Randol, R exxon

ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol

took out watson ipcc

bak 2 22

===

What else was happening at ExxonMobil and in the world in 2003?

Arthur G. Randol, III, whom everyone knew as Randy Randol, retired and left his post as Senior Environmental Advisor, a position he held since the 1980s.

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very good 2022 BBC doc big oil v world

pt 2 raymond confronted (shareholder mtg? by cli sci) reads oregon?! 15 min https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8cnif4

sci heins sp? Arthur Green geosci BS denier ppt, culture polite.

200m$ on BP PR 2x solar John Browne raymond furious brk ranks, exxon ppl ha grnwash

mccraken gore clinton holdover w aggressive agenda sci biasrandy randol

ipcc watson

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https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/climate-deniers/koch-industries/dr-willie-soon-a-career-fueled-by-big-oil-and-coal/

willie Soon plotted to take down the IPCC AR4 before it was even written.

In 2003, as the IPCC was gearing up for the upcoming Fourth Assessment (AR4) due in 2007, Willie Soon began plotting with colleagues about how to undermine the work. As part of the FOIA documents received by Greenpeace, there was a link to Dr. Soon’s documents. That link led to a directory of Dr. Soon’s files at Harvard. Dr. Soon has also referenced these online files in previous articles published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In a letter in these files (dated after 10 October) Dr. Soon wrote:

“Clearly they [the AR4 chapters] may be too much for any one of us to tackle them all … But, as A-team, we may for once give it our best shot to try to anticipate and counter some of the chapters, especially WG1—judging from our true expertise in the basic climate sciences …

Even if we can tackle ONE single chapter down the road but forcefully and effectively … we will really accomplish A LOT!

In all cases, I hope we can start discussing among ourselves to see what we can do to weaken the fourth assessment report or to re-direct attention back to science …”

Who was this “A Team”? The letter was addressed to “Bob, Randy, Walter, Sallie and Dave”.

From other correspondence, it seems possible that “Bob” is Australian scepticBob Carter, as Dr. Soon worked with Carter. “Sallie” is clearly Dr. Sallie Baliunas,“Dave” is likely David Legates.

There is no prominent “A-team” type scientist or climate sceptic called Randy – except ExxonMobil’s lobbyist Randy Randol, who was heavily involved with the Exxon-funded deniers. Randol wrote the famous memo to the Bush administration recommending that the then head of the IPCC, Bob Watson, be replaced. (Watson was indeed replaced – by the current chair Rajendra Pachauri. But Pachauri has continued the rigorous scientific work carried out by Watson and has since become the target of deniers.)

Randol was involved in a number of other Exxon plans to undermine climate science, including a plan cooked up in 1998 with other Exxon-funded think tanks to attack the Kyoto Protocol (see his name, bottom of page 4).

Equally, there is no “Walter” in the climate denial field [cunningham?]– exceptWalt Buchholtz, ExxonMobil’s Government Relations & Issues Advisor, the man responsible for doling out Exxon’s funding grants to deniers and front groups. Buchholtz was listed as a “Government relations advisor” to the Heartland Institute in 2005 (as listed in the Heartland Institute’s 2005 990 IRS form).

Regardless of who these “A Team” members truly were, Willie Soon clearly coordinated a plan to undermine the science chapter of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment – before he even knew what science it contained. This is a clear example of the climate denier strategy of undermining climate science, and stands in sharp contrast with accepted scientific methodology.

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mashey 2012 fake expert

p 28

Even if Singerhad never gotten money directly or indirectly from

tobacco/fossil sources, IRS-0E rules violations are violations, period.

B.2 Fossil energy funding chains

Via Sourcewatch,119 some funding chains have been:

Coal companies

Western Fuels Association120

Robert Balling121

Singer

API, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Texaco, etc

Global Climate Coalition122

Singer

According to ABC News123

“Singer insists he is not on the payroll of the energy industry, but admits he once

accepted an unsolicited check from Exxon for $10,000.”

ExxonMobil

Singer

Generous companies just send unsolicited donations, I guess.124

Funding chains through Heartland are discussed later.

Singer has worked closely for 2 decades with GMI, whose CEO William

O’Keefe is a 25-year veteran of API.125 Singer also has had a long

association with a top ExxonMobil lobbyist, discussed next...

p29

Randy Randol was a key ExxonMobil lobbyist, retired YE2004.126

 He was on the 1998 GCSCT team with SEPP.

127

If Singer did not already know him, he surely made contact thereafter.

 He is an organizer of the Virginia SEEE, with Singer and Haapala. 128

 Along with Singer’s Board, he was copied on email, as of 2010.129

“To: "Canadian Nuclear Discussion List"

Subject: [cdn-nucl-l] American Thinker:: Renewable electricity hoax, fraud, ripoff

From: "Jerry Cuttler" 161

―----- Original Message -----

From: S. Fred Singer

To: Thomas Lifson

Cc: ken@haapala.com ; Mark@legalplanner.com ; Tom Sheahen ; Donna

Bethell ; randy.randol@comcast.net 162

Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 9:06 AM

Subject: RE: Renewable electricity hoax, fraud, rip-off

Thank you, Thomas I was particularly pleased to read some of the comments --

meatier than the original article

comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/646560.html You have

sophisticated readers. Best Fred‖ (Fred‘s article attached, published by Lifson)”

Singer has certainly supported demands for Michael Mann’s email by Ken

Cuccinelli130

One might wonder how often Randol and other interesting

people would appear if Singer’s emails were subpoenaed. One might

suspect they would be far more interesting than Mann’s.

Tobacco companies funded some good, but irrelevant, medical science.

ExxonMobil has funded some good energy research. Still, when someone

not a medical researcher has taken tobacco money, and has taken fossil

money, while doing everything possible to discredit climate science,

people might reflect on possible influences.

126 MAS2010, p.147.

127 MAS2010, pp.19-20, 147. Singer’s wife Candace Crandall represented SEPP.

128 vaseee.org Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment

129 mailman.mcmaster.ca/mailman/private/cdn-nucl-l/1008/msg00001.html

MAS2011f, p.20

130 www.americanthinker.com/2010/11/the_global_warming_court_battl.html

---

no desmog profile

If you’re John Stossel and you want to host a segment to rail against the US Environmental Protection Agency, who ought you call?

It turns out, a man who was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison for defrauding the EPA!

Stossel’s guest last night, Jay Lehr, was sentenced to six months–serving three–in a minimum security federal prison back in 1991, and his organization at the time was fined $200,000. So Jay Lehr knows about EPA corruption better than anyone: he was the guy caught “falsifying employee time sheets on a government contract” for EPA, according to the Columbus Dispatch,

[pix]

Ironically, Lehr told Stossel that EPA is “fraudulent” in estimates of amounts of pollution that pose hazards to people’s health, such as particulate matter in coal pollution, estimated to prematurely kill 13,000 Americans every year, according to the American Lung Association.

Jay Lehr is now the “science director” at a climate chance science denying organization called The Heartland Institute, which has received money from coal mining company Murray Energy.

John Stossel did not mention Lehr’s fraud conviction. Perhaps he didn’t know his guest defrauded US taxpayers, but Stossel and Lehr share a flair for denial of global warming for polluting corporations like Koch Industries, which has financial ties to both men. Heartland is part of the Koch brothers-funded [State Policy Network](http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/state-policy-network-spn/?utma=1.834972712.1309880319.1345044157.1345047894.336&utmb=1.6.10.1345047894&utmc=1&utmx=-&utmz=1.1345047894.336.247.utmcsr=google|utmccn=%28organic%29|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=%28not%20provided%29&utmv=-&__utmk=19481784)–the massive apparatus of state-based and national front groups that push political agendas that are favorable to billionaire executives like Charles Koch. Heartland itself has received money from Koch foundations.

Stossel hosts “Stossel in the Classroom,” a product of the Koch-funded Center for Independent Thought. When Stossel ran a TV in 2009 that was intended to mislead students about the scientific reality of climate change, Koch’s Claude Lambe Foundation gave CIT $35,000. The Center for Independent Thought has continued to receive money from Koch foundations every year since, according to IRS tax filings.

According to a Heartland Institute email advertising Lehr’s attendance on Stossel’s show, Mr. Lehr’s relevance in attacking the EPA comes from a Heartland report he wrote urging the agency to be “systematically dismantled.” This coming from a group soliciting money from coal company Murray Energy, former ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Charles Koch Foundation.

This all fits into the framework that is becoming nauseatingly familiar to American voters: billionaires pull the strings, and our voices don’t matter. Stossel is just one of many Koch-funded or Koch friendly media personalities that wrap Charles Koch’s values in patriotic rhetoric and un-factual packaging. Meanwhile, people like Jay Lehr at groups like Heartland continue to carry Koch’s water into the policy arena, influencing politicians to do things like undermine enforcement of laws to reduce air and water pollution or mitigate dangerous climate change.

Source: David Lore, “Minimum Security, Maximum Cost: State Spends $53,000 Per Prison Bed to House Mostly Nonviolent Criminals,” Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) September 6, 1992.

USA V. LEHR, ET AL, Case Number: 2:91-CR-00068, Charges Filed 04/26/1991, U.S. District Court Southern District of Ohio.

Hat tip to Deep Climate, Russel Seitz and Thomas Miles for leading to primary sources on Jay Lehr’s conviction. Video courtesy Crooks and Liars.

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https://www.desmog.com/2013/01/31/three-states-pushing-alec-bill-climate-change-denial-schools/

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – known by its critics as a “corporate bill mill” – has hit the ground running in 2013, pushing “models bills” mandating the teaching of climate change denial in public school systems.

January hasn’t even ended, yet ALEC has already planted its ”Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” – which mandates a “balanced” teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms – in the state legislatures of Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona so far this year.

In the past five years since 2008, among the hottest years in U.S. history, ALEC has introduced its “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” in 11 states, or over one-fifth of the statehouses nationwide. The bill has passed in four states, an undeniable form of “big government” this “free market” organization decries in its own literature.

ALEC‘s“model bills” are written by and for corporate lobbyists alongside conservative legislators at its annual meetings. ALEC raises much of its corporate funding from the fossil fuel industry, which in turn utilizes ALEC as a key – though far from the only – vehicle to ram through its legislative agenda through in the states.

A Frankenstein Co-Created with Heartland Institute

A DeSmogBlog investigation last year found that the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act’s orgins date back to 2000.

The Act’s creation is directly connected to the ongoing efforts of another corporate-funded group, the Heartland Institute – of “Heartland Institute Exposed” fame – a group well plugged into the climate change denial machine.

ALEC‘s Natural Resources Task Force, now known as its Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, adopted this model at a time when the Task Force was headed by Sandy Liddy Bourne. Bourne, who served in this capacity from 1999-2004, would eventually ascend to the role of Director of Legislation and Policy for ALEC in 2004.

Upon leaving ALEC in 2006, Bourne become Heartland’s Vice President for Policy Strategy. Today she serves as Executive Director of the American Energy Freedom Center, an outfit she co-heads with Arthur G. Randol. Randol is a longtime lobbyist and PR flack for ExxonMobil, a corporation which endowed the climate change denial machine for years.

Heartland’s website still lists Bourne as one of its “experts,” stating that ”Under her leadership, 20 percent of ALEC model bills were enacted by one state or more, up from 11 percent.”

Importantly, Heartland is still a member of ALEC‘sEnergy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force that originally passed the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act.

According to internal documents leaked to and published by DeSmogBlog in Feb. 2012, Heartland obtained funding for a “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” project beginning in 2012. This cirruculum aims to teach that there “is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather.”

If this sounds similar to ALEC‘s model bill, it should, given the fact that the two outfits share funding from the same honey pot. In fact, Heartland actively promotes the ALEC model on its website.

Model Bill Introduced in OK, CO, and AZ

Oklahoma and Colorado came first and within just over a week, Arizona followed suit in proposing the ALEC climate science “mis-education” bill.

Oklahoma: Sooner Rather than Later

On Jan. 18, the Sooner State’s legislature took the lead for 2013 in pushing the ALEC climate change education model in the form of HB 1674, the “Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act.”

HB 1674 calls for the teaching of “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories,” including of global warming, saying it’s a theory steeped in “controversy” – not that the actual scientific record thinks so.

This is necessary, the bill states, “to help students develop critical thinking skills they need in order to become intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens,” going on to explain that it’s important to explore “differences of opinion on scientific issues.”

The ALEC model similarly calls for the teaching of “critical thinking so that students will be able to fairly and objectively evaluate scientific…controversies.” The model also mandates creation of “an atmosphere of respect for different opinions and open-mindedness to new ideas” in the scientific sphere.

The OK bill is sponsored by Rep. Gus Blackwell (R-61), unsurprisngly a dues-payingmember of ALEC. According to a Dec. 2012 report published by the Center for Media and Democracy(CMD) titled, “Buying Influence,” Blackwell has paid for his attendance at least one ALEC meeting with taxpayer money.

National Institute on Money in State Politics‘ data demonstrates that Blackwell’s largest pool of campaign funding for his 2012 electoral victory came from the oil and gas industry, which gave him $28,800. This includes taking $7,500 from shale gas industry giant Chesapeake Energy, $2,350 from ConocoPhillips, and $1,000 each from Koch Industries and coal industry giant Duke Energy, among others. All of these corporations also fund ALEC.

Colorado’s Same Day Affair

One sure sign of a coordinated, ALEC-lead effort is the fact that Colorado’s state legislature introduced the ALEC model on the same day as did Oklahoma’s. The two states, it’s worth noting, share a border on Oklahoma’s panhandle.

On Jan. 18, 2013, eight representatives and four senators introduced HB 13-1089, coining the bills the “Academic Freedom Acts.”

Paralleling the language in the ALEC model and the Oklahoma bill, the HB 13-1089 aims to “Inform students about scientific evidence and to help students develop critical thinking skills,” also recognizing that the teaching of the concept global warming “can cause controversy.”

One of the senators co-sponsoring the bill, Rep. Scott Renfroe (R-13) is an ALEC dues-paying member. He’s also attended at least one ALEC meeting paid for by Colorado taxpayers, according to the CMD‘s “Buying Influence” report.

Of the $91,000 dollars he raised for the 2012 election, over $5,000 of it came from the oil, gas and electric utilities industry, according to the *National Institute on Money in State Politics*. This includes taking money from Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko Petroleum, Williams Companies, and the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.

The Arizona (Sun) Devils are in the Details

Eight days later, ALEC‘s model billmade its way to Arizona, a state sharing a “corner border” with Colorado.

Arizona’s SB 1213 was introduced on Jan. 26, 2013 by six senators that, as it turns out, are all dues-paying ALEC members. Five of the six have attended conferences totally on the taxpayer dime, according to CMD‘s report.

SB 1213 incorporates the “critical thinking skills” operative language, the “scientific controversies” operative language and the “teaching…global warming” can “cause controversy” operative language.

In short, SB 1213 is the same exact copycat ALEC model bill that’s been proposed in both Oklahoma and Colorado.

ALEC Celebrates Groundhog Day 2013

Groundhog Day is on Feb. 2 and fittingly, ALEC and its corporate patrons continue to sing the same tune, simultaneously promoting fracking, blockading a transition to renewable energy and pushing bills mandating teaching climate change denial on par with actual science.

“It’s the same old schtick every year, the guy comes out with a big old stick, raps on the door,” actor Bill Murray said in the classic film “Groundhog Day.” “They pull the little rat out, they talk to him, the rat talks back, then they tell us what’s gonna happen.”

Replace “guy” with “corporate lobbyist” and “legislators” with “rats” and that’s ALEC in a nutshell, serving as a mere microcosm of the current American political system at-large.

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ref

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/2210:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:**2015**:{/Exxon-Sowed-Doubt-about-Climate-Science-for-Decades-by-Stressing-Uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exxon had turned a colleague into its enemy.

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

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

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

The Uncertainty Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Seat at the Table

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

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

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

Exxon has declined to answer specific questions from InsideClimate News.

[grfx dialogue]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fork in the Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drilling for Uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MacCracken rejected the task as "fruitless."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Doubt Industry

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

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

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

[grfx]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blowing the Whistle

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

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

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

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

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

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

appendix b]

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

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

---

no lnx pix knight of the garter?cmdr delinpole

https://www.desmog.com/2016/12/13/exclusive-myron-ebell-donald-trump-s-aide-epa-meets-who-s-who-long-serving-climate-science-deniers/

Donald Trump’s Aide at EPA Myron Ebell Meets with Who’s Who of Climate Science Deniers

ByGraham ReadfearnonDec 13, 2016

A key figure picked to prepare the federal environment agency for life under a Donald Trump administration has met in Washington D.C. with some of the world’s most notorious and longest-serving climate science deniers.

Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), was picked by the now President-elect to lead the Environmental Protection Agency “transition team” back in September.

Trump has pledged to strip many powers from the EPA to boost fossil fuel production.

Ebell has spent two decades trying to undermine the science linking dangerous climate change to fossil fuel burning.

E&E News reported that Ebell was at one meeting hosted by the CEI and held in the hearing room of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee.

The EPW committee is chaired by Senator James Inhofe who, like Trump, has described human-caused climate change as a hoax.

The meeting was not open to the public or the press, E&E News reported, with Ebell refusing to give any details.

Climate Denial Who’s Who

But details of the gatherings have been made public by some of the climate science denialists who attended. The attendee list reads like a who’s who of the climate science denial industry.

Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts, of the far-right One Nation party, who is in the U.S, revealed he had given a speech at a CEI meeting with Ebell.

Roberts wrote the meeting was a gathering of the Cooler Heads Coalition and then listed some of the participants.

Screenshot from the Facebook page of Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts.

They included Marc Morano,Randy Randol, Steve Milloy, Chris Horner, Craig Rucker, Patrick Michaels, Ken Haapala and James Taylor.

The views of most of the attendees are in direct contradiction to the overwhelming majority of scientific research published over decades, as well as the positions of the world’s major scientific academies.

Also listed by Roberts as attending was Breitbart writer James Delingpole, who published a picture of himself, Roberts and Ebell on his Twitter account.

Delingpole says climate change is “junk science” and has said that “hanging is too good” for climate scientists.

Denialists Reunited

Three of the attendees — Ebell, Randy Randol and Steve Milloy —were part of the Global Climate Science Communications Team in the late 1990s.

The GCSC was a coalition of think tanks and fossil fuel companies that hoped to shift people’s understanding of the science linking fossil fuel burning to human-caused climate change.

At the time, Randol was a lobbyist for ExxonMobil and Milloy was the executive director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition — a tobacco industry-funded front group.

One of the meeting’s attendees, lawyer Chris Horner, was named this week to Trump’s EPA “landing team” alongside Ebell.

Horner, who has been funded by coal companies, is known for launching multiple FOIA requests targeting the email inboxes of climate scientists and government officials. Many see his work as harassment.

Also in attendance, according to Roberts, was Fred Singer – a former advisor to TASSC who set up his first group to attack climate science in 1990.

Trump this week named current ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as his nomination for the Secretary of State.

On Twitter Tony Heller reported that Tim Ball, a retired geography professor and climate science denier from British Columbia, told the EPW meeting: “I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.”

In November 2016, Ball and Heller were in Australia for speaking engagements at the invitation of Roberts who claims there is no evidence linking climate change to human activity.

Ball then travelled to the US for a two-day conference organised by G. Edward Griffin with the title: Global warming: An Inconvenient Lie.

Griffin, who runs Freedom Force International that organised the conference, is a conspiracy theorist who claims there is no such thing as the HIV virus, that climate change is a hoax and that a US military plane shot down one of the passenger flights that crashed during the September 11 attacks in the United States.

The full line-up of attendees at the Cooler Heads Coalition listed by Roberts was Tony Heller, Tim Ball, Fred Singer, Ken Haapala, Craig Rucker, Randy Randall, Steve Milloy, Marc Morano, James Delingpole, Chris Horner, Myron Ebell, Tom de Weise, James Taylor, Pat Michaels, Austin Smithson, Brandon Middleton, Marlo Lewis and “Mandy from Senator James Inhofe’s staff”.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/27/what-happened-to-lobbyists-who-tried-reshape-us-view-climate-change

guk no lnx

what happened to the lobbyists who tried to reshape the US view of climate change?

In 1998 major fossil fuel companies put $2m behind a plan that would effectively fuel the fires of climate science scepticism among the American public. We reveal where the 12 people behind that plan are now

Graham Readfearn

@readfearn

Published onFri 27 Feb 2015

In early 1998, some of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world were hatching a plan to hijack the science of human-caused global warming.

Representatives from major fossil fuel corporations and industry groups had joined forces with operatives from major conservative think tanks and public relations experts to draft what they called their Global Climate Science Communications (GCSC) plan.

In a memo the plan boldly declared its goal would be to convince “a majority of the American public” that “significant uncertainties exist in climate science”.

Earlier this week it was revealed that major US coal utility Southern Company had paid scientist Dr Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, more than $400,000 in recent years for science research.

[Work of prominent climate change denier was funded by energy industry

ORGANIZATIONS

American Energy Freedom Center

Source: American Energy Freedom Centre: Staff list

ExxonMobil Corporation

Source: American Energy Freedom Centre: Staff list

---

RS:

Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing

the CEQ into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues

were really turned over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The

CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To

head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former

lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General

Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste

sites.

Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House.

In a fax sent to the CEQ on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush

took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a

housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming.

Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along

with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken, who had coordinated the

National Assessment.[--> christy lindzen]

Page 3

Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail

obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton' s first order of business -

even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White

House colleagues-to- be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He

echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office

of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the

scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was clear there was

a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy

industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.

---

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/twenty-years-later-this-gop-congressman-is-still-using-exxons-talking-points/

In recent months, the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts announced investigations into whether ExxonMobil has defrauded the public and their investors over the issue of climate change. In response, Rep. Smith has subpoenaed the state attorneys general and a number of environmental and philanthropic groups — including Greenpeace USA. (Don’t worry, we’re not backing down.)

Reading through Rep. Smith’s long history of denying climate change, it is obvious that he has assimilated Exxon’s own decades-long campaign to cast doubt on climate science as his own. If you compare Smith’s words with the talking points and arguments made decades ago by Exxon and its allies, you can see the same zombie arguments recycled, no matter how many times they’ve been refuted.

Exxon’s Zombies From the 1990s Attack

In 1998, Celine Dion was warbling her way to the top of the musical charts and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 366 parts per million (already about 30 percent higher than pre-industrial levels and rising steadily each year).

That year, an internal document from the American Petroleum Institute (API) was leaked to the public. Titled the “Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan,” the document laid out a cynical strategy to manipulate public opinion on climate change by highlighting “scientific uncertainty.” The document even states that “victory will be achieved” when “average citizens understand” uncertainties in climate science and they become part of the conventional wisdom.

Excerpt from the American Petroleum Institute’s 1998 Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan.

The document was created by an API task force spearheaded by Exxon’s chief lobbyist, Randy Randol. Exxon itself had been pushing the “uncertainty” line for several years after ending its ground-breaking climate science research program in the 1980s and reversing its position on the importance of climate action.

A 1996 Exxon publication sought to confuse and muddy the emerging scientific consensus by claiming that:

“Clearly, considerable uncertainty exists about future climate change. We are faced with more questions than answers on almost every aspect of this issue […] There is still a tremendous amount of uncertainty about how the climate will change in the 21st century.”

Amazingly, fifteen years later we find Rep. Lamar Smith saying the exact same thing in the Washington Post:

“[T]here is a great amount of uncertainty associated with climate science. These uncertainties undermine our ability to accurately determine how carbon dioxide has affected the climate in the past. They also limit our understanding of how anthropogenic emissions will affect future warming trends.”

The difference is that now the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has soared over 400 parts per million (now almost 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels), making it that much more difficult to curb global warming. Exxon and its allies put their plan into action and successfully stalled meaningful action on climate for years. In the meantime, ExxonMobil racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in profits.

Decades Later, Doubt Is Still ExxonMobil’s Product

Pushing “scientific uncertainty” was a self-serving spin-job back in 1998 — especially given the depth and quality of Exxon’s in-house climate research — but it is pure nonsense to keep repeating it today as global temperatures smash records. The fact that Rep. Smith and his colleagues on the Science Committee are still pushing this false narrative is a testament to the enduring legacy of the colossal denial scheme that Exxon devised.

Digging deeper into Rep. Smith’s statements, Exxon’s fingerprints are everywhere.

He likes to cast doubt on the reliability of climate models, claiming that such models have “greatly overestimated warming” and that any predictions “looking 50 to a 100 years into the future […] have close to no chance of being correct.”

In the early 1980s, Exxon was one of the world leaders in climate modeling and its scientists published results in peer-reviewed journals. But by 1997, Exxon CEO Lee Raymond was calling the models “notoriously inaccurate” and mocking them in public speeches. (For the record, climate models have a pretty good track record.)

Elsewhere, Smith attributes climate change to an uncertain “combination of factors, includingnatural cycles, sunspots and human activity.” Once again, Exxon was there first, publishing several pamphlets in the 1990s that tried to deflect blame for climate change away from fossil fuels and onto the solar cycle or “natural changes.” In fact, climate scientists have concluded that human-caused emissions are “extremely likely**to have been the dominant cause” of observed global warming.

ExxonMobil claims that they have turned over a new leaf and that they accept the science of climate change. They claim to have stopped funding climate deniers (though their latest giving report still shows funding going to several groups that spread misinformation or oppose action on climate change). But it is clear that the damage caused by years of denial and political lobbying is still blocking progress today.

Rep. Smith may still be peddling “doubt” and “uncertainty,” but the public deserves to know the truth about ExxonMobil’s campaign of delay and denial.

Demand the U.S. Department of Justice open an investigation into whether ExxonMobil misled the public about the science of climate change.By Tim Donaghy Tim Donaghy is a Senior Research Specialist with Greenpeace USA. He writes frequently about climate change, offshore oil drilling, energy production, and the Arctic.

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https://whistleblower.org/general/climate-science-watch/exxonmobil-and-climate-change-a-story-of-denial-delay-and-delusion-told-in-forms-10-k-2001-2008/

(part Two of Three)

To commemorate ExxonMobil’s 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders set to be held today, we are releasingPart Two of our ongoing series reporting on the company’s treatment of the climate change issue in its 10-K filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from2001 through 2008, coinciding with the Bush-Cheney administration (read Part One).

Calls for a U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) investigation — by presidential candidates, Members of Congress, and former DOJ attorney Sharon Eubanks — similar to the one conducted against Big Tobacco for lying about the connection of cigarette smoking and lung cancer, to determine whether Exxon Mobil Corp. should face federal charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for knowingly misrepresenting scientific knowledge regarding global climate change and its impacts, have received significant play in the media over the last several months. Unsurprisingly, these appeals have been met with push-back by the oil company — and more recently in a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial and a Wall Street Journal editorial, both summarily slammed for multiple gross distortions by the journalistic watchdog group Media Matters. The more imminent and potentially more problematic legal threat for ExxonMobil (also referred to simply as Exxon) than a future DOJ probe is the ongoing criminal investigation of the oil giant by the state of New York.

:{:{}:

Uniquely armed with broad investigative and prosecutorial powers under the Martin Act, a 1921 “Blue Sky” New York state law (amended in 1982) intended to prevent financial fraud, state Attorney General (AG) Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed ExxonMobil on November 4, 2015to determine whether the oil giant has been knowingly deceiving its investors and the public (over a span of decades!) as to potential risks to its operations posed by human-induced global warming and associated impacts. California AG Kamala Harris may be conducting a similar investigation, and Maryland AG Brian Frosh has indicated he may do so as well.}:

Whether ExxonMobil, or any of its competitors in the oil industry for that matter, will ultimately face state or federal criminal charges is anyone’s guess. Much clearer and demonstrable at this point is the distinct disparity between what Exxon has been saying and disclosing to its investors and shareholders (primarily via its 10-K filings with the SEC, the main focus of this series) and what Exxon has been saying and doing both publicly and privately behind closed doors as part of an apparently organized and carefully crafted communications strategy. One of the more damning pieces of evidence of their seeming intent to deceive is the leaked1998 Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan— a collaborative effort of Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute (API), and other key fossil energy interests. The body of evidence is vast and complex and, in some instances, nuanced and requires context. Nevertheless, in our view, ExxonMobil’s chronic duplicity is unmistakable.

Irrespective of the ultimate outcome of any state or federal probe into ExxonMobil, a solid narrative has formed that appears to be growing into a grassroots movement to hold the fossil fuel industries in general (and ExxonMobil in particular) accountable for their respective roles in helping to engineer what CSPW has referred to since its inception in 2005 as the “global warming denial machine.” (Note to our readers, this phrase is an established CSPW website category going back to 2006, populated with several hundred posts, many of which focus on Exxon).

Now popularized in social media under the Twitter hashtag #ExxonKnew, the moniker and its implicit message strike to the heart of what tends to stick in people’s craw: namely, the apparent, abrupt pivot

Exxon executives took at some point in the mid-1980s, when some sort of sea change evidently took place at corporate headquarters. Thanks to stellar investigative journalism at InsideClimate News (ICN), the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, we have learned (or were reminded) that, back when Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter occupied the White House, when sideburns and wide ties were in fashion, Exxon was spending millions of its own dollars to conduct basic, in-house, curiosity-driven research on carbon dioxide levels in our oceans — and its leaders were understandably and legitimately worried about what that might portend. We also were reminded that Exxon subsequently did everything in its power to convince the public to stop worrying, despite what the science was saying — to carry on, businesses-as-usual.

In other words, Exxon’s message to the world: It’s OK to wait for more definitive answers before we go inconveniently altering our carefree, consumptive lifestyles.

Or, is it?

Younger generations are waking up to the harsh reality of a compromised and potentially very dangerous global climate system in the only world in which they have to live, grow, and raise families. Naturally, they are looking for obvious culprits, and ExxonMobil is squarely on the radar. They are demanding explanations, and deserve to know the truth; we all do. Why and how did a corporate culture characterized by open-minded curiosity and concern regarding rising carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere as a direct result of fossil fuel combustion suddenly morph into a closed-minded culture known for its stubborn insistence that, despite what the body of evidence was showing at any given time, climate science was (and still is) too dicey, too uncertain (so goes the mantra) to warrant legislation aimed at cutting carbon emissions. The answer is painfully obvious: at Exxon, cutting carbon equals cutting corporate profit, a cardinal sin. And so, Deny. Delay. Delude. Repeat.

Notably, Exxon has exhibited a harsher, more stubborn recalcitrance on the climate change question, compared with other oil majors, such as BP Amoco. One 2000 study found “striking” differences between these two corporations with regard to their attitudes and actions on global climate change and BP Amoco was found to be significantly “more willing [than Exxon] to contemplate a world that uses less oil.” Less oil, you say? Exxon apparently would not have it. Perhaps this is why Exxon is being singled out for scrutiny: sheer hubris. And now, if only in the court of public opinion, this hubris is coming around to haunt Exxon.

Now, we resume our timeline initiated in Part One covering years 1993 through 2000, with another well-documented offense that rightly belongs in the proverbial evidence locker. Almost exactly sixteen years ago, on March 23, 2000, The New York Times ran an advertisement paid for by ExxonMobil featuring a line graph of temperature data for the Sargasso Sea from a scientific study authored by Lloyd Keigwin, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Falsely implying the graph was representative of overall surface temperatures, the ad stated that “poorly understood natural variability” makes it “impossible for scientists to attribute the recent small surface temperature increase to human causes.” The ad extolled possible virtues of higher carbon dioxide concentrations (e.g., promotion of crop and forest growth), talked about both positive and negative consequences of climate change, and characterized as “empty rhetoric” calls for near-term public policy responses by “some [who] argue that the science debate is settled.”

While the ad didn’t cite the US National Research Council report in which the Sargasso Sea data was presented, Keigwin later recognized his own work, expressed dismay, and complained publicly:

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

A sad story indeed, one that grew even sadder when, a couple of months later, ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond blatantly misrepresented the Sargasso Sea data asglobal temperature data in a statement used as corporate ammunition to shoot down a climate-related shareholder resolution offered at its May 2000 annual shareholders meeting. Will this particular example of deception eventually make its way into a prosecutorial argument presented before a judge?

Raymondmust have either missed or disagreed with the admonishment in a November 2000 article published in Harvard Business Review, targeted to industry executives, warning that “companies that effectively calculate the risks and opportunities of climate change will be able to survive the coming storms.” Referring to the Global Climate Coalition, the piece pushes on:

“The coalition and its supporters appear to be betting against the weight of scientific opinion, but their approach to the problem may be subtler than it appears. If they can stall regulation of carbon-dioxide emissions, they might be able to protect the short-term values of their assets. They may hope they’ll be able to convince the public that government regulation is a greater evil than climate change. In doing so, they run the risk of missing out on the opportunity to help tip the balance toward more sensible forms of intervention.”

Fast forward to 2016: ExxonMobil is still making regulation out to be the bogeyman.

Recall from Part One, no mention is made of climate change in ExxonMobil’s 10-K report for FY 2000, despite the following realities at the time:

Attitudes had shifted markedly in the U.S., as compared with a decade before, toward taking the climate threat seriously and believing action should be taken. For example, a publication by the American Chemical Society reports that a 1998 survey by the World Wildlife Fund revealed that nearly 60 percent of Americans perceived global warming as a “real problem,” and a March 1999 poll taken by the Mellman Group determined that three fourths of a group consisting of representatives in Congress, industry association leaders, the media, economists, scientists, and other policy experts believed US action to cut carbon emissions was necessary.

In 2000, even The New York Times admitted that those who were actively denying and taking issue with the seriousness of the climate change threat represented “the contrarian view.”

The industry front-group formed to impede an international climate treaty, theGlobal Climate Coalition (GCC), began fizzling out after losing key members: British Petroleum (BP) in 1996; Royal Dutch Shell in 1997; Ford Motor Company in 1999 (the first US company to defect); and Daimler-Chrysler, Texaco, the Southern Company, and General Motors in 2000. ExxonMobil stayed in.(Find additional detail at The Heat Is Online.) A postscript: the GCC subsequently identified itself as an umbrella group for trade associations, and closed its doors for good in 2001.

Some who perceived the full gravity of the climate change problem took the view that “desperate times call for desperate measures” and began considering what some of us in climate policy circles at the time jokingly referred to as the “Geritol” solution. By introducing massive amounts of iron into the ocean, the theory goes, we could catalyze photosynthesis in phytoplankton, resulting in a sort of giant swallowing of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In November 2000, Wired Magazine helped to popularize this last-ditch (and since rejected) effort at salvation in “Dumping Iron.”

International pressure to move forward on implementing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol led to another set of U.N. talks in The Hague in November 2000. The talks ultimately collapsed, and as the world’s biggest polluter at the time, the United States was held largely to blame.

In the waning days of the Clinton administration, the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) released a seminal 2000 report to Congress, Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, required by the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990. As stipulated, it was distributed to all Members of Congress and made available to the public. Comprised of nearly a dozen regional assessments of climate impacts, drawing on information and guidance from hundreds of stakeholders, the report was detailed and robust enough to be used as a guide for helping to anticipate and prepare for a panoply of climate change consequences: extreme weather, storm surges, more intense and frequent hurricanes and floods, sea level rise, prolonged droughts, increased wildfires, melting glaciers, and so on. The outgoing Clinton-Gore team had handed the incoming Bush-Cheney team a treasure trove of valuable information on a silver platter. How was it received? Read on.

2001: Some content of ExxonMobil’s Form 10-K for FY 2001 did deviate from the boilerplate language that appears in the 10-Ks from 1993 to 2000. For example, new language appeared, under the category Industry and Economic Factors affecting ExxonMobil’s business operations. The relevant paragraph with the new wording (in bold) calls attention to the well-established knowledge that harsh weather is not always predictable and can cause problems, even for oil giants. It’s tiny, but it’s a start.

Industry and Economic Factors: The operations and earnings of the corporation and its affiliates throughout the world are affected by local, regional and global events or conditions that affect supply and demand for oil, natural gas, petroleum products, petrochemicals and other ExxonMobil products. These events or conditions are generally not predictable (emphasis added) and include, among other things, general economic growth rates and the occurrence of economic recessions; the development of new supply sources; adherence by countries to OPEC quotas; supply disruptions; weather, including seasonal patterns that affect energy demand and severe weather events that can disrupt operations (emphasis added); technological advances, including advances in exploration, production, refining, and petrochemical manufacturing technology and advances in technology relating to energy usage; changes in demographics, including population growth rates and consumer preferences; and the competitiveness of alternative energy sources or product substitutes.

This seemingly obvious, innocuous comment about the weather raises for us some important questions:

Question 1: At this point — which would be early 2002 when the 10-K was being prepared for the previous fiscal year — did the company draw any connection between “severe weather events” acknowledged in the 10-K and “extreme weather” predicted by multiple IPCC Assessment Reports to date and the USGCRP 2000 National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts?

Question 2: Was CEO Lee Raymond cognizant of ExxonMobil’s own carbon footprint, of the massive carbon dioxide emissions resulting from consumer use of its products as intended?

Question 3: Was there any perception that its own operations could be disrupted by extreme weather brought about by human-caused global climate disruption?

If so, there was no evidence of it in its reports for shareholders, and Exxon’s 10-K for 2001, again, omits any discussion of climate change or national and international efforts to address it.

The backdrop for 2001: ExxonMobil as climate bully

:{:{}:

In early 2001, just as deliberately and forcefully as ExxonMobil was turning its back on formally acknowledging any notion of problems with Earth’s climate, the company was excitedly embracing sudden changes in our national political climate. Regime change had come, and the sound of champagne corks popping in the new Bush-Cheney White House were nearly audible as far away as Irving, Texas, headquarters for ExxonMobil, which now had a prominent seat at the table at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. ExxonMobil’s Washington, D.C. office was strategically located just a few blocks away from the Oval, at 2001 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest. Arthur G. Randol III, Ph.D., known simply as Randy Randol, served at the time as Exxon’s “Senior Environmental Advisor,” but in practice he was a full-time lobbyist evidently tasked with fending off any and all Congressional attempts to introduce and pass legislation curtailing carbon emissions or even addressing climate change in any meaningful way.}:

His actions reveal his mission. We can report one prime example,in exclusive coverage of information obtained by GAP and released today by The Guardian:

On the morning of January 29, 2001, just one week into the new Republican administration, Randol placed a phone call to the USGCRP Coordinating Office, asking to speak with its Communications Director, Nicky Sundt. Sundt took the call and made written notes of the conversation as it took place; he has shared his phone log of the exchange with CSPW:

29 January 2001. Sundt receives a phone call from Randy Randol of Exxon-Mobil. Arthur G. Randol, III is senior environmental adviser for Exxon Mobil Corp. He says [someone] forwarded him a copy of some survey questions that Sundt sent to Congressional staffers. The survey related to the possibility of sponsoring climate science seminars on Capitol Hill. Randol called Sundt and wanted to know a little about where USGCRP was headed with the seminars. Randol suggested that previous USGCRP seminars were “agenda-driven” and indicated that with the new administration and Congress — “IF the seminars continue” — he hoped to see a different balance with other viewpoints.He suggested a “different process” for picking topics and speakers. He said USGCRP needed to look at the structure of seminar series and suggested USGCRP put more emphasis on putting things in context. He specifically mentioned the NRC’s “Global Change: Pathways for the Next Decade” report as providing a useful framework.

According to Sundt, he did more listening than responding, and was alarmed enough by the direct attempt of an oil company lobbyist to blatantly influence legitimate communications to Congress regarding taxpayer-funded programs that he immediately reported the call to USGCRP Director Richard Moss.While not stated explicitly, Randol’s motive was clear to Sundt: ExxonMobil was interested in limiting the scope of communications between the USGCRP Coordinating Office and Congressional staff to the basic physical science of climate change, and to stay away from talking about climate change impacts and our collective vulnerability to them.

After all, it was not in the oil company’s interest to have a bunch of Congressmen and Senators asking probing questions about the troubling findings in the USGCRP National Assessmentreport that had recently been distributed to every office in the House and Senate, warning of harmful climate impacts in a dozen regions of the United States. Instead, Randol redirected Sundt to a report focused narrowly on basic climate research, Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade, a 1999 National Research Council publication identifying specific areas of basic climate science research needing more attention, devoid of content addressing the array of impacts affecting real people (i.e., consumers), in real places (i.e., markets). Meanwhile, the Bush White House went to work deep-sixing the National Assessmentreport, suppressing it, quietly getting the message across to political appointees and civil servants alike that they’d best avoid mention of the report or its findings, or else. CSPW founder Rick Piltz would later identify this mass suppression as “the central climate science scandal of the Bush Administration.”

Prime example number two of Randy Randol’s (and ExxonMobil’s) agenda to derail both domestic and international efforts to reach agreement on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be found in a memo he sent over to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), dated February 6, 2001, just one week after the call to the USGCRP. The memo is addressed to John Howard, CEQ’s Senior Associate Director at the time. The IPCC was on track to produce a Third Assessment Report (TAR) later that year, and ExxonMobil was, we now know, determined to do all it could to have greater control over the content of these international assessments representing the collective research results of nearly 3,000 highly credible scientists worldwide. From the White House CEQ director, Randol wanted answers to some fairly pointed questions.

First, Randol asked: “Could [IPCC Chair Robert] Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?”

Sir Robert Tony Watson (knighted by the Queen of England in 2012) had chaired the IPCC since 1997; ExxonMobil was overtly clear it wanted him ousted and to have him replaced by Rajendra Pachauri, whom the company viewed as more industry-friendly. ExxonMobil ultimately got its way: Watson gave up his position as Chair in May 2002 and was replaced by Pachauri.

Randol doesn’t stop there. In the memo he also asks if Dr. Rosina Bierbaum, Associate Director for Environment on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dr. Michael MacCracken, Executive Director of the US Global Change Research Program, have been “removed from their positions of influence.” Randol attacks the 2000 National Assessment of Climate Change Impactsas “roundly criticized for its political and scientific bias” and “driven by a political schedule to help the Gore campaign,” allegations that have never been credibly corroborated.

The second week of the Bush-Cheney administration also brought the top-secret formation of the National Energy Policy Development Group(NEPDG),later known simply as the Energy Task Force, chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney. Dozens of task force meetings were held with outside groups, energy and environmental organizations, private companies and individuals; meetings so deeply shrouded that it took six full years for even partial knowledge of their inner workings and meeting attendees to be revealed: the Washington Post broke the story in July 2007.

To this day, we still do not have the full picture of what happened behind the closed-door meetings of the Energy Task Force, despite multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and several lawsuits, though a fairly good timeline has been constructed. On May 16, 2001, the NEPDG released its final report which was taken to be the new “national energy policy” to serve as a template for altering the regulatory landscape.

Testifying at a Senate hearing, from left, Lee R. Raymond of Exxon Mobil, David J. O’Reilly of Chevron, James J. Mulva of ConocoPhillips, Ross Pillari of BP America and John Hofmeister of Shell Oil. (By Chip Somodevilla — Getty Images)

While it is beyond the scope of this series to provide detail, suffice it to say the oil and gas industry was treated well during the George W. Bush presidency. Moreover, while we now have evidence to the contrary, ExxonMobil vice president James J. Rouse and CEO Lee Raymond attended task force meetings, provided substantive input to the White House regarding energy policy, and vehemently denied doing so when questioned directly by the late Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), as witnesses testified in a 2005 Congressional hearing (see, for example, coverage by CBS News). While they could not be accused of perjury as they were not officially under oath, their outright dishonesty was exposed as such in a scathing headline in the November 16, 2005 Washington Postwhich broke the story: Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force. The accompanying photograph — the picture that says a thousand words — shows ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond at the far left, joining in one of the oil industry’s most famous group lies.

Mainstream press coverage was abundant; this November 17, 2005 CBS News report is a good example of what the public was finally able to learn after years of speculation and suspected secrecy.

2001 was a year chock-full of bad news for those hoping for a positive public policy response to the looming climate change threat. The U.S. Senate with a narrow Republican majority did not have the votes needed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and, 15 years ago, on March 28, 2001, Christine Todd Whitman, Bush’s choice to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced that the United States had “no interest” in implementing the painstakingly crafted terms of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Bush kills global warming treaty, proclaimed The Guardian on March 29. Kyoto was officially dead, it seemed. (Ultimately, the treaty entered into force in 2005 when the requisite 55 nations ratified its terms; the U.S. never became a signatory.)

A few weeks later, The Guardianpublished an article blasting ExxonMobil for its role in stymieing progress on slowing global warming. How the high priests of capitalism run roughshod over fears for planet quotes Kenneth P. Cohen, the company’s head of government relations and public affairs (i.e., the new Randy Randol):

“We know we have a giant target painted on our chests.”

The target, one could argue, was painted on Planet Earth and the weapon pointed at it was in the hands of ExxonMobil and the rest of Big Oil. Greenpeace International successfully launched a harsh negative ad campaign targeting ExxonMobil (known as Esso in Europe). Meanwhile, Charles Keeling’s Mauna Loa carbon dioxide curve (see Part One for more detail) continued to climb, and the spirits of many intent on some sort of rational response to the climate problem continued to take a nosedive.

On September 11, 2001, two large passenger airliners crashed directly into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; a third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth was downed before it could reach Washington, D.C. “9-11” changed everything, it seemed. Domestic policymaking necessarily took a back seat to the nation’s need to recover from shock, bury its dead, and seek to understand what had happened and who was behind the attack. Within short order, plans were in the works to invade Iraq. Climate change dropped way down on the list of public policy priorities.

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its Third Assessment Report (TAR); five years had passed since the Second Assessment Report (SAR) had been released in 1996, and climate science had significantly evolved. Each of three working groups issued its own voluminous report: I) The Scientific Basis, II) Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, and III) Mitigation (active measures to bring down atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases). The three working group reports were then condensed into a Synthesis Report. In the TAR, newer and stronger evidence emerged that the bulk of Earth’s warming that occurred over the previous 50 years was attributable to human activities (primarily the combustion of oil, gas, and coal), and the level of scientific certainty attached to each major conclusion regarding global average temperature increases and associated impacts rose to levels on which any major decision could arguably be based.

By the close of 2001, one wonders if ExxonMobil executives hadbothered to familiarize themselves with the conclusions drawn from the IPCC Third Assessment Report. Was anyone at corporate headquarters concerned with how the multinational corporation would deal with and respond to mounting challenges in a climate-disrupted world? And, if not, why not? What CEO of a major corporation chooses to remain in the dark regarding a serious threat to its own business interests?

It’s a serious question.

2002: By the time the 2002 10-K report was submitted to the SEC, in late March 2003, CEO Lee Raymond had turned 64 years of age and was closing in on forced retirement, which occurs at 65. Senior Vice President Rex Tillerson, then 51, was being groomed for the position and was reportedly already actively involved with Raymond in top-level decision-making. Tillerson’s attitudes toward climate change, we soon learn, are all but indistinguishable from those of his predecessor.

The new language ExxonMobil had introduced in its 2001 10-K filing was carried through to its Form 10-K for 2002; the report again includes under Risks: Industry and Economic Factors: “weather, including seasonal patterns that affect energy demand and severe weather events that can disrupt operations” among other factors (such as “supply disruptions”). In this, the tenth 10-K report CSPW reviewed, we continued to find radio silence on likely and potential risks to its global operations associated with climate disruption.It’s a silence that speaks volumes given all else the corporation was doing and saying that year.

Take, for example, the 10-page letter ExxonMobil staff scientist Brian Flannery wrote to presidential science advisor John Marburger in March 2002. Noting ExxonMobil’s 20-plus year involvement in climate science research and the many scientific papers it had produced and submitted to the IPCC, Flannery urged Marburger to pressure the USGCRP to set its focus on reducing scientific uncertainties; the clear, implicit message was to stay away from talking about climate change impacts. Even though the USGCRP had a clear mandate from Congress to study and report on climate change impacts and to draw connections between mounting carbon emissions and heat waves, sea level rise, extreme weather, more intense flooding, prolonged droughts, and so on, ExxonMobil had a vested interest in those connections not being drawn.

Or, did it? In a provocative paper published in 2002, “Risking Shareholder Value? ExxonMobil and Climate Change—An Investigation of Unnecessary Risks and Missed Opportunities,” author Mark Mansley warns:

“For investors…the key point is that ExxonMobil’s current strategy on global warming endangers (emphasis added) shareholder value.” The notion that crude oil will eventually become a “stranded asset” for corporations such as ExxonMobil, and thus could jeopardize its stock value, is a growing concern.

At the 2002 annual shareholders meeting on May 29, a remarkable thing happened. A repeat shareholder resolution asking the company to adopt a policy to promote renewable energy as part of its energy portfolio (as BP and Royal Dutch Shell had recently done) was submitted, approved by the SEC over ExxonMobil’s objections), and put to a vote. The proposal amassed an unprecedented 20.3 percent of the shareholder vote, representing about $60 billion in shares — a level of support four or five times higher than for most other “dissident” resolutions (see archived ENS News report). The same resolution received 9 percent of the vote in 2001. In his book Boiling Point,Ross Gelbspan notes that the unusually high approval rate “sent shock waves” through corporate headquarters and caused the company to change its tune, “soften its stance” toward global warming, and tone down the rhetoric in its frequent advertisements in The New York Times.

While the Bush-Cheney White House was still holding top-secret Energy Task Force meetings with a variety of corporate energy interests, what must have been an awkward moment for President George W. Bush occurred. On June 13, in a rose garden ceremony, Bush presented fifteen scientists, including Mauna Loa’s Dr. Charles Keeling of tropospheric carbon dioxide measurement fame, with the National Medal of Science: the highest U.S. award for scientific research lifetime achievement.

In late September 2002, ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, and each member of ExxonMobil’s board of directors, received a lengthy, personal letter from Dr. Michael MacCracken, who was soon to leave his post as director of the USGCRP. Acknowledging attempts by ExxonMobil to have him ousted, MacCracken took the oil company to task for egregiously misleading messages in a whole series of paid advertisements in The New York Times,defending his positions using scientific citations. Rick Piltz posted the full letter on the Climate Science Watch website in 2006; it is well worth the read. Below are some excerpts, containing messages ExxonMobil leadership still needs to hear.

“While my departure may be satisfying to ExxonMobil, I can assure you that this will not make the scientific challenge of climate change and its impacts go away. That 150 countries unanimously agree about the science of this issue is not because of some “green” conspiracy, but because of the solid scientific underpinning for this issue. Certainly, there are uncertainties, but decisions are made under uncertainty all the time—that is what executives are well paid to do.

…

I offer this advice to you in remembrance of my great grandfather, Samuel Calvin Tate Dodd, who a century ago was legal counsel to John D. Rockefeller (notably, he took no stock to ensure his opinions would not be tainted by the economic implications of his advice). What I rather imagine he would say is that you are on the wrong side of history, and you need to find a way to change your position…”

Some of ExxonMobil’s public rhetoric did soften in the latter part of 2002, but it was evidently just talk. ExxonMobil took zero action to address the looming climate threat.

The US Congress was not sitting idly by while the George W. Bush administration turned its back on the climate change issue. To the contrary, by the time the 107^th Congress adjourned in late 2002, more than 80 proposals (bills, resolutions, and amendments) had been put forth, and about half of them had been acted upon in some way; for example, through committee hearings and markups. (C2ES provides a good summary.) A good example is the comprehensive bill introduced by Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vermont) titledThe Clean Power Act, which required reductions in carbon dioxide (and other pollutant) emissions from electric power plants. Considered and passed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, then chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), the bill was not acted upon by the House or Senate. No bill regulating the fossil fuel industry’s emissions would survive a certain veto by President Bush. Other similar bills were introduced and considered, but failed to make it through the many gauntlets required to pass into law. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon levels continued to climb.

In late 2002, the eighth Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or simply COP 8, took place in New Delhi. The Kyoto Protocol still lacked the requisite number of ratifications it needed to enter into force. Leaders of less developed nations rightfully complained that they were being hardest hit by climate change impacts, yet bore little of the responsibility for the emissions causing global warming. “Technology transfer” was the buzz phrase used to describe the obligation of the wealthier nations out of basic fairness to supply advanced technologies for economic growth, as well as funding.

In advance of the climate negotiations in New Delhi, Greenpeace International issued Exxon’s Weapons of Mass Deception, a report that included a forward by Bianca Jagger, wife of Rolling Stone rock star Mick Jagger. “As citizens of this planet,” she wrote, “we are each reliant on our governments’ representatives at the climate talks. But in amongst these delegates are powerful agents with vested interests who continue to wage a cynical, self-interested war to derail this vital process. The worst of these are the men from ExxonMobil.”

This type of high-profile negative publicity had to be ruffling feathers inside ExxonMobil’s headquarters, and had to sting a little bit; especially after the beating the corporation took at its annual shareholders meeting when one-fifth of the shareholders told the company it was heading the wrong way by failing to embrace cleaner, safer, energy sources. Given all that had taken place in 2001 and 2002, the failure to mention climate change as a potential risk to its bottom line in the 10-K report for fiscal year 2002 is a glaring — and highly questionable — omission.

2003: More new language appears in ExxonMobil’s Form 10-K for FY 2003 that appears to have been drafted by corporate attorneys interested in creative hedging. Two entirely new sentences appear under the same heading we’ve been discussing, category: Risks, subcategory: Industry and Economic Factors:

Throughout ExxonMobil’s businesses, new and ongoing measures are taken to prevent and minimize the impact of our operations on the air, water and ground. This includes a significant investment in refining technology to manufacture low-sulfur motor fuels and projects to reduce nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide emissions.

The first sentence is too vague and all-encompassing to mean anything at all. The second sentence is a bit of a mystery; it is not clear what is behind the mention of two specific pollutants, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, but not others typical of ExxonMobil’s oil extraction and refining operations. The reference to “severe weather events” introduced in 2001, carried over in the 2002 10-K report, appears again, verbatim,in the 2003 filing: “weather, including seasonal patterns that affect energy demand and severe weather events that can disrupt operations.”

What else was happening at ExxonMobil and in the world in 2003?

Arthur G. Randol, III, whom everyone knew as Randy Randol, retired and left his post as Senior Environmental Advisor, a position he held since the 1980s.

On the climate change question, ExxonMobil was now isolated and alone among the four “super-major” oil companies at the time; the other three — Shell, BP, and ChevronTexaco — were taking positive steps to face this difficult challenge. According to a study (full report, pdf) conducted by London-based Claros Consulting, strategies being explored by ExxonMobil’s three largest competitors included “incorporating ‘carbon pricing’ into future planning scenarios and decisions, setting emissions reductions targets, developing emissions trading experience, and investing in renewable energy.” Ceres, a coalition of investor and public interest groups working with major companies to increase corporate environmental responsibility worldwide, issued a May 2003 Press Release applauding the Claros report, issued shortly before the May 2003 annual shareholders meeting.

Claros was recommending shareholder support for several proxy resolutions seeking greater disclosure of ExxonMobil strategies to address the climate risk and respond to shareholder pressures to embrace renewable energy. The report’s author and head of Claros Consulting, Mark Mansley, observed ExxonMobil’s growing isolation, noting how much it was “out of step” in continuing to deny the climate change threat. The company was “relying on a ‘hope for the best’ strategy,” he said, that would be logical only if one expected the climate threat to suddenly “evaporate.” Ceres Executive Director Mindy Lubber said it best: “It doesn’t matter if you ‘believe in climate change’ if policies are emerging around the world that affect your industry. ExxonMobil’s continued denial of this reality demonstrates an impressive lack of sophistication in basic risk management.” Impressive, indeed.

January 2003 saw the opening of the 108^th Congress. The U.S. Senate maintained a narrow Republican majority, and the November elections of 2002 had widened the Republican majority in the House. While tax credits were extended for a variety of alternative energy sources, no major climate legislation was adopted in the first session.

Meanwhile, scientists continued to churn out peer-reviewed publications in academic journals and to contribute to the scientific knowledge base on which we depend to gauge the threat. For example, well-known climate scientist Michael Mann continued the important work of studying and reporting global surface temperature trends. And, by 2003, more academics were interested in analyzing the negative influence of politics on our collective ability to adopt sensible public policy commensurate with what the science was telling us.

2004: Two new sentences appearing in ExxonMobil’s 2003 10-K filing, one which mentions measures it was taking to “minimize the impact” of its operations “on the air, water and ground” and the second which reports efforts to reduce emissions of oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, were carried forward to its Form 10-K for FY 2004. And, for the fourth time in a row, the risk factor mentioning “severe weather events” is included.

2004 was a presidential election year, and naturally, the Bush-Cheney team was determined to stay in office. Shortly before Election Day, in mid-October 2004, former Vice President Al Gore delivered a speech (full text) at Georgetown University castigating the Bush administration for epic failures on global warming. He attacked the administration for its duplicitousness regarding the alleged role national greed for Middle East oil played in our decision to invade Iraq in early 2003. Gore noted that among “documents obtained in discovery proceedings against the Cheney [Energy] Task Force by the odd combination of Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club” was found “a detailed map of Iraq showing…in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country.”

However, not everyone at the Pentagon was on board with Dick Cheney’s fixation on oil fields in the Middle East region. In early 2004, the Defense Department secretly commissioned a report assessing the climate risk from a national security standpoint. Authored by CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Peter Schwartz, the report warned that, in a matter of two decades, climate change could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters, as reported by The Guardian. Concluding that the climate threat to global stability vastly eclipsed that of global terrorism, and that climate change should move beyond scientific debate to a national security concern, the report became a potential embarrassment for President Bush, who was still publicly denying the mere existence of climate change. Robert (Bob) Watson, who had moved on to become chief scientist for the World Bank after being pushed out of the IPCC, asked the key question: “Can Bush ignore the Pentagon?” Noting how difficult it would be for Bush and Cheney to dismiss the Pentagon’s findings, Watson continued: “After all, Bush’s single highest priority is national defense…If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act.”

“There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,” Watson noted. So, was the Bush administration listening more closely to the oil lobby, or the Pentagon?

The other big climate-related news for 2004 was the May release of the 20th Century Fox film, The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. Ridiculed for its apocalyptic message and ridiculous notion that the Earth could suddenly careen into a full-blown ice age in a matter of a few weeks, the film did have the benefit of raising public awareness of potentially abrupt changes in our climate system.

There were some notable climate-related publications in 2004:

Jared Diamond published his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Ross Gelbspan authored Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis — and What You Can Do to Avert Disaster

In April 2004 James Gustave Speth released his book Red Sky at Morning. America and the Crisis of the Global Environment

In October 2004 Stanford-based climate scientist Steve Schneider published a scientific paper with the alarming title, “Abrupt Non-Linear Climate Change, Irreversibility and Surprise(abstract)

In November 2004 the Pew Center on Global Climate Change (now the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions) released a report, Observed Impacts of Global Climate Change in the U.S.,the twelfth in a series.

A December issue of Science magazine included an article by Naomi Oreskes, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”Oreskes had conducted a thorough literature review of the science, concluding: “a robust consensus that anthropogenic global climate change is occurring…despite claims sometimes made by some groups that there is not good evidence that Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities.”

The climate change threat was now being widely covered, and one would have had to work really hard to remain ignorant of the looming prospect of a world significantly disrupted by human-caused alterations in Earth’s climate system.

2005: Given the rich variety of attention paid to climate change over the previous decade, and positive actions to deal with climate change by other companies in the oil and gas industry, it is almost shocking to see that ExxonMobil’s official report to shareholders in its Form 10-K for FY 2005 continues to make no mention of climate change, global warming, or carbon dioxide emissions. As was seemingly the general rule, language from the previous year’s report was carried forward, so, under Risks: Industry and Economic Factors,we see the same two sentences: “Throughout ExxonMobil’s businesses, new and ongoing measures are taken to prevent and minimize the impact of our operations on the air, water and ground. This includes a significant investment in refining technology to manufacture low-sulfur motor fuels and projects to reduce nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide emissions.” And, for now the fifth year in a row, we see the same risk factor about the weather: “weather, including seasonal patterns that affect energy demand and severe weather events that can disrupt operations.”

:{:{The Beginnings of Climate Science Watch}:

In June 2005, Climate Science Watch was founded as a program of the Government Accountability Project,by federal climate science whistleblower and former GAP client Rick Piltz.}:

Piltz had abruptly left his 10-year stint at the USGCRP Coordinating Office in March, resigning his post after witnessing multiple instances of politically-motivated tampering of official White House documents addressing the current state of our scientific understanding of global climate change and potential impacts.

“I believe the overarching problem is that the [George W. Bush] Administration…does not want and has acted to impede forthright communication of the state of climate science and its implication for society,” he wrote in his formal letter of resignation.

Piltz also penned a lengthy critique for the interagency leadership of the nation’s climate research programs codified by the Global Change Research Act of 1990, the US Global Change Research Program, which had been renamed the Climate Change Science Program under Bush.

Piltz took issue with multiple, blatant attempts by Phil Cooney, who had been recruited to the White House Council on Environmental Quality from his post as a corporate attorney and chief lobbyist (not a scientist) at the American Petroleum Institute, to water down scientific conclusions in official government reports. With strategic and tactical foresight, Piltz had collected a significant body of hard evidence in the way of a paper trail demonstrating the White House’s not-so-hidden agenda to exaggerate the scientific uncertainty of climate change — the same disingenuous game ExxonMobil had been engaged in for the previous two decades. Piltz submitted copies of documents clearly showing Cooney’s hand-scribbled edits to reporter Andrew Revkin, then at The New York Times. The June 8 news story made page one (archived here), and was chronicled in one of Piltz’s first few posts on the new Climate Science Watch website. Two or three days later, we learned that Cooney had jumped ship as CEQ’s chief of staff and took a plush position at Exxon Mobil Corp. Was this jump evidence of a pre-arranged safety net the oil company had put in place for Cooney? It sure did have that appearance.

Piltz used his new platform at Climate Science Watch to offer a detailed explanation of the factors leading to his decision to leave the comfort and security of a federal government job in order to blow the whistle; he had decided to formally identify as a whistleblower and thus be afforded specific protections under whistleblower laws on the books at the time.

In Censorship and Secrecy: Politicizing the Climate Change Science Program, Piltz blasted the Bush-Cheney White House, and posted it on the same day The New York Times story was published:

“This administration has acted to impede honest communication of the state of climate science and the implications for society of global climate change. Politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the program in its relationship to the research community, to program managers, to policymakers, and to the public interest.”

June 8, 2005 was a productive day for Piltz: he also chronicled the immediate White House response and various media reports (Piltz went on to direct Climate Science Watch for nearly ten years and to serve as an effective watchdog over the scientific integrity of climate science and policy before sadly passing away on October 18, 2014).

The 109^th Congress was sworn in during January 2005. The Republican majority in both the House and Senate was strengthened following the election. Legislative proposals addressing various aspects of climate change were still being developed and introduced by a number of Members of Congress, but nothing passed into law. Notably, the Energy Policy Act was significantly amended in 2005 but did not contain any provisions relating to climate.

It was November 2005 when five oil executives, including outgoing ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, lied to a Congressional committee about their participation in the super-secret Energy Task Force chaired by VP Dick Cheney (see discussion above under section for 2001 and accompanying photograph). Sen. Frank Lautenberg had asked each witness the same question: “Did your company or any representatives in your companies participate in Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001?”One by one, each responded in the negative. Eight U.S. Senators later submitted a formal request (as reported by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)) to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for a Justice Department investigation.

The letter noted the public disclosure by The Washington Postof a leaked Secret Service document raising questions about the veracity of their claims and subsequent statements and letters issued by the CEOs attempting to “clarify” their answers, with some admitting participation after all. The Senators wanted to know if testimony provided at the November 9 hearing had violated the Federal “False Statements” statute, or any other applicable statutes. “If witnesses believe that the laws requiring truthful testimony before our committees will not be enforced, our hearings will lose their usefulness and the Senate’s ability to effectively legislate will be hampered,” the letter continued, concluding with: “You and your Department have a unique Constitutional duty to enforce laws that help protect the integrity of proceedings before the United States Senate. We strongly urge you to exercise this critical duty.” The five oil company executives never had to face legal consequences for what would have been outright perjury in a court of law. Now, most Congressional hearings require witnesses to “take the oath” to tell the truth, and nothing but, with more serious consequences for lying than existed back in 2005.

The other big climate and weather-related development of 2005, of course, was the landfall of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, slamming the Gulf Coast region with devastating force, taking lives and property, leaving a trail of death and destruction from which the region has still not completely recovered from. Were these powerful hurricanes, as the late Steve Schneider would put it, souped-up on “climate change steroids?” It is generally accepted now that warmer average global temperatures often cause hurricanes to pack a bigger punch.

Also of note, on June 20, 2005, Charles David Keeling passed away; his son, Ralph Keeling, had picked up the torch at Mauna Loa and has continued gathering measurements of tropospheric carbon dioxide concentrations ever since. Remarkably, this essential data record is continuous from 1958 to the present.

On the publications front, Rick Piltz had an article published in the academic journal Eos: “Toward a Second U.S. Climate Change Assessment.”(Over the years, Climate Science Watch has paid quite a bit of attention to the requirement for these periodic assessments of climate change impacts, and how well or how poorly this requirement has been satisfied). Known climate-deniers John Christy and Roy Spencer published a paper in Sciencetitled: “Correcting Temperature Data Sets” (a likely attempt to dispute or discredit an upwards warming trend); meanwhile, former GAP client and renowned climate scientist Dr. James Hansen published an editorial in the academic journal Climatic Change with the provocative title, “A Slippery Slope: How Much Global Warming Constitutes ‘Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference’?”Chris Mooney (now a journalist with The Washington Post) published a book, The Republican War on Science.

2006: On January 1, 2006, Rex Tillerson took the reins of the Exxon Mobil Corporation, as CEO and Chairman of its Board of Directors; Lee Raymond had been forced to retire when he reached age 65.

Along with the change in leadership came many new changes in the 10-K filed for 2006. For the very first time since 1993, the year our review began, the words “risks of global climate change” appear. However, rather than admitting climate change and associated impacts could pose a risk to ExxonMobil’s operations, the matter is turned on its head. A brand new risk factor is added in a section titled “Political and Legal Factors” under “Risks” in the Form 10-K for FY 2006, and reads as follows: “laws and regulations related to environmental or energy security matters, including those addressing alternative energy sources and the risks of global climate change.” Notably, this “risk factor” appears among a half dozen other risk factors including “war or other international conflicts” and “civil unrest.”

In other words, it is not the array of impacts associated with climate change that ExxonMobil sees as a problem; rather, it is the threat of potential “laws and regulations” addressing climate and alternative (renewable) energy sources that ExxonMobil feels a fiduciary responsibility to warn its shareholders about. So, after being called out for being “out of step” with the rest of the industry, for being alone and isolated in its recalcitrance regarding the climate change issue, ExxonMobil decides to dig in even further.

The company also made some editorial changes to the risk factor regarding weather patterns; the new phrase now reads (additions in bold): “weather, including seasonal patterns that affect regional energy demand (such as the demand for heating oil or gas in winter) as well as severe weather events (such as hurricanes) that can disrupt supplies or interrupt the operation of ExxonMobil facilities.” It makes sense that ExxonMobil would specifically mention the winter months (and not the summer months) in discussing energy demand, as most air conditioners draw electrical power generated by coal, not oil or gas. It also makes sense that ExxonMobil would mention hurricanes, after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, which disrupted energy supplies including those provided by ExxonMobil. However, the likely climate change component to the vast devastation wasn’t acknowledged in the slightest.

In 2006, Al Gore’s famous book, An Inconvenient Truth, was made into a movie of the same name. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, the film was intended to alert average citizens of the “planetary emergency” of global warming, “before it’s too late.”

Dr. James Hansen, from his post at NASA, was still cranking out research papers. In 2006, he published “Dangerous Human-Made Interference with Climate: A GISS Model Study.”It was about at this time that Hansen began to use the word “dangerous” to describe human-caused perturbation of Earth’s climate system.

Another trend that began taking a stronger hold was the growing alliance between the “faith” community and the climate science and policy communities. Journalist Eli Kintisch wrote about this in“Evangelicals, Scientists Reach Common Ground on Climate Change”published in Science magazine.

And, academics were beginning to take a good, hard look at the troubled legacy of the George W. Bush Administration pertaining to the climate threat. For example, Seth Shulman published a 2006 book, Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration.

2007: The company’s Form 10-K for FY 2007 carries forward the brand new language introduced in 2006 under “Political and Legal Factors” in disclosing risk factors to its investors: “laws and regulations related to environmental or energy security matters, including those addressing alternative energy sources and the risks of global climate change.” Nowhere in the report is it acknowledged that the company’s operations could be adversely affected by climate change impacts. The slightly amended risk factor addressing “severe weather events” is repeated verbatim from the 2006 report: “weather, including seasonal patterns that affect regional energy demand (such as the demand for heating oil or gas in winter) as well as severe weather events (such as hurricanes) that can disrupt supplies or interrupt the operation of ExxonMobil facilities.” More frequent and intense hurricanes as the result of rising global surface temperatures and warmer oceans were some of the more frequently discussed climate change impacts in the media. One might argue that ExxonMobil’s specific mention of hurricanes as a risk factor could be interpreted as its own inadvertent admission that it was just as vulnerable to climate change impacts as the rest of us. But, that argument is a stretch, and ExxonMobil was still actively in the deny-delay-delude business.

Early 2007 saw the release of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), summarizing our current scientific understanding of changes already taking place in our climate system as a result of rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The three working groups issued their voluminous reports: I) The Physical Science Basis, II) Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, and III) Mitigation of Climate Change — as well as the AR4 Synthesis Report.

The new IPCC findings were heavily covered by the worldwide media with predictions for global temperature increases, sea level rise, prolonged droughts, increased flooding, melting glaciers, and so on. The most important, newsworthy finding in the AR4 was that the panel had now concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases, rather than natural variations, were warming the planet’s surface. The BBC and others quoted co-lead author Dr Susan Soloman: “We can be very confident that the net effect of human activity since 1750 has been one of warming,” addressing the delegates in Paris. The unequivocal nature of this conclusion made waves everywhere.

IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri, brought in to replace Robert Watson, expressed satisfaction with the results: “It is extremely encouraging in that the science has moved on from what was possible in the Third Assessment Report.” Pachauri also had a warning for the world: “If you see the extent to which human activities are influencing the climate system, the options for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions appear in a different light, because you can see what the costs of inaction are.” The New York Times characterized the new climate assessment report as “bleak and powerful.” John Holdren, later to become the White House science advisor for President Barack Obama, noted that the report “powerfully underscores the need for a massive effort to slow the pace of global climatic disruptions before intolerable consequences become inevitable.” Intolerable. Holdren is well known for quipping that there are only three solutions to climate change: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. In recent years, we certainly have observed “suffering” with myriad record floods in the Southeast and elsewhere, record droughts and wildfires in the West, severe snow storms, and other impacts long-predicted by the scientific community.

2008: It is evident from the 2008 10-K report submitted by ExxonMobil to the SEC that upper management had not read the IPCC AR4 reports or the vast amount of news coverage the new IPCC findings generated. The Form 10-K for FY 2008 simply repeats the language from 2007, including the two sentences about minimizing impacts on air, water, and the ground, and reducing emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides. The “severe weather” risk factor is also repeated, as is the backward-thinking inclusion of potential regulations intended to avert catastrophic, “intolerable” climate impacts as a risk to its operations, not the dangerous impacts themselves.

Meanwhile, academic papers addressing the very real nature of the climate change threat continued to flourish, Charles Keeling’s son Ralph published a paper in Science titled “Recording Earth’s Vital Signs,” and the media, for the most part, continued to cover climate change, with varying levels of competence and neutrality. Yet, the executives at ExxonMobil, the second largest corporation in the world at the time, holding the number two spot on the Fortune 500, with $460 trillion in revenue for 2008 and $45 trillion in profit, continued to bury their heads in the (increasingly hot) sand.

Part Three of our series will cover the years 2009 through 2015, and an assessment of tomorrow’s annual shareholders meeting.

CSPW Senior Climate Policy Analyst Anne Polansky has 30 years of experience in public policies relating to energy and the environment, with a strong focus on climate change and renewable energy.

May 25th, 2016|Activism, Assessments of Climate Impacts and Adaptation, Attacks on Climate Science and Scientists, Climate Change Education and Communication, Climate Change Mitigation, Climate Change Preparedness, Climate Litigation, Climate Science & Policy Watch, Climate Science Censorship, Climate Science Watch Update, Congress: Legislation and Oversight, Energy, General, Global Climate Disruption and Impacts, Global Warming Denial Machine, International Climate Policy, National Security, Obama Administration, Obama Climate Plan, Science Communication, Science-Policy Interaction, Scientific Integrity, U.S. Global Change Research Program, Whistleblowers

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randy randol Archives - Climate Files

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This document is a fax, dated March 22, 2002 from ExxonMobil's Randy Randol to Phillip Cooney of the Bush Council on Environmental Quality.

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2002 Exxon Randy Randol to Phil Cooney White House CEQ ...

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This document is a fax, dated March 22, 2002 from ExxonMobil's Randy Randol to Phil Cooney of the Bush Council on Environmental Quality.

### 2001 Exxon Randy Randol fax to John Howard White House ...

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2001 Exxon Randy Randol fax to John Howard White House CEQ re IPCC. This memo from ExxonMobil to the young Bush Administration gave instructions and ...

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