Elliott Negin - ExxonMobil Is Still Spending Millions of Dollars on Climate Science Deniers
NB: those intellectuals who have made capitalism into a religion may kindly consider why a big energy corporate is investing money to cover up the scientific truth about the links between fossil fuel and climate change - DS
ExxonMobil spokesman Richard Keil told a carefully worded
whopper last week. After the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) revealed that Exxon was aware of the threat posed by
climate change as early as 1981 and has intentionally been deceiving the public
for decades, reporters contacted Keil for comment. One reporter asked him about
ExxonMobil's long history of funding climate change denier groups. "I'm here to talk to you about the present," Keil said. "We have been factoring the likelihood of some
kind of carbon tax into our business planning since 2007. We do not fund or
support those who deny the reality of climate change."
ExxonMobil no longer funds climate change deniers?! Is that
right?
Technically, perhaps, because practically no one can say
with a straight face that global warming isn't happening anymore. Most, if not
all, of the people who used to deny the reality of climate change have morphed
into climate science deniers. They now concede that climate
change is real, but reject the scientific consensus that human activity --
mainly burning fossil fuels -- is driving it. Likewise, they understate the
potential consequences, contend that we can easily adapt to them, and fight
government efforts to curb carbon emissions and promote renewable energy.
ExxonMobil is still funding those folks, big time.
Keil said he wanted to talk about the present, so why don't
we? According to the most recent publicly available data, last year ExxonMobil spent $659,000 on congressional
climate-science-denier political campaigns and $1.9 million on 15 denier think
tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations for a total of $2.56 million.
Meanwhile, between 2007 -- when Keil said ExxonMobil began to factor in the
ramifications of a carbon tax -- and 2014, the company spent at least $10
million on climate science denier organizations to spread disinformation and
undermine efforts to address climate change.
ExxonMobil Claimed it Stopped Funding Deniers Eight Years
Ago
This isn't the first time ExxonMobil has denied it was
sponsoring a climate disinformation campaign.
Back in 2007, a UCS report revealed that the oil giant had shelled out at
least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of more than 40 climate
denier think tanks and advocacy groups to advance its agenda. Widely covered by
the news media, the report prompted ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to acknowledge
that his company had a PR problem. "We recognize that we need to soften
our public image," he said, according to a January 10 story in Greenwire,
a trade publication. "It is something we are working on."
A month later, just after the release of the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report, an
ExxonMobil official followed through on Tillerson's promise to temper the
company's position. "There is no question that human activity is the source of carbon dioxide
emissions," Kenneth Cohen, vice president of public affairs, told Greenwire on
February 9. "The appropriate debate isn't on whether climate is changing,
but rather should be on what we should be doing about it." But what about
the 40-plus ExxonMobil grantees UCS identified in its report? Cohen told Greenwire that
the company had stopped funding them.
In fact, the company did not stop funding them. ExxonMobil's
documented support for denier groups did peak at $3.48 million in 2005, when
the company began to cut off grantees. That year, it severed ties with the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, and over the next two years, it dropped a
number of others, including the Cato Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, George C.
Marshall Institute, Heartland Institute and Institute for Energy Research.
The company's funding to denier groups, however, remained
substantial, second only to the Koch brothers' war chest. The company spent
nearly $21 million from 1998 through 2006 and some $10 million from 2007
through 2014. Last year, the company paid out $1.9 million to 15 denier groups,
including 10 cited in the 2007 UCS report.
The Disinformation Campaign Continues
ExxonMobil's climate science denier network may have shrunk
since 2007, but the 15 groups currently in the company's stable, including the
American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan
Institute and National Black Chamber of Commerce, are still doing their best to
sow doubt about climate science and denigrate renewable energy.
Let's take a quick look at what these four emblematic groups
are doing.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received
$1.9 million from ExxonMobil since 2007, has played a relatively bit part in
the climate and energy debate and, to its credit, has hosted some
well-publicized forums on the pros and cons of a carbon tax. Even so, some of
its prominent scholars are still pumping out disinformation. Two of the
organization's primary talking heads on climate and energy these days are
institute fellow Jonah Goldberg and resident scholar Benjamin Zycher, who is
also a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, another ExxonMobil
grantee.
During an appearance on Fox News Channel's Your
World with Neil Cavuto show last November, Goldberg denounced climate scientists as profiteers who are
"financially incentivized" to advocate for government action on
climate change. Cavuto did mention that Goldberg works at AEI, but left out the
fact that the organization has been generously funded not only by ExxonMobil,
but also by the American Petroleum Institute and Charles G. Koch Charitable
Foundation. Zycher, meanwhile, has been caught playing fast and loose with the
facts. For example, in late 2011, AEI published a book on renewable energy by
Zycher that claimed the cost of solar power had jumped 63 percent
since 2001. In fact, it had plummeted nearly 40 percent over that time.
Since 2007, ExxonMobil has donated $454,500 to the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive lobby group that drafts
sample corporate-friendly legislation for state lawmakers. The company has also
given campaign contributions to seven of ALEC's 21 board of directors. What
does a company like ExxonMobil get for that money? At a three-day conference
held in Washington, D.C., last December, ALEC's corporate and legislator
members collaborated on sample bills and resolutionsthat would, among other things,
thwart implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed
standard for existing power plant carbon emissions and block the EPA's new
proposed standard for ground-level ozone.
For ALEC, the role human activity plays in global warming is
still up in the air. "Climate change is a historical phenomenon," its
website states, "and the debate will continue on the
significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions." That tortured
position gives the organization the opening to invite such notorious climate
science denier groups as the Heartland Institute and the Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow to run workshops at its conferences. Both organizations
are former ExxonMobil grantees.
The Manhattan Institute received $475,000 from ExxonMobil
between 2007 and 2014. Last year the company gave the institute $100,000 for
its energy policy center, the primary beneficiary being senior fellow Robert
Bryce, a former reporter who previously worked for the Institute for Energy
Research, another ExxonMobil grantee. Bryce has said he's "agnostic"
about climate change, and over the years he has written a stream of newspaper
columns that sing the praises of oil and coal and disparage the potential of
wind and other renewable energy technologies. For example, his May 4, 2012, Wall
Street Journal column, "Gouged by the Wind," claimed state
standards requiring utilities to ramp up their use of renewables would
significantly raise electricity rates, despite evidence to the contrary. His most recent column, "The Poor Need More Energy: What BP Knows and
Pope Francis Doesn't," which ran on June 22 in the National Review,
maintained that the best, low-cost energy source for developing countries is
coal.
Finally, from 2007 through last year, the National Black
Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), which boasts 151 chapters nationwide, received
$800,000 from ExxonMobil, and the organization's president, Harry C. Alford, is
unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. "Of course we do and
it is only natural," Alford states on the NBCC website. "The legacy of
Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil
fuel.... [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend."
In June, the NBCC placed a column by Alford in a number of newspapers charging
that the EPA's plan to curb carbon emissions from existing power plants would
impose "economic hardship" on blacks and Hispanics. In fact, unchecked climate change will likely hurt poor and
minority Americans most. How did Alford come up with his upside-down assessment? John
Rogers, a senior energy analyst at UCS, took a close look the NBCC-commissioned study that Alford
used as the core of his argument and found it was based on several flawed
fossil fuel industry-friendly studies. Two of the bogus studies were produced
by ExxonMobil grantees, demonstrating the reach of the company's disinformation
campaign. One was from the Heritage Foundation, which received $340,000 from
ExxonMobil between 2007 and 2013; another was from the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, which received $1 million from ExxonMobil last year.
ExxonMobil Curries Favor in Congress
Besides funding climate science denier groups, ExxonMobil
spends a considerable amount of money on federal election campaigns. In 2014,
for example, the company contributed $10,000 to reelect the most notorious
denier in Congress, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chairman of the
Environment and Public Works Committee, matching what it gave him in 2008. You
may remember that just last February, Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate
floor, ostensibly to prove that the cold spell gripping the Northeast somehow
proved that human activity is not causing climate change. "Climate has
always changed," Inhofe declared. "...No one would debate that it has always
happened. The debate is whether man is causing that to happen."
Inhofe, however, is just the tip of the proverbial melting
iceberg. More than 40 percent of the $1.6 million ExxonMobil spent
last year on 283 congressional races went to 102 documented climate science
deniers. It gave $544,000 to 89 deniers in the House, including Fred Upton
(R-Mich.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Lamar Smith
(R-Texas), chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee. Thirty-four
of the 54 members of the Energy and Commerce Committee got ExxonMobil money,
and half of those recipients are climate science deniers. Sixteen of the 39 members
of the Science Committee, meanwhile, got ExxonMobil funding, and four of the
recipients are deniers.
Upton, who had called for taking action on global warming before
landing the Energy and Commerce chairmanship in 2011, now maintains -- despite overwhelming scientific evidence
-- that climate change is "not manmade." In April, his committee
passed a bill sponsored by Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), another ExxonMobil-funded
denier, that would give states the choice to opt out of the EPA's new carbon
emission rules for existing power plants and postpone implementation until all
legal challenges are resolved. That likely would take years.
When it comes to climate science denial, Lamar Smith is
nearly on par with Inhofe. In April, he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal,
"The Climate Change Religion," which was riddled with false claims,
prompting a scathing critique by Factcheck.org. But Smith is doing a lot
more than repeating the fossil fuel industry's talking points in the pages of
the Wall Street Journal. Since January, his committee has passed ahandful of bills that, if enacted, would roll back
public health and environmental protections and obstruct the EPA and other
federal agencies from enacting science-based rules.
Then there's the Senate. The balance of ExxonMobil's support
for deniers -- $115,000 -- went to 13 senators, five of whom sit on the Energy
and Natural Resources Committee and four others on the Environment and Public
Works Committee, including Chairman Inhofe. Shelley Moore Caputo (R-W.Va.), who
received $10,000 from ExxonMobil last year and sits on both committees, has
introduced a version of Whitfield's opt-out bill in an Environment and Public
Works subcommittee.
ExxonMobil's 'Plan B' is Not a Viable Answer
In response to a reporter's question last week in the wake
of UCS's revelation, Exxon spokesman Richard Keil maintained that ExxonMobil today "believes the
risk of climate change is clear, and warrants action."
Really? A close reading of the transcript of the company's annual
shareholders meeting in May says otherwise. Over the last 25 years, ExxonMobil
has repeatedly fended offshareholder resolutions to address
climate change, and this year was no different. The message was loud and clear:
Stay the course. Technological ingenuity will enable us to cope with the
consequences.
One shareholder-sponsored resolution called on the company
to set goals for curbing carbon emissions. Another would have required the
company to appoint a climate change expert to its board. Still another
requested a report on the company's state and federal lobbying expenditures,
including lobbying through trade associations and other organizations, such as
ALEC. The answer was no, no and no. None of the climate-related resolutions passed.
In his opening statement at the meeting, CEO Rex Tillerson
predicted that oil and natural gas "will meet about 60 percent of global
energy in the year 2040." And when asked later why he uttered nary a word
about renewable energy in his remarks, Tillerson quipped, "We choose not
to lose money on purpose" to loud applause.
Tillerson, who has long maintained that climate models are
flawed, recommended a wait and see approach. "What if everything we do, it
turns out our models were really lousy ... and it turned out the planet behaved
differently because the models weren't good enough to predict?" he said.
"What's Plan B?" For Tillerson, Plan B is continuing to burn fossil fuels and
adapt to whatever happens, be it sea level rise or crop failures. "Mankind
has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity," he said, "and
those solutions will present themselves as the realities become clear."
In lieu of ExxonMobil's dangerous, do-nothing Plan B, there
are many things the company and other major carbon polluters can and must do to
protect the planet. Step one for ExxonMobil: Put an end to its climate
disinformation campaign. That means doing more than just talking about closing
it down. ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel companies must stop funding
proxy groups and politicians to sow doubt about climate science and oppose
proven ways to address the problem. After decades of deception, we need more
than just talking the talk.
