Angeles Times*, [10/23/15]

New York Attorney General Is Investigating Whether Exxon Lied To The Public About Climate Change.The New York Times reported on November 5 that New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman had "begun an investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business." As The Times reported, Schneiderman issued a subpoena to Exxon Mobil on November 4 "demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents." The Times also reported that, according to people with knowledge of the case, the attorney general's investigation into Exxon started a year ago, but "[n]ews reporting in the last eight months," including the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News reports, "added impetus to the investigation." *The New York Times*, [11/5/15]

Washington PostArgues Against State And Federal Investigations Of Exxon, Dismisses Comparison To Tobacco Companies

Washington PostEditorial Prematurely Concludes: "Exxon Deserves Criticism, But It Didn't Commit A Crime."On November 15, The Washington Postpublished an editorial titled, "Not a criminal offense"; the online version of the editorial, which was posted on November 14, had the headline, "Exxon deserves criticism, but it didn't commit a crime." In the editorial, the Postaddressed the media investigations by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, the New York Attorney General's investigation of Exxon, and calls for a federal probe of Exxon by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The Postsaid the media accounts of Exxon depict "a discouraging example of corporate irresponsibility," but prematurely argued that Exxon's actions weren't "criminal" and don't rise to the level of the tobacco industry's behavior, which a federal judge ruled violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO):

==

2011

After a year-long review, ExxonMobil has consolidated global advertising duties with Interpublic Group of Cos' Universal McCann for media, while global creative will largely be handled by Omnicom Group's BBDO, according to executives familiar with the matter.

Roster shop DDB, also an Omnicom firm, will hold onto below-the-line work for Exxon's fuel business, continuing to create signage for gas stations, among other things, executives said. As part of the consolidation, BBDO won the above-the-line fuels business, which accounts for all other advertising for fuels. BBDO will handle corporate advertising for Exxon as well as creative work that was previously handled by Interpublic's McCann Erickson and Havas' EuroRSCG.

==

Mssachusetts Institute of Technology last week denounced campaigns led by fossil fuel companies to obstruct public understanding of climate science and vowed to “advocate frankly” with industry allies for climate solutions as part of a new climate action plan. But oil giant, long-time collaborator and university funder ExxonMobil, which is charged with sowing doubt on climate change in a recent InsideClimate News investigation, puts MIT's commitment to the test.

MIT made its vow in "A Plan for Action on Climate Change," an 18-page report released Oct. 21. In it, the university said it will engage and collaborate with fossil fuel companies to combat climate change rather than divest its stock holdings in these companies.

As part of its decision to not divest, MIT took a seemingly hard line on the issue of climate denial when it said: "We are not naïve about the pernicious role of some segments of the fossil fuel industry in creating the current policy deadlock. We deplore the practice of 'disinformation,' through which some industry players and related groups have obstructed public understanding of the problem of climate change."

MIT went on to say it has already had "candid conversations" with industry allies and will continue "to advocate frankly" with them to work toward solutions.

While MIT vice president of research Maria Zuber told InsideClimate News that MIT “means business” and that "climate change is an institutional priority," some members of the MIT community remain unconvinced.

The student group Fossil Free MIT said the engagement plan amounted to "little more than business-as-usual repackaged," in a recent op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tech, on Thursday. Members of the group have led a sit-in outside of MIT President L. Rafael Reif's office for the past nine days in protest of the divestment decision and are asking for clarification on the engagement process. Approximately 3,500 students signed a petition last year asking the administration to divest; 90 faculty members also signed an open letter supporting divestment.

"I think it is inconsistent with our mission for MIT to invest in the enterprises that are helping to create the climate problem and also many of them are funding the disinformation campaigns that led to denial and confusion and prevent the adoption of policies we need for the climate problem," John Sterman, a professor the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT's System Dynamics Group, told InsideClimate News. "We need to stand with science. We need to stand with integrity."

Sterman added that he is not against working with energy companies, but only after companies prove they are not opposing policies needed to respond to climate change and are sincere about building a low-carbon economy.

In the climate action report's executive summary, MIT offered one example of how the fossil fuel industry may already be at a "tipping point," referring to a coalition of 10 oil and gas companies, including six members of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), that recently supported the international goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Conspicuously absent from that list of energy companies, however, is ExxonMobil, a founding member of MITEI.

ICN's recent investigation revealed that the company's scientists conducted rigorous climate research between the late-1970s and mid-1980s, warned executives that global warming posed a threat to Exxon's core business. But beginning in the late 1980s, Exxon led a campaign tohighlight the uncertainty of climate science. An independent investigation by the Los Angeles Timescame to a similar conclusion.

MIT offered few details when asked if it believed Exxon had engaged in disinformation campaigns, how it has and how it plans to communicate with Exxon on this topic, and what it thought of the fact that Exxon had not supported the 2 degree warming goal.

"I’m not going to talk directly about Exxon," MIT's Maria Zuber told InsideClimate News. "As a rule we don't make pronouncements about details of our individual industry relationships."

But Zuber did offer some clarification on MIT's motivation for voicing such a strong opinion on disinformation campaigns and defended the engagement decision. In the leadup to the report, members of the Fossil Free group had "really raised the sense of urgency" of the climate issue on campus, she said. It was clear to the administration that business as usual "was not going to be adequate."

"It was important to say [to the rest of MIT] that what we really want to do is change the game. And by changing the game, that means engaging sectors in this solution space who maybe haven't been fully participating or participating in the way that we chose. So we made the conscious decision that we were better off trying to sit all these people around the table and to find common ground and to convey to them our urgency on this matter than to push them away and hope that that leads to action," she said.

But how will MIT know if its approach is working? Zuber told InsideClimate News that the administration is setting up benchmarks for tracking the potential success of engagement.

Walking a Fine Line

Two days after MIT released its climate action plan, Exxon rebuked the charges laid out in the recent InsideClimate News and Los Angeles Times investigations concerning its role in sowing doubt about climate change. As evidence of Exxon’s continued commitment to climate change, the company pointed to its relationship with MIT.

"The facts are that we identified the potential risks of climate change and have taken the issue very seriously," said Ken Cohen, vice president of public and government affairs at Exxon. "We embarked on decades of research in collaboration with many parties, including the Department of Energy, leading academic institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and others to advance climate science."

"There are a lot of people at MIT who are pretty disgruntled" about that, said Geoffrey Supran, an MIT graduate student and member of MIT Fossil Free. He said Exxon is using MIT "as a paintbrush to greenwash its climate lies."

"Instead of MIT using its name through actions like divestment to call out this disinformation, MIT is actually lending its name as a social license, even if it's unintentional," he said.

Zuber, however, said all of MIT’s partners have meaningfully contributed to the university's research and mission.

"When we look at any of these companies with whom we are engaging, what I care about is what they are doing right now and what they are going to do tomorrow and the next day to move this forward and to me, this out to be the benchmark of which we ought to judge the usefulness of these collaborations," she said.

Zuber later acknowledged that MIT is putting its "reputation on the line" by working with the companies.

MIT's action plan includes a commitment to reduce the university’s carbon footprint by at least 32 percent by 2030 as compared to 2014 levels, as well as provide more options to study climate change and sustainability in the classroom and through research.

In addition to declining to divest, the MIT administration rejected a proposal to form an Ethics Advisory Council. According to the MIT Climate Change Conservation Committee report, such a group would have examined issues such as disinformation campaigns through ethical lenses that are "antithetical to the Institute's central mission of education."

==

bill mckib arrested

... the last three weeks, two separate teams of journalists — the Pulitzer-prize winning reporters at the website Inside Climate News and another crew composed of Los :{Angeles Times veterans and up-and-comers at the Columbia Journalism School:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: — have begun publishing the results of a pair of independent investigations into ExxonMobil.

Though they draw on completely different archives, leaked documents, and interviews with ex-employees, they reach the same damning conclusion: Exxon knew all that there was to know about climate change decades ago, and instead of alerting the rest of us denied the science and obstructed the politics of global warming.

To be specific:

But of course Exxon did dispute that fact. Not inside the company, where they used their knowledge to buy oil leases in the areas they knew would melt, but outside, where they used their political and financial might to make sure no one took climate change seriously.

They helped organise campaigns designed to instil doubt, borrowing tactics and personnel from the tobacco industry’s similar fight. They funded “institutes” devoted to outright climate denial. And at the highest levels they did all they could to spread their lies.

To understand the treachery – the sheer, profound, and I think unparalleled evil – of Exxon, one must remember the timing. Global warming became a public topic in 1988, thanks to Nasa scientist James Hansen – it’s taken a quarter-century and counting for the world to take effective action. If at any point in that journey Exxon – largest oil company on Earth, most profitable enterprise in human history – had said: “Our own research shows that these scientists are right and that we are in a dangerous place,” the faux debate would effectively have ended. That’s all it would have taken; stripped of the cover provided by doubt, humanity would have gotten to work.

Instead, knowingly, they helped organise the most consequential lie in human history, and kept that lie going past the point where we can protect the poles, prevent the acidification of the oceans, or slow sea level rise enough to save the most vulnerable regions and cultures. Businesses misbehave all the time, but VW is the flea to Exxon’s elephant. No corporation has ever done anything this big and this bad....

==

series:

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/08102015/Exxons-Business-Ambition-Collided-with-Climate-Change-Under-a-Distant-Sea

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/9/24/inside_exxons_great_climate_cover_up

A new report by InsideClimate News reveals how oil giant ExxonMobil’s own research confirmed the role of fossil fuels in global warming decades ago. By 1977, Exxon’s own senior experts had begun to warn the burning of fossil fuels could pose a threat to humanity. At first, Exxon launched an ambitious research program, outfitting a supertanker with instruments to study carbon dioxide in the air and ocean. But toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon changed course and shifted to the forefront of climate change denial. Since the 1990s, it has spent millions of dollars funding efforts to reject the science its own experts knew of decades ago.

Please check back later for full transcript.

aei alec icn w/ frontline

http://ecowatch.com/2015/09/19/climate-change-exxon

This week, Inside Climate published some new revelations about one of the world’s biggest oil companies: that scientists working for Exxon knew about climate change as early as 1977.

Exxon’s own scientists conducted an extensive research program on climate change and “The Greenhouse Effect,” running complex CO2 monitoring experiments and publishing peer-reviewed papers, because the company was deeply interested in this emerging threat to its core business, oil and ultimately the company’s survival. There is now no doubt that Exxon has known about the science and the risks of global warming for decades.

The news will perhaps be of great interest to those lawyers who successfully prosecuted the tobacco industry, which hid its knowledge of the science around tobacco’s addiction, and the impact of second hand smoke.

Exxon Advertising Fully Contradicted Exxon Scientists

Because, despite having this breadth of knowledge within its walls, and for many years after these climate science programs were run at Exxon, the company has spent years and millings of dollars funding climate deniers and think tanks who attack the scientific consensus, spreading doubt and uncertainty. Greenpeace has collected data on Exxon’s campaign of climate denial for decades. Our ExxonSecrets project and database now shows that has spent nearly $31 million since 1998 funding think tanks and campaigns against the climate science consensus and climate policy progress.

For decades, Mobil ran a weekly “advertorial” or “op-ad” on the opinion pages of the New York Times and other papers, ads that continued after Mobil merged with Exxon in 1999. The story of how Mobil managed to secure advertising space on the editorial page of the New York Times and why they did so is another story.

We at PolluterWatch have collected an archive of these ads from the 1970’s to 2004. In light of the recent revelations about the company’s early understanding of the issue, they’re worth re-examining. The ads on global warming in particular set out the history of the companies’ campaign against both climate action and the science.

The Mobil Ads

In the lead up to the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, Mobil, a prominent member of the Global Climate Coalition, was leading the charge on the “it’s not global” message calling for developing countries to be included in emissions reduction targets.

Mobil focused on all the arguments against action on climate change that we still hear today. It claimed that developing country emissions were not addressed (the “blame China” argument). It said the climate models can’t be trusted. It called for more research. And it questioned the veracity of climate science. This argument later became the mantra of Republicans and industry opponents of international climate action, turning into a “blame China” campaign that stalled international action for years.

The ExxonMobil Ads

On December 2 1999, the first of the newly-merged ExxonMobil company ads appeared in the New York Times, announcing the merger.

And just one weeklater, on December 9, 1999, the merged ExxonMobil picked up the decades-long New York Times ad campaign with an ad titled: “Tomorrow’s energy needs,” emphasizing of course the plentiful global supply of fossil fuels, ExxonMobil’s preferred energy source. ExxonMobil is still running this argument today, using outdated, business as usual IEA scenarios to emphasize its point, and ignoring any of the IEA’s “new policy” scenarios. Interestingly, the new revelations by Inside Climate News show that in the 1970s, Exxon was thinking well beyond oil for a spell, doing advanced research in solar power for example.

The Chairman and CEO of the merged giant ExxonMobil was Lee Raymond, who had worked for Exxon since the 1960s. Raymond in fact chaired the American Petroleum Institute’s climate change committee, and twice chaired the API itself. Raymond was a hardened climate science denier, and his views were strongly reflected in a new turn in the company’s ads. Whereas Mobil had called for more research, and put the blame on developing countries, ExxonMobil embraced those arguments, but turned to outright denial.

On March 16, 2000, ExxonMobil’s ads continued the onslaught against the Kyoto Protocol and climate science with “Do no harm” that argued a similar line to the “coal will solve poverty” pitch we hear from Peabody Energy today:

==

PIVOT PT:

BP Withdraws

In the immediate aftermath of the speech, BP announced that it would be withdrawing from the Global Climate Coalition.

It issued a short statement which included the following quote from Browne: “The time to consider the policy dimension of climate change is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven, but when the possibility cannot be taken seriously by the society of which we are part. We in BP have reached that point.”

Shell would follow shortly after, and the transatlantic coalition would slowly unravel. The environmentalists, by targeting shareholders and leveraging Blair's influence over his friend Browne, had delivered a knockout blow.

The sceptics in the oil industry had lost their extremely well-funded, effective and brutal weapon in the war against climate regulations. Energy companies could not rely on openly funded, and in some ways honest, special interest-lobbying front groups.

The executives at Exxon faced the prospect of having to come to terms with climate science and rebuild their multi-billion dollar company in its entirety, from the tip of the rotary oil drill, along the pipelines and refineries, to the nozzle of the petrol pump pushed into the back of the SUV.

Or they could instead go it alone in the public relations and lobbying war. Exxon and the remaining oil companies would have to find new allies.

Exxon’s Maligned $5M Settlement for Pegasus Spill Ruled ‘Fair and Reasonable’

A federal judge rejected arguments by local Arkansas authorities that a $5 million settlement for ExxonMobil’s 2013 Pegasus pipeline rupture was too weak to protect residents and drinking water sources from another major spill. The pact finalized by the court "doesn’t really instill a lot of confidence," said Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline safety expert involved in the case. 

Read more.

==

Email Shows Exxon Was Studying Its Climate Impact in the '80s

A company scientist's letter to his son reveals the oil giant was researching carbon emissions much earlier than Exxon previously disclosed.

By Neela Banerjee, InsideClimate News Jul 8, 2015

Exxon scientists studied the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on global warming as far back as 1981, an indication that the company was probing the industry's potential contribution to climate change much earlier than previously reported.

Exxon's early research into climate change was revealed in a 2014 email from a former company scientist that was uncovered by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). It was shared as part of a broader project,The Climate Deception Dossiers [2], published Wednesday, that traces campaigns by fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, to discredit the impact of industry on the planet's warming. The company's early awareness of climate change and willingness to factor it into business decisions starkly contrasts with the path it took a decade later, when it led efforts to cloud public understanding of climate science and delay action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.

Exxon's research in 1981 was initiated to help corporate planning, according to the email by Leonard S. Bernstein, the former employee. The research apparently was instrumental in Exxon's decision not to develop a major natural gas field in Asia. The field, called Natuna, contains a vast natural gas reservoir but it also contains a sizable amount of carbon dioxide, according to Bernstein.

"If Natuna were developed and its CO2 vented to the atmosphere, it would be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about 1% of projected global CO2 emissions," wrote Bernstein in an email to his son, Neil, a classics professor at Ohio University.

"In the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna [the gas field] and other potential projects," Bernstein wrote. "They were well ahead of the rest of industry in this awareness." Neil Bernstein shared his father's email with a colleague who then posted it to the website of the university's Institute for Applied & Professional Ethics.

In the email Bernstein wrote that whatever the public stance of natural resource companies, "internally they make very careful assessments of the potential for regulation, including the scientific basis for those regulations." He added that: "Exxon NEVER denied the potential for humans to impact the climate system. It did question––legitimately, in my opinion––the validity of some of the science."

Usually energy companies vent the carbon dioxide released in drilling fields like Natuna into the air, Bernstein wrote. The email indicates that early research by Exxon into CO2's contribution to climate change apparently was one reason the company put off exploring Natuna. The difficulty and expense of disposing of the carbon dioxide has kept the Natuna project dormant since then, said Gautam Sudhakar, director of global gas at IHS, an industry consultancy.

Ten years after Exxon began its assessment of the Natuna field's potential impact on the atmosphere, the company became a driving force in industry organizations committed to derailing American participation in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, a landmark international treaty that called for developed countries such as the United States to combat global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. At the time those organizations argued that climate science was too uncertain to underpin sweeping efforts to cut emissions. Exxon also became a generous funder of conservative think tanks and scientists, such as Harvard-Smithsonian scientist Willie Soon [3], that sowed public doubt about global warming.

A scientist at Exxon for 20 years until his departure in 1989, Bernstein went to Mobil where he wrote a 1996 primer on climate science for the Global Climate Coalition, an advocacy group for the fossil fuel industry. In it he urged members to focus on scientific uncertainty rather than use arguments popular among climate deniers, such as the effect of solar activity on the climate. Exxon lobbyist and environmental adviser Arthur G. "Randy" Randol III was a key member of the 1998American Petroleum Institute-led "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan," which determined that[4]"victory will be achieved when those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality."

In an email, Bernstein declined to comment.

Richard Keil, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, said that Exxon's involvement in groups that sought to slow or halt action on climate change was not a reversal of course from the company's early interest in the issue. Rather, it was an acknowledgement of the uncertainty around much of the science, he said.

"A full reading of Bernstein's email reveals an important point––his assertion that, in the 1980s, we never denied the possible role of human activity as a cause for climate change, and he further makes clear that, at that point in time, there was a great deal of uncertainty and lack of understanding of climate change, even among leading scientists and experts," said Keil, adding that today, Exxon "believes the risk of climate change is clear, and warrants action."

Yet ExxonMobilhas consistently fought off shareholder resolutions [5] to do more on climate change, most recently a proposal to set company-wide standards to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  In May, Exxon Chief Executive Rex Tillerson criticized [6] climate models and said humans will adapt to the strains of global warming.

Nancy Cole, UCS's campaign director for climate and energy, said companies such as Exxon need to take a more constructive course. "The deception simply must stop," she said. "It's time for major carbon companies to become part of the solution."

InsideClimate News

Source URL: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/08072015/email-shows-exxon-was-studying-its-climate-impact-80s?utm_source=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_campaign=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_medium=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_term=PANTHEON_STRIPPED

Links

[1] https://twitter.com/share

[2] http://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/fight-misinformation/climate-deception-dossiers-fossil-fuel-industry-memos#.VZ1S9vlViko

[3] http://insideclimatenews.org/news/21022015/documents-reveal-fossil-fuel-fingerprints-contrarian-climate-research-willie-soon-harvard-smithsonian-koch-exxon-southern-company

[4] https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucs-documents/global-warming/Climate-Deception-Dossiers_All.pdf

[5] http://books.insideclimatenews.org/exxonsclimategamble

[6] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-27/exxon-ceo-says-it-won-t-give-lip-service-on-climate

==

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/09/fossil-fuel-industry-climate-change/

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse created a stir recently when he speculated that fossil fuel companies may be violating federal racketeering law by colluding to defraud the public about the threat posed by carbon pollution.

...

Whitehouse likened their actions to those of the tobacco companies that conspired to manufacture doubt about the link between smoking and disease when they were all too aware of it. In 2006, a federal district court ruled that the tobacco industry’s deceptive campaign to maximize its profits by hoodwinking the public amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

Whitehouse may be among the first to suggest that the fossil fuel industry is flouting the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), but he’s not the first to point out the parallels between the tobacco industry’s fraudulent campaign and the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to quash government action on climate change.

Back in 2007, a Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report revealed that ExxonMobil—then the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company—had spent $16 million between 1998 and 2005 on a network of more than 40 front groups to try to discredit mainstream climate science. Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, meanwhile, were outed by a 2010 Greenpeace report revealing they spent significantly more than ExxonMobil between 2005 and 2008 on virtually the same groups. Many of those groups and the scientists affiliated with them had previously shilled for the tobacco industry.

Despite their outsized role, ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers are just a part of a much bigger story, according to a new UCS report, “The Climate Deception Dossiers.” After spending nearly a year reviewing a wide range of internal corporate and trade association documents pried loose by leaks, lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, UCS researchers have compiled a broader tale of deceit.

Drawing on evidence culled from 85 documents, the report reveals that ExxonMobil and five other top carbon polluters—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, coal giant Peabody Energy and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change but continued to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be wrong. Taken together, the documents show that these six companies—in conjunction with the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry’s premier trade association, and a host of front groups—have known for at least two decades that their products are harmful and have intentionally deceived the public about the climate change threat.

Exxon Recognized Carbon Emissions Problem 34 Years Ago

The collected documents reveal the fossil fuel industry campaign has relied on a variety of deceptive practices, including creating phony grassroots groups, secretly funding purportedly independent scientists, and even forging letters from nonprofit advocacy groups to lobby members of Congress.

end p1

...

ExxonMobil’s duplicity is perhaps the most remarkable. Internal documents and public statements stretching back decades show that ExxonMobil’s corporate forerunners Exxon and Mobil, which merged in 1999, acknowledged the threat posed by global warming as far back as the early 1980s.

  1. UCS discovered one eye-opening document just last week, unfortunately too late to include in its new report. It’s an email former Exxon and Mobil chemical engineer Leonard S. Bernstein sent last October in reply to a request for comment by an Ohio University ethics professor about how corporations often fail to account for “externalities” such as pollution. Bernstein stated in his email that Exxon was factoring climate change into its resource development decisions more than 30 years ago.

“Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna [natural] gas field off Indonesia.” Bernstein wrote. “… [P]rojections were that if Natuna were developed and its [carbon dioxide] vented to the atmosphere, it would be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about one percent of projected global CO2 emissions.” The company ultimately abandoned the project.

“In the 1980s,” Bernstein explained, “Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other potential projects. They were well ahead of the rest of industry in this awareness. Other companies, such as Mobil, only became aware of the issue in 1988, when it first became a political issue.”

It may have taken Mobil seven more years to wake up to the reality of global warming, but it was much more vocal than Exxon about it. In November 1988, five months after NASA scientist James Hansen rang the alarm bell before Congress, Mobil President Richard F. Tucker cited the “greenhouse effect” in a list of serious environmental challenges during a speech at an American Institute of Chemical Engineers national conference.

“Our strategy must be to reduce pollution before it is ever generated—to prevent problems at the source,” he said. “That will involve working at the edge of scientific knowledge and developing new technology at every scale on the engineering spectrum … Prevention on a global scale may even require a dramatic reduction in our dependence on fossil fuels—and a shift toward solar, hydrogen and safe nuclear power. It may be possible—just possible—that the energy industry will transform itself so completely that observers will declare it a new industry.”

Fossil Fuel Companies Disregard Their Own Scientists

Tucker’s warning went unheeded even by his own company. A year later, in 1989, 50 U.S. corporations and trade groups created theGlobal Climate Coalition (GCC)to discredit climate science. Its founding members included API, British Petroleum (now BP), Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Texaco and … Mobil.

Until it disbanded in 2002, GCC conducted a multimillion-dollar lobbying and public relations campaign to undermine national and international efforts to address global warming. One of its fact sheets for legislators and journalists, for example, claimed “the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood” and emphasized that “scientists differ” on the issue.

An internal 1995 GCC primer included in the UCS report, however, indicates that the coalition’s own scientific and technical experts were telling its members that greenhouse gases were indeed causing global warming.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established,” the 17-page document stated, “and cannot be denied.” The primer’s lead author was none other than Leonard S. Bernstein, who at the time was Mobil’s manager for corporate environmental, health and safety issues. After retiring from Mobil in 1999, Bernstein was a lead chapter author for U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports in 2001 and 2007. end p2

One draft version of the primer even addressed—and dismissed—major arguments made by climate change contrarians. “The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes,” the draft stated, “but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.” That section wasn’t included in the primer’s final version.

Bernstein referenced his role with the coalition in his October 2014 email. “I was involved in GCC for a while,” he wrote, “unsuccessfully trying to get them to recognize scientific reality.”

Exxon definitely was not interested in scientific reality. In 1998—a year before it merged with Mobil—the company embarked on its contrarian network spending spree and placed one of its lobbyists, Arthur G. “Randy” Randol III, on API’s newly created Global Climate Science Communications Team. The team’s goal was to derail the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international agreement signed by 192 countries—but not the U.S.—to meet binding carbon emissions reduction targets.

The new UCS report includes a leaked API communications team campaign memo—co-written by Randol and representatives from API, Chevron, Southern Company and a handful of fossil fuel industry-funded think tanks—which lays out a plan largely based on the tobacco industry’s deception strategy famously encapsulated in an internal memo that asserted “doubt is our product.” Echoing that sentiment, the API memo stated: “Victory will be achieved when: average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.”

Case Study: Covertly Underwriting a Contrarian Scientist

What makes the secret API memo so revealing is how closely its tactics were implemented in the case of Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Last February, internal documents made public for the first time revealed that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests have been secretly funding Soon’s scientific work for years.

This revelation didn’t come as a total surprise. The 2007 UCS report on the ExxonMobil contrarian network identified Soon as one of a dozen scientists affiliated with more than 40 ExxonMobil-funded think tanks that then constituted the backbone of the climate change-denier PR machine. Soon produced work for at least five of these ExxonMobil-backed groups, including the Heartland Institute.

But the latest cache of documents, obtained by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center through an FOIA request, lays bare a wealth of detail that was not available before, partly because a number of Soon’s contracts with the astrophysics lab dictated that the names of his benefactors remain confidential.

It turns out that Soon received more than $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry over the last decade and failed to disclose that conflict of interest in most of the scientific papers that money underwrote. Southern Company contributed more than $400,000, ExxonMobil donated $335,000, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation kicked in $230,000 and API gave more than $100,000. Except for Charles Koch’s foundation, all of the funders participated in API’s Global Climate Science Communications Team, and one of the co-authors of the team’s 1998 memo, Southern Company research specialist Robert Gehri, personally negotiated a $60,000 grant to the astrophysics lab in 2008 to pay for Soon’s research.

So what did API, ExxonMobil, Koch and Southern Company get for their money?

Soon’s papers and congressional testimony, which he called “deliverables” in his correspondence with his funders, conclude that solar activity is the main cause of global warming and carbon emissions have had little or no impact. Scientifically indefensible, no doubt. But they have served their purpose. Soon’s discredited findings are routinely cited by members of Congress—notably Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—to argue that climate science is a hoax.

Holding the Companies Accountable

The tobacco industry successfully stalled meaningful regulations for decades. Using virtually the same strategy and tactics, the fossil fuel industry thus far has been able to do the same, at least when it comes to federal legislation.

As the new UCS report notes, recent research has documented that 90 state- and privately owned corporations alone have produced and marketed the fossil fuels and cement responsible for nearly two-thirds of the world’s industrial carbon emissions over the past two and a half centuries. Of these, 50 are investor-owned coal, oil and natural gas companies, including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Peabody and Shell. Even more startling, nearly 30 percent of all industrial emissions can be traced to just 20 investor- and state-owned companies.

Scientists have been warning about the looming threat for decades, but governments have only begun to take climate change seriously. Meanwhile, the rate of carbon emissions has increased dramatically in recent years. In fact, more than half of all industrial carbon emissions have been released into the atmosphere since 1988, after major fossil fuel companies knew about the harm their products are doing to the climate.

So what is to be done?

There are a number of potential ways to hold large industrial carbon polluters accountable. It remains to be seen whether Sen. Whitehouse’s call for prosecuting them under RICO holds promise. But shareholder engagement, divestment campaigns, consumer boycotts and state court litigation all can play an important role in forcing them to curb their emissions, end their disinformation campaigns and even pay the cost of climate damages, preparedness and mitigation. The most effective tactics remain a subject for debate. But, as the picture of the fossil fuel companies’ efforts to deceive the public becomes clearer, it is high time these companies take responsibility for their actions and the damage they’ve done.

Watch Union of Concerned Scientists’ video explaining how internal industry documents reveal decades of disinformation: end p3

==

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

more hist

OurDeSmog UKepic history series continues as ExxonMobil uses its PR power to change the public’s mind on climate change.

The basic tenet of ExxonMobil’s strategy was clear: it would use PR, not to change their image, but to change the public's mind.

Exxon’s longstanding senior environmental advisor was a large, bullish, but “brilliant”, nuclear engineer, heroically named Arthur G Randall III. He went by the name of “Randy”.

Though Randy was nearing the end of his career, he was a powerful force within ExxonMobil’s Washington network.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Arthur_G._Randol_III

The Action Plan

In April 1998, four months after BP boss Lord Browne praised the new Kyoto Protocol to limit emissions, the hardliners came together to create an “Action Plan” to combat America’s growing fondness for fighting climate change. 

The “Global Climate Science Communications Team” was led by the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry lobby group bankrolled by Exxon and increasingly used as a political cover for their activities.

Randy was one of just a few industry representatives present; apart from this, the group was dominated by think tank representatives from the Heartland Institute, the Marshall Institute, and Frontiers for Freedom.

The group had a singular clarity of vision. The problem was that the public was sympathetic to the Kyoto Protocol. But this was alterable.

Media Outreach

The environmentalists' Achilles heel was the public's understanding of the science. By recruiting and training “a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach”, industry representatives would ensure that “a majority of the American public” recognise that significant uncertainties exist in climate change.

They would have a direct outreach programme to engage with colleges, the press and politicians “about uncertainties in climate science.”

“Victory” for the scheme would be achieved when climate change becomes a “non-issue” and when those promoting “initiatives to thwart climate change”, such as Kyoto are out of step with public opinion.

Between their first meeting in April 1998 and the next round of Kyoto talks scheduled for November, the group planned to spend $2m on the campaign. By 2000, they expected this to rise to $7.9m.

Leaked Memo

The biggest project proposed, with a budget of $5m, would be for a science centre that would develop and implement a direct outreach programme to inform and educate members of Congress, state officials, industry leaders, and school teachers/students.

The groups who allocated funds were all libertarian think tanks, each one heavily subsidised by Koch and ExxonMobil: American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom and the Marshall Institute.

The memo from their first meeting was leaked in April 1998, and the organisations involved claimed that funding for the project had not gone ahead. But nonetheless the Action Plan would prove to be a blueprint for their activities over the next four years.

http://www.desmog.uk/2015/04/14/how-exxonmobil-s-pr-machine-impacted-climate-change-debate

==

Rex Tillerson, chief executive of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, has called for European governments to support fracking, despite being called out as a ‘nimby’ last year.

Speaking at the World Gas Conference in Paris this week, he claimed that the large number of wells already fracked in the US and Canada have proven that the technology is safe.

However, just last year, Tillerson joined a lawsuit citing fracking’s consequences in order to stop the construction of a 160-foot water tower as it would harm the value of his $5 million home in Texas.

The claimants also stated that the water tower’s intended operations – to sell water to the local fracking firms – will create “a noise nuisance and traffic hazards”.

Tillerson eventually dropped out of the suit a few months later and, after continuing battles between his neighbours and the company building the water tower, the completion of the project was eventually given the go-ahead.

More recently, ExxonMobil faced criticism after its shareholders rejected proposals to add independent directors with climate change expertise to their boards.

From Coal to Gas

Leading European oil and gas companies have been championing calls for global price on carbon emissions this week in order to shift production away from coal to natural gas.

Over the past few years energy companies have seen a gradual shift in the mix of their energy production. Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, has said that his company has changed from “an oil-and-gas company to a gas-and-oil company.”

Shell and Total began producing more gas than oil in 2013 and 2014 respectively, and ExxonMobil’s gas output rose to about 47 percent of total production last year, up from 39 percent six years ago.

These calls come as oil and gas companies face growing pressure to take action on climate change from fossil fuel divestment campaigns and policy makers who want to bring down their nations' carbon emissions.

But Tillerson, along with Chevron, said that he only intend to support a carbon tax if real consensus emerges in the US.

Climate Change and Poverty

Tillerson has repeatedly rejected the accuracy of climate models that seek to predict the outcomes of rising temperatures, and has warned that hastily adopting carbon limits based on these models could have costly long-term consequences for shareholders. ExxonMobil is also well known for its involvement in funding climate denial think tanks.

The coal industry has also attempted to fight back against the call for more natural gas by arguing that coal production is essential in order to lift people out of poverty in developing countries.

The London-based World Coal Association (WCA) has met with officials from India to Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Malaysia to convince them of this policy and get them to support coal-fired power generation in any potential agreements made at the UN climate change conference in Paris this December. ...

==

note state sometimes heads off EPA fines, eg gov of state worked for duke 25 yrs re coal ash

--

Exxon Wants $1 Million Fine for 2011 Yellowstone Oil Spill Reduced Again

More than three and a half years after an ExxonMobil pipeline spilled 63,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River, the world's second-most-valuable company is still fighting regulators over being assessed a $1 million fine.

Read more.

==

1% of 9 billion see trms

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/nyregion/exxon-mobil-settles-with-new-jersey-over-environmental-damage.html

==

1% of 9 billion see trms

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/nyregion/exxon-mobil-settles-with-new-jersey-over-environmental-damage.html

==

Exxon Fighting to Keep Public From Seeing 900,000 Pages of Documents in Oil Spill Lawsuit

Oil giant ExxonMobil is seeking "unprecedented secrecy" by labeling nearly 900,000 pages of documents as confidential in a class action lawsuit over an oil pipeline rupture in Arkansas, an attorney said in a new court filing.

Read more.

==

Deepening Ties Between Exxon and Russia Run Counter to U.S. Efforts to Punish Putin

As tensions mount and U.S. lawmakers push for stiffer sanctions on Russia for its role in the Ukraine crisis, oil giant ExxonMobil wants no part of it.

Read more.

==

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

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

 big pict  exxon china

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175848/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_what%27s_big_energy_smoking/#more

==

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/exxonmobil-papua-new-guin_n_5242489.html

==

impacts on communities and the environment from hydraulic fracturing.

The oil & gas production industry is consistently failing to report measurable reductions of its impacts on communities and the environment from hydraulic fracturing operations, according to a scorecard report released by As You Sow, Boston Common Asset Management,Green Century Capital Management, and the Investor Environmental Health Network.

The report, ***Disclosing the Facts: Transparency and Risk in Hydraulic Fracturing Operations***, benchmarks 24 companies engaged in hydraulic fracturing against investor needs for disclosure of operational impacts and mitigation efforts.

While scores varied, no firm succeeded in disclosing information on even half of the selected 32 indicators related to management of toxic chemicals, water and waste, air emissions, community impacts, and governance. Even the highest scoring company, Encana Corporation (ECA) provided sufficient disclosure on just 14 of the 32 indicators. The lowest scoring companies were: BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP) (2 of out 32 indicators); BP plc (BP) (2 out of 32 indicators); Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) (2 out of 32 indicators); Occidental Petroleum Corporation (OXY) (2 out of 32 indicators); Southwestern Energy Co. (SWN) (2 out of 32 indicators); and, in last place, QEP Resources, Inc. (QEP) (1 out of 32 indicators).

http://dirtyenergymoney.com/view.php?type=search&com=1737#view=connections rank 3

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opensecets 2012

Exxon Mobil: Recipients

HEAVY HITTER

Money to Congress: 2012 Cycle

Dems:$155,150
Repubs:$1,662,961
Others:$0
Incumbents:$1,336,361
Non-Incumbents:$481,750
House

of Members

Average ContributionTotal Contributions
Democrats30$3,330$99,900
Republicans201$5,300$1,065,461
Independents0$0$0
TOTAL231$5,044$1,165,361

The US House of Representatives has 435 members.

Senate

of Members

Average ContributionTotal Contributions
Democrats4$3,625$14,500
Republicans17$9,205$156,500
Independents0$0$0
TOTAL21$8,142$171,000

The US Senate has 100 members.

Top Recipients

ChamberMemberAmount
PresidentRomney, Mitt (R)$221,535
PresidentObama, Barack (D)$102,132
SenateMcConnell, Mitch (R-KY)$45,500
HouseRehberg, Denny (R-MT)$29,500
SenateCruz, Ted (R-TX)$21,750
SenateBarrasso, John A (R-WY)$17,750
HouseHudson, Richard (R-NC)$15,250
HouseBenishek, Dan (R-MI)$15,000
SenateHatch, Orrin G (R-UT)$15,000
HouseWhitfield, Ed (R-KY)$15,000
SenateAllen, George (R-VA)$13,750
HouseBarton, Joe (R-TX)$12,500
HouseBoehner, John (R-OH)$12,500
SenateThompson, Tommy G (R-WI)$11,750
SenateMandel, Josh (R-OH)$11,500
HouseWest, Allen (R-FL)$11,250
HouseCritz, Mark (D-PA)$11,000
SenateBrown, Scott (R-MA)$10,750
HouseBiggert, Judy (R-IL)$10,250
PresidentSantorum, Rick (R)$10,050
**See all recipients****See all recipients****See all recipients**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

==

Courthouse News [1] / By Chris Fry [2]

Exxon Receives Slap on the Wrist for Poisoning NYC Water for Decades

August 2, 2013 |

MANHATTAN (CN) - ExxonMobil owes more than $104 million to New York City for poisoning the groundwater with the gasoline additive MTBE, the 2nd Circuit ruled.

New York City had sued the oil giant over its release of the additive into six wells in the Jamaica section of Queens from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s. The wells had been designated for emergencies.

Methyl teriary butyle ether, or MTBE, is a gasoline additive that helps gasoline burn more cleanly and reduces tailpipe emissions. New York City argued that the National Science and Technology Council found that "MTBE is a known animal carcinogen and ... had the potential ... to be a human carcinogen."

MTBE can also cause dizziness, nausea and other nervous-system disorders. New York state banned the additive in 2004, and 20 others states have similar bans.

Numerous Exxon employees claimed during the trial in 2009 that gasoline additives, including MTBE, "might render water undrinkable by humans." They informed Exxon managers that it has "low taste and odor thresholds." The additive purportedly tastes like turpentine.

A jury found Exxon responsible for product liability, failure to warn people about the dangerous nature of its product, trespass, public nuisance and negligence.

On appeal, Exxon argued that the federal Clean Air Act pre-empts the city's common-law claims. From the mid-1990s through 2004, the law required use of gasoline oxygenates, such as MTBE, in New York City.

Exxon also claimed that the city "failed sufficiently to prove the elements of negligence, trespass, public nuisance, and failure-to-warn."

In a 117-page doorstopper, a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit affirmed the jury verdict.

"Imposing state tort law liability for negligence, trespass, public nuisance, and failure-to-warn - as the jury did here - falls well within the state's historic powers to protect the health, safety, and property rights of its citizens," Judge Susan Carney wrote for a three-person panel. "In this case, therefore, the presumption that Congress did not intend to preempt state law tort verdicts is particularly strong"

The jury found that the MTBE levels in the Station Six Wells will peak at 10 ppb in 2033 - the maximum contaminant level for MTBE since 2004, according to the ruling.

This finding "is not inconsistent with a conclusion that the city has been injured," Carney wrote.

New York City did not prevail entirely on the appeal, however, failing to persuade the panel that the trial court improperly reduced its compensatory damages.

"The jury found that the cost of removing pre-existing contamination - namely, PCE - was $70 million, and reduced its $250.5 million compensatory damages award accordingly," Carney wrote.

New York City is planning to build a water-treatment plant in Queens that will clean 10 million gallons of the contaminated water per day. It says the water from the wells will be ready within 15 to 20 years as a back-up source for drinking water.

pegasus:  

Recent maintenance and testing records for the Pegasus, as well as the metal analysis report that blamed the accident primarily on a 65-year-old manufacturing defect, would offer important insight into why the pipeline failed. Those documents, however, are being withheld from the public as well as from a Congressional committee, two Arkansas Congressmen and a water utility worried that the pipeline could foul drinking water for nearly half a million people.

Exxon has given pertinent data to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the federal agency that regulates the nation's pipelines, and to Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel (in response to a subpoena). But Exxon says the two most recent inspections it conducted on the Pegasus are proprietary and confidential, so they shouldn’t be shared with the public.

http://grist.org/news/arkansas-tar-sands-spill-was-an-accident-60-years-in-the-making/

exxonpvtemp

6/25/2013

‘Private Empire,’ Steve Coll 2012  The Penguin Press.

valdez; b2 budget cuts in traffic control (also drunk/stoned 2 guys) big pressure at exon to reduce costs p 4

80k jobs cut by 1989 (NYC 1300 to 300)[in '97 top profit per captia]; top ecol officer demoted his team dispersed, oil response team canned p 5

1000 otters dead, 300 seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer wehales, 250k seabirds, billions salmon p 8  exec invokes patton on glee of challenge

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

claims spent 2.1 billion$ in 1989

john browne boho p 16

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

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

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

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

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

JDRock hist p 35: 1st integratd, tarbell, breakup; valdex spill 2x size of #2

purged execs not into rule book OIMS

nationliz of oil, those co's also went to other contries to compete w/ exxon, booked reserves plummetted

SEC did not allow tar sand and other low grade to be booked

great profit; if country, gnp #21

Ch 3 GW:

LRay knew cheney 20 yrs, hunt; hali and exxon did deals, AEI retreats lynne

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

secret task force did not meet long and results came out fast, which suggests pre-cooked, but output could rapidly be put into action thru exec order, policy and law 69, one goal open ANWR

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

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

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

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

NAS got exxon attn; hired flannery, got LNC lab guy, published by IPCC 79LR 1st ceo phd, so thot he could read the sci(plus experts saying geology is long time and we have only short data?, thus extrap tricky) 79 LR shut down green efforts 80

Rio B1 agreed, not binding but pledge to reduce to 1990 by 2000; 3 yrs later ipcc says likely human, LR relected 1995 assess; LR urged dev countres to oppose US on kyoto incl chinese commie; agw becomes taboo at exxon 85

exxon and api join GCC as barrier; GrP says really effective at blocking legis , ~ and in UK went after BP 85; gotAPI action plan;had spent millions on disinfo since 60's (who had?) current budget 7.9$M on PR to beat kyoto 85: sow doubt, media coverage balanced; find hacks.

exxon public affairs cheif Kenneth P Cohen worked  w/ Walt Buchholz (PR exxon chem), heartland, CEI(sued BC admin on climate review, claimed sci unreliable) p 86 Annapolis, backed bogus books

perhaps learning from tobacco blowback, exxon and api did not create or promulgate ("malic distort inhouse) what they knew to be lies, more nuanced doubt? 87

LR used oregon pet

gore cooled rhet to get coal states 89 (// BO?)

in addit to DC energytask force, another on climate; c powell. o'neill, evans, sp abraham, ctw, DC, john bridgeland, and gary edson org'd w/ aristides patrinos sci: heady, nixon goes to china scenario; hansen did briefing; cp and DE seemed openbut not DC 90 Barbour March 1 memo, wks later CTW letter 91 ctw tells o'n it's over, only production matters; o'n says we gave away enviro 91

paula dob: [Charles A. Heimbold, Jr., born May 27, 1933, is an American businessman and diplomat.

Heimbold was nominated by President George W. Bush as U.S. Ambassador to Sweden on April 13, 2001. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 1, 2001 and sworn in on September 12, 2001 in New York City. Heimbold presented his credentials to King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm on September 26, 2001.

Heimbold previously served as Chairman and CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company.]

suharto freeport and exxon

col and nigeria hu rights 2001

scientistslooking for oil in alaska followed by 178 foot cruise ship w/ paid sci; big $ on line if exxon found laible; FOIA for data not even done 131 accused of fraud, hacks in aud whenever they present;exxxon execs threaten to level your house if threaten legal (liability) 135 Short gov sci quit b/c of harrassment ch5

early 2002 b2 strat was pledge research but avoid any law or treaty, so exxon // 179

exxon schlumbuger GE give $ stanford for green res 100M$ from exxon 180

Greenpeace goes after iconic co, incl exxon, FOIA got randol ppt to b2 admin183

k str lobby exxon see some fundees off the res, but had been most aggressive funder

one of best sciPeter Vail 's idea curve applied to climate to help them find oil faster?! 185

exxon encouraged prosecution of Irving HQ caper; Public Interest Watch pushes IRS audit of GP 188 (120 of 124K from exxon)

LR pal of greenspan, echoes talking pts 201

browne rebrand bp 1990's p 224 had a sm solar co drivable from DC for PR foto

LR on bd AEI lynn cheney

don nelson pal hagel, led fight ~ kyoto 301; LR pal of nelson, LR wanted to be outside chairman of AEI, but nelson warned him that AEI might not play along with exxon POV both went to WH hubbard mtg, VP energy aid hutto set up exxon briefings for staffers and even Nat Sec Council 305 (Cohen had done studies how to give info to elites 305 "informed influentials

all scen said biz as usual (solar only up tp 2%, butregulation cd be black swan310; predicted co2 up 30% 2005 -30 311

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

big worry on punitive damages in valdez, so (paid research" submitted; judge won't read, but clerks are lawyers and/or econ degrees, so open to our ideas 313. academics can be bought cheap; forum trickier b/c have to invite both sides.  Souter sided with exxon, tho noted they paid for res. 314

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

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

katrina 1800 kia and 11b$

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

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

exxon wanted state dept help to beat shell in UAE, DC gave up and made call himself 323, exxon won

after1999 merger in top 3 but 1; LR retires worth 400m$327

pt 2 tillerson

fav bk atlas shrugged

2006 cohen did climate review, for execs only, CTT's helped; somewhat dangerous b/c UCS has accused to replay tobacco, thus legal liability, class action tort to get docs (tob co's thot no problem till it was) 337 even trickier b/c sci getting clearer and louder, est on temp rise 2x in a few years ; 

early 06inc truth out, showed 6x times while frantic notes taken on K str 337  exxon cited MIT and stanford $ as proof not anticlimate 338

Under LR.close // gop; 700K PAC for 2 yr cycle, 95% gop 340 (lowest of all oil co).

Buchholz PR guy sent to work at 2004 gop convention; 6 figs to inaug

exxon had vote metric but crappy; even dingell only got 30%; women intiative lobby ties to hillary fariello?

sherri stuewer after sprow climate pol 343

started to pull $ from outthere, concentrate on policy 346  tillerson admits agw? 347 demurs on reality, but says good to limit ghg "we are involved in discussion" that it's real 348

us intel pass info to exxon

world bank experiment fail wolfie debt Chad

62 k gas station, some leak so liable benzene mtbe tobacco tort lawyers gas station case $150 mil but no punitive

signed at last onto vol hu rights princ as shield/ 405

chavez ven

usually we pay 2% for oil, at 5% recessions can happen 422

after 2001 b2 sad $ for green energy to deflect crit [see connaughton bio]

colton comm to look for black swan alt energy h2 sci --> lobby

jack stanleykbr bribe nigeria DC ken saro wiwa

cohen started in exxon chem; risk analysisfavored corp(used against kyoto) 479 shift burden of proof, vs precaut, fundedharv bs shop even paul thacker gop, said bs  pthalates

bartonborn waco tx 1949 The Way to Win bio mark halperin and ; hired ROVE 488 got dingell chair house energy and comm comm; after merger most exxon pac 46K$  barton PO'd at exxon not backing 2005 energy bill b/c they balked at 4 bill$ mtbe fund 488; outed R retire $ later made up b/c exxon bundled $ 2008 38K$

cohen to k st: all about 60th vote; arlington cit action team wrangled employees and retires [RETIRED big cat]

polls told MCC that offshore drill pop; BO said end oil in our time; 2008 price spike but exxon did not know why.

exxon joined transpaency pledge; demo consult said have to change climate strategy 505 nelson old guard LR fired to fariello 507 (offered irag oil job but retired)

1997 LR did climate talk bejing denied

till went for carbon tax 535 rev neutral; gore had proposed, AEI Hassett backed but tough sell by 2008

justin petersondci pr shop us climate task force

podesta and browner went for cap and trw/ uscap, uscap some traction 2006 but collapsed in recession; wind and solar can only compete if dirty fuel taxed butreq trust both wall st and govt 541 cda tar sands exxon big stake api, consumer energy alliance Cncl For Relations study

algae partner ventner; leiter staff to kerry marr to hillary ch of s; bl lincoln staffer

waxman takes over from dingell

waxman bo plan reduce 2.5% gnp in 40 yrs, 15% less jobs coal and oil but no effect elsewhere 553

carbon tax win polls, esp when expl vs cap

eXxon sent flannery to cop15; china will negate any treaty gains

hunt bros 569 b2 went for unconv oil kurds

1976 till does fracking; 7$ got induistry in, not gov regs/res bot xto

gulf 60 kia 1550 hurt 948 fires system fails  gulf 10% our oil  69 sta barb

watt planned all US water offshore, but only tx, la, Miss ala

bo said keep moratorium but lifted to get bigger climate  deal 607

exxon res plan (biollerplate by sm co) includes walruses 609but 40 pp appendix on media handling, 4 cats w/ boillerplate press releases cat D most sensitive, incl GW

lord B resigned may 2007 after caught lying abut gay partner/ 611 07-10 BP res 97% willful egregious safety viols 612

deepwater horiz  6 wks behind, 58$mil over 613

2004-09 more trade def b/c of oil than china 618 mostly to cty don't like us

fix agw 2% gnp, but damage 20x worse uk, aust and eur tax themselves to fix 619

almost climate bill 09?!

stabile at 500 by 2050 only need to reduce 4%/yr  (but france only got 2.6 going nuke 620

aceh torture ct win

artic ice go makes drill easier uhoh 621

corp profits bigger share of gnp since 29

since merger exxon spenrt most on direct lobbty after GE and PG&E 625

after downgrade S&P said exxon one of 4  US co to have AAA

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

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

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

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

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

Exxon Mobil’s foreign policy, orchestrated by a political division including National Security Council and State Department alumni, sometimes coincides with that of the United States, and sometimes diverges. For example, the corporation had no enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Yes, Iraq has all that oil, but with most remaining reserves ever harder to get at, oil executives knew that whoever ran Iraq would ultimately depend on the technology and capital of the Exxon Mobils of the world. And yes, it might have been nice to own Iraqi oil wells outright, but long-term stability and security mattered more. Today, although the company has billions invested in tearing up wetlands and forests to extract oil from Alberta’s tar sands, it doesn’t much care whether an expanded pipeline system that would stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast gets the go-ahead from the Obama administration. If Exxon Mobil can’t send that oil to the United States, it can easily sell it to Japan or China.

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Hochschild is the author, most recently, of “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.” He is writing a book about Americans in the Spanish Civil War.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/books/review/private-empire-steve-colls-book-about-exxon-mobil.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0