Exxon admits funding climate deniers

[Stephanie]

You love how this group called, echowatch :
whining about who is funding what and who. when you know they are being funded by every wacko radical environmentalist group in this country. so they have some nerve to say who can put funds where they want

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Exxon is paid subsidies? I love that silly claim.

What subsidies are they paid? You have any specifics?

Yeah, I do.

United States
Allocation of subsidies in the United States[edit]
On March 13, 2013, Terry M. Dinan, senior advisor at the Congressional Budget Office, testified before the Subcommittee on Energy of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the U.S. House of Representatives that federal energy tax subsidies would cost $16.4 billion that fiscal year, broken down as follows:

1. Renewable energy: $7.3 billion (45 percent)
2. Energy efficiency: $4.8 billion (29 percent)
3. Fossil fuels: $3.2 billion (20 percent)
4. Nuclear energy: $1.1 billion (7 percent)

In addition, Dinan testified that the U.S. Department of Energy would spend an additional $3.4 billion on financial Support for energy technologies and energy efficiency, broken down as follows:

1. Energy efficiency and renewable energy: $1.7 billion (51 percent)
2. Nuclear energy: $0.7 billion (22 percent)
3. Fossil energy research & development: $0.5 billion (15 percent)
4. Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy: $0.3 billion (8 percent)
5. Electricity delivery and energy reliability: $0.1 billion (4 percent)[25]

Energy subsidies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

25) Congressional Budget Office. Testimony Federal Financial Support for Fuels and Energy Technologies. Terry M. Dinan, Senior Advisor. Before the Subcommittee on Energy. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. U.S. House of Representatives. March 13, 2013. http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-12-EnergyTechnologies.pdf. Accessed 4 January 2015.

Fossil fuels: $3.2 billion (20 percent)

Any specifics?

 

[Stephanie]

just ran across. this is an eye opener. thank gawd the people aren't falling for this Climate change aka globull warming garbage

SNIP;
Al Gore, Maurice Strong
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story
By Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives March 25, 2009



FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

ALL of it here:
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story

 

[CrusaderFrank]

just ran across. this is an eye opener. thank gawd the people aren't falling for this Climate change aka globull warming garbage

SNIP;
Al Gore, Maurice Strong
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story
By Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives March 25, 2009



FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

ALL of it here:
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story

Obama lining his pocket with that Climate Change Kool Aid

 

[Stephanie]

just ran across. this is an eye opener. thank gawd the people aren't falling for this Climate change aka globull warming garbage

SNIP;
Al Gore, Maurice Strong
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story
By Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives March 25, 2009



FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

ALL of it here:
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story

Obama lining his pocket with that Climate Change Kool Aid

so is the Hillary, Bernie and every other crook in that Democrat party and some in the Republican party I'm sure. this Government has gotten completely out of control with corruption, but you can't that thought a lot of these citizens heads

 

[gipper]

just ran across. this is an eye opener. thank gawd the people aren't falling for this Climate change aka globull warming garbage

SNIP;
Al Gore, Maurice Strong
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story
By Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives March 25, 2009



FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

ALL of it here:
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story

One would think all this evidence of corruption would convince the warmer he/she has been duped.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

I'm using my Exxon Denier Funding to go to Bermuda in January. We should have a Meet Up there! The Exxon Funded Deniers Meet Up

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Exxon is paid subsidies? I love that silly claim.

What subsidies are they paid? You have any specifics?

Yeah, I do.

United States
Allocation of subsidies in the United States[edit]
On March 13, 2013, Terry M. Dinan, senior advisor at the Congressional Budget Office, testified before the Subcommittee on Energy of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the U.S. House of Representatives that federal energy tax subsidies would cost $16.4 billion that fiscal year, broken down as follows:

1. Renewable energy: $7.3 billion (45 percent)
2. Energy efficiency: $4.8 billion (29 percent)
3. Fossil fuels: $3.2 billion (20 percent)
4. Nuclear energy: $1.1 billion (7 percent)

In addition, Dinan testified that the U.S. Department of Energy would spend an additional $3.4 billion on financial Support for energy technologies and energy efficiency, broken down as follows:

1. Energy efficiency and renewable energy: $1.7 billion (51 percent)
2. Nuclear energy: $0.7 billion (22 percent)
3. Fossil energy research & development: $0.5 billion (15 percent)
4. Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy: $0.3 billion (8 percent)
5. Electricity delivery and energy reliability: $0.1 billion (4 percent)[25]

Energy subsidies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

25) Congressional Budget Office. Testimony Federal Financial Support for Fuels and Energy Technologies. Terry M. Dinan, Senior Advisor. Before the Subcommittee on Energy. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. U.S. House of Representatives. March 13, 2013. http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-12-EnergyTechnologies.pdf. Accessed 4 January 2015.

Fossil Fuels
Option to expense depletion costs on the basis of gross income rather than actual costs 1.1 billion

Expensing of exploration and development costs for oil and natural gas 0.9 billion

Amortization of air pollution control facilities 0.4 billion

Option to expense 50 percent of qualified property used to refine liquid fuels 0.4 billion

Credit for investment in clean-coal facilities 0.2 billion

Fifteen-year depreciation for natural gas pipelines 0.1 billion

Amortization of certain expenditures associated with oil and gas exploration 0.1 billion

Except for the "green" clean-coal money, these all look like typical business expense issues.
Not subsidies at all.

 

[Crick]

That doesn't explain why they're given to the oil industry. They make more than enough profit to pay these costs and we, the American people, do not.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

That doesn't explain why they're given to the oil industry. They make more than enough profit to pay these costs and we, the American people, do not.

That doesn't explain why they're given to the oil industry.

Deductions for typical business expenses aren't "given" to anyone.

They make more than enough profit to pay these costs

Profit, the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something.

we, the American people, do not.

The American people are not paying for depletion costs or exploration and development costs or air pollution control facilities or qualified property used to refine liquid fuels or depreciation for natural gas pipelines or certain expenditures associated with oil and gas exploration.

Oil companies are paying for that.

Did you have an actual point? Or maybe proof of your original claim?

 

[NoNukes]

You think this controversy is driven by money? Well guess what? HERE'S the MONEY.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/23/exxon-still-fund-climate-deniers/1/

Viewers were treated to a rare moment of candor at the end of a recent PBS NewHour interviewwith Kenneth Cohen, ExxonMobil‘s vice president of public and government affairs.

NewsHour host Judy Woodruff pressed Cohen about an accusation New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman made during a taped interview that aired just before Cohen’s segment. Schneiderman—who had announced the week before that he was investigating ExxonMobil over whether it had misled the public and shareholders about climate change risks—had charged that ExxonMobil funds climate change denier organizations to malign mainstream climate science.

“Has Exxon been funding these organizations?” she asked.

“Well, the answer is yes,” Cohen replied. “And I will let those organizations respond for themselves.”

Putting aside the fact that no one from any of the denier groups was on the program, Cohen’s admission is noteworthy because technically “has been funding”—which, grammatically speaking, is in the present perfect progressive tense—describes an action that began in the past and continues in the present.

To avoid any doubt, it would have been helpful if Woodruff had used the present tense—as Schneiderman did—and had asked if ExxonMobil is funding these groups. Ambiguous or not, Cohen’s statement still calls into question recent assertions by Richard Keil, ExxonMobil’s senior public affairs adviser, that the company is no longer funding them. And second, it would appear to contradict a claim the company had stopped funding denier groups that Cohen himself made eight years ago.

In any case, as I spelled out in a July blog post, no matter how Cohen or Keil answer the funding question, it’s an indisputable fact that ExxonMobil has been—and still is—a leading sponsor of think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations and contrarian scientists that peddle lies about climate science and the viability of renewable energy. Only the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries, have spent more on the climate disinformation network.

Equally interesting was Cohen’s attempt to dismiss the funding question. In so many words, he told Woodruff that although ExxonMobil may have financed climate science denier groups, the groups are ultimately responsible for their anti-science message, not ExxonMobil.

That response may well signal that ExxonMobil plans to use this legal tactic to counter the charge that it financed a massive climate change disinformation campaign. It would certainly make sense for the company to plant seeds of doubt about its responsibility. After all, hasn’t its modus operandi all along been to emphasize uncertainty?

ExxonMobil Exposed

The NewsHour interview with Cohen came on the heels of a string of public relations disasters for ExxonMobil. The first came in July, when the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report documenting that ExxonMobil and five other top carbon polluters—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, coal giant Peabody Energy and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change for decades but spent tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be false. UCS also uncovered evidence that Exxon had been factoring climate change into its oil and gas extraction plans as early as 1981—much earlier than anyone had realized and years before there was much public awareness of the problem.

Since then, two news organizations have published a series of articles that fill out the details of what Exxon scientists knew and when they knew it. Both InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times dug up evidence from company archives and interviews with former employees showing that Exxon, a leader in climate research in the 1970s and 1980s, became one of the most ardent climate science deniers, rejecting the warnings of its own scientists that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic.

Partly due to these revelations, several members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidates, and more than 60 leading environmental, science and social justice groups (including UCS) have called for the Justice Department to investigate ExxonMobil for deliberately deceiving the public, much in the same way the tobacco industry lied about the link between smoking and disease. And then, on November 4, Schneiderman launched his criminal investigation to determine, as he told PBS NewsHour, whether Exxon was “using the best science and the most competent [climate] models for their own purposes, but then telling the public, the regulators and shareholders that no competent models existed.” If that’s the case, he said, the company could be guilty of fraud.

ExxonMobil’s Counterattack

Cohen and other ExxonMobil officials, including CEO Rex Tillerson and the aforementioned Richard Keil, hit back with a flurry of press releases, newspaper columns, TV and radio interviews, and tweets. Right out of the box, they attacked the credibility of InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, calling them “activists” and mischaracterizing their reporting.

“Activists deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers,” Cohen said in an October 21 press release, for example. “These activists took those statements out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time, which, in fact, mirrored global understanding.”

In fact, both news organizations did report there were differences of opinion among Exxon scientists early on. As InsideClimate News put it, company researchers “acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science.” By the early 1980s, however, internal documents show that company scientists had concluded that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences within the first half of the 21st century if fossil fuel emissions weren’t significantly reduced. It was later in that decade when the company turned a deaf ear to what its scientists were saying, presumably because it feared heightened awareness about climate change could lead to government controls on carbon emissions.

The turning point came in 1988. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the same year the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress that global warming had already begun, Exxon’s public affairs director defined the “Exxon Position” in a draft memo titled “The Greenhouse Effect.” Acknowledging the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is driving global warming, the memo recommended that the company “emphasize the uncertainty.”

That’s just what a number of key Exxon researchers did from then on, turning their backs on their previous work. As InsideClimate News characterized it, they “became vocal climate contrarians” and ridiculed IPCC findings.

ExxonMobil’s Disinformation Network

In the 1990s, Exxon participated in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an alliance of more than 60 U.S. and British corporations and trade groups formed in 1989 to thwart international and domestic efforts to address global warming by, you guessed it, emphasizing scientific uncertainty.

By end of the decade, however, Exxon and other key GCC members began enlisting the help of a number of think tanks that had been surreptitiously assisting the tobacco industry in its fight against tighter controls on smoking. Why? To hide their fingerprints. Exxon, which quickly proved to have the deepest pockets—at least until the Koch brothers surpassed it in 2005—kicked off its spending spree on these think tanks and other nonprofit advocacy groups in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil and Kenneth Cohen became the company’s VP for public and government affairs.

In January 2007, UCS issued a report that revealed that between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil had spent at least $16 million on a network of more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks and advocacy groups to launder its message. A few weeks later, when asked about the report by a Greenwire reporter, Cohen said ExxonMobil had stopped funding them.

That claim is as preposterous today as it was eight years ago. Just last year the company spent $1.9 million on 15 climate science denier groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and 10 of last year’s grantees were among those cited in UCS’s 2007 report. All told, Greenpeace has documented that ExxonMobil has spent $31 million since 1998 on denier groups, but there is good reason to suspect that’s not even the half of it. A former highly placed ExxonMobil executive who requested anonymity told UCS that the company paid out as much as $10 million annually on what insiders called “black ops” from 1998 through 2005, significantly more than what UCS was able to pin down in its 2007 report from company tax records.

So what should we make of Cohen’s apparent admission on PBS NewsHour about ExxonMobil’s role in the climate-denial funding game? Well, Cohen may not be much of a grammarian, but he is top-notch lawyer who worked for 22 years in Exxon’s legal department before becoming VP for public affairs. As noted above, Cohen was likely taking a new tack designed to shield ExxonMobil from blame for the climate disinformation campaign. Lawyers call it “plausible deniability.” ExxonMobil may have paid denier groups for their services, the argument goes, but those groups are solely responsible for their actions.

Legally proving a quid pro quo may be difficult, but at least one prominent denier-group funder has spoken candidly about the power such funding entails. In Brian Doherty’s 2007 book,Radicals for Capitalism: The Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, David Koch put it plainly. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our interest,” Koch said. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding. We do exert that kind of control.”

Cohen can trot out the “plausible deniability” line all he likes, but there is little doubt that ExxonMobil has exerted that kind of control, too.

ExxonMobil’s Culpability

The big question is, are ExxonMobil’s actions illegal?

The Washington Post doesn’t think so. It ran an editorial on Nov. 14, Exxon deserves criticism, but it didn’t commit a crime. Syndicated columnist Robert J. Samuelson doesn’t think so, either. A week before the Post editorial, he wrote a column maintaining that ExxonMobil is being vilified for “expressing its opinions,” which deserve protection. For Samuelson, the company is exercising its constitutional right of free speech.

Attorney General Schneiderman obviously thinks they might be, hence his investigation. “In New York,” he told PBS NewsHour, “we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.” And, it goes without saying, there is no legal protection for fraud.

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, thinks they might be, too. “The revelation that Exxon knew about the link between climate change and carbon pollution as early as 1981 and yet continued to support decades-long campaign of denial described in the [July] UCS report, strengthens the parallel with the tobacco-industry conduct that led to a civil [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] verdict against tobacco,” Whitehousetold The Nation in July. “Whether [the Justice Department] pursues this or not is their call, but if nothing else, the UCS report shows these are legitimate questions to ask.”

Sharon Eubanks, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted the racketeering case against the tobacco industry, also has called for a federal investigation. “It appears to me, based on what we know so far, that there was a concerted effort by Exxon and others to confuse the public on climate change,” she said in an October 20 interview with Climate Progress. “They were actively denying the impact of human-caused carbon emissions, even when their own research showed otherwise.”

In any case, absent a full investigation, it would be premature draw to any conclusions about the legality of ExxonMobil’s conduct. At this point, we don’t know. What we do know is, in light of the evidence uncovered by UCS, InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and others, investigations of whether ExxonMobil violated any state or federal laws are undoubtedly warranted.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

Morocco’s Giant Solar Plant to Bring Energy to 1 Million People

Another Historic Day in the Battle to Stop the Tar Sands

Ted Cruz Calls Obama’s ‘Radical’ Climate Plan ‘Tyranny’

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

I do like it. Idiots are funny.

What do you find humorous about this.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

You think this controversy is driven by money? Well guess what? HERE'S the MONEY.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/23/exxon-still-fund-climate-deniers/1/

Viewers were treated to a rare moment of candor at the end of a recent PBS NewHour interviewwith Kenneth Cohen, ExxonMobil‘s vice president of public and government affairs.

NewsHour host Judy Woodruff pressed Cohen about an accusation New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman made during a taped interview that aired just before Cohen’s segment. Schneiderman—who had announced the week before that he was investigating ExxonMobil over whether it had misled the public and shareholders about climate change risks—had charged that ExxonMobil funds climate change denier organizations to malign mainstream climate science.

“Has Exxon been funding these organizations?” she asked.

“Well, the answer is yes,” Cohen replied. “And I will let those organizations respond for themselves.”

Putting aside the fact that no one from any of the denier groups was on the program, Cohen’s admission is noteworthy because technically “has been funding”—which, grammatically speaking, is in the present perfect progressive tense—describes an action that began in the past and continues in the present.

To avoid any doubt, it would have been helpful if Woodruff had used the present tense—as Schneiderman did—and had asked if ExxonMobil is funding these groups. Ambiguous or not, Cohen’s statement still calls into question recent assertions by Richard Keil, ExxonMobil’s senior public affairs adviser, that the company is no longer funding them. And second, it would appear to contradict a claim the company had stopped funding denier groups that Cohen himself made eight years ago.

In any case, as I spelled out in a July blog post, no matter how Cohen or Keil answer the funding question, it’s an indisputable fact that ExxonMobil has been—and still is—a leading sponsor of think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations and contrarian scientists that peddle lies about climate science and the viability of renewable energy. Only the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries, have spent more on the climate disinformation network.

Equally interesting was Cohen’s attempt to dismiss the funding question. In so many words, he told Woodruff that although ExxonMobil may have financed climate science denier groups, the groups are ultimately responsible for their anti-science message, not ExxonMobil.

That response may well signal that ExxonMobil plans to use this legal tactic to counter the charge that it financed a massive climate change disinformation campaign. It would certainly make sense for the company to plant seeds of doubt about its responsibility. After all, hasn’t its modus operandi all along been to emphasize uncertainty?

ExxonMobil Exposed

The NewsHour interview with Cohen came on the heels of a string of public relations disasters for ExxonMobil. The first came in July, when the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report documenting that ExxonMobil and five other top carbon polluters—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, coal giant Peabody Energy and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change for decades but spent tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be false. UCS also uncovered evidence that Exxon had been factoring climate change into its oil and gas extraction plans as early as 1981—much earlier than anyone had realized and years before there was much public awareness of the problem.

Since then, two news organizations have published a series of articles that fill out the details of what Exxon scientists knew and when they knew it. Both InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times dug up evidence from company archives and interviews with former employees showing that Exxon, a leader in climate research in the 1970s and 1980s, became one of the most ardent climate science deniers, rejecting the warnings of its own scientists that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic.

Partly due to these revelations, several members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidates, and more than 60 leading environmental, science and social justice groups (including UCS) have called for the Justice Department to investigate ExxonMobil for deliberately deceiving the public, much in the same way the tobacco industry lied about the link between smoking and disease. And then, on November 4, Schneiderman launched his criminal investigation to determine, as he told PBS NewsHour, whether Exxon was “using the best science and the most competent [climate] models for their own purposes, but then telling the public, the regulators and shareholders that no competent models existed.” If that’s the case, he said, the company could be guilty of fraud.

ExxonMobil’s Counterattack

Cohen and other ExxonMobil officials, including CEO Rex Tillerson and the aforementioned Richard Keil, hit back with a flurry of press releases, newspaper columns, TV and radio interviews, and tweets. Right out of the box, they attacked the credibility of InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, calling them “activists” and mischaracterizing their reporting.

“Activists deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers,” Cohen said in an October 21 press release, for example. “These activists took those statements out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time, which, in fact, mirrored global understanding.”

In fact, both news organizations did report there were differences of opinion among Exxon scientists early on. As InsideClimate News put it, company researchers “acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science.” By the early 1980s, however, internal documents show that company scientists had concluded that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences within the first half of the 21st century if fossil fuel emissions weren’t significantly reduced. It was later in that decade when the company turned a deaf ear to what its scientists were saying, presumably because it feared heightened awareness about climate change could lead to government controls on carbon emissions.

The turning point came in 1988. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the same year the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress that global warming had already begun, Exxon’s public affairs director defined the “Exxon Position” in a draft memo titled “The Greenhouse Effect.” Acknowledging the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is driving global warming, the memo recommended that the company “emphasize the uncertainty.”

That’s just what a number of key Exxon researchers did from then on, turning their backs on their previous work. As InsideClimate News characterized it, they “became vocal climate contrarians” and ridiculed IPCC findings.

ExxonMobil’s Disinformation Network

In the 1990s, Exxon participated in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an alliance of more than 60 U.S. and British corporations and trade groups formed in 1989 to thwart international and domestic efforts to address global warming by, you guessed it, emphasizing scientific uncertainty.

By end of the decade, however, Exxon and other key GCC members began enlisting the help of a number of think tanks that had been surreptitiously assisting the tobacco industry in its fight against tighter controls on smoking. Why? To hide their fingerprints. Exxon, which quickly proved to have the deepest pockets—at least until the Koch brothers surpassed it in 2005—kicked off its spending spree on these think tanks and other nonprofit advocacy groups in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil and Kenneth Cohen became the company’s VP for public and government affairs.

In January 2007, UCS issued a report that revealed that between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil had spent at least $16 million on a network of more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks and advocacy groups to launder its message. A few weeks later, when asked about the report by a Greenwire reporter, Cohen said ExxonMobil had stopped funding them.

That claim is as preposterous today as it was eight years ago. Just last year the company spent $1.9 million on 15 climate science denier groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and 10 of last year’s grantees were among those cited in UCS’s 2007 report. All told, Greenpeace has documented that ExxonMobil has spent $31 million since 1998 on denier groups, but there is good reason to suspect that’s not even the half of it. A former highly placed ExxonMobil executive who requested anonymity told UCS that the company paid out as much as $10 million annually on what insiders called “black ops” from 1998 through 2005, significantly more than what UCS was able to pin down in its 2007 report from company tax records.

So what should we make of Cohen’s apparent admission on PBS NewsHour about ExxonMobil’s role in the climate-denial funding game? Well, Cohen may not be much of a grammarian, but he is top-notch lawyer who worked for 22 years in Exxon’s legal department before becoming VP for public affairs. As noted above, Cohen was likely taking a new tack designed to shield ExxonMobil from blame for the climate disinformation campaign. Lawyers call it “plausible deniability.” ExxonMobil may have paid denier groups for their services, the argument goes, but those groups are solely responsible for their actions.

Legally proving a quid pro quo may be difficult, but at least one prominent denier-group funder has spoken candidly about the power such funding entails. In Brian Doherty’s 2007 book,Radicals for Capitalism: The Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, David Koch put it plainly. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our interest,” Koch said. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding. We do exert that kind of control.”

Cohen can trot out the “plausible deniability” line all he likes, but there is little doubt that ExxonMobil has exerted that kind of control, too.

ExxonMobil’s Culpability

The big question is, are ExxonMobil’s actions illegal?

The Washington Post doesn’t think so. It ran an editorial on Nov. 14, Exxon deserves criticism, but it didn’t commit a crime. Syndicated columnist Robert J. Samuelson doesn’t think so, either. A week before the Post editorial, he wrote a column maintaining that ExxonMobil is being vilified for “expressing its opinions,” which deserve protection. For Samuelson, the company is exercising its constitutional right of free speech.

Attorney General Schneiderman obviously thinks they might be, hence his investigation. “In New York,” he told PBS NewsHour, “we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.” And, it goes without saying, there is no legal protection for fraud.

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, thinks they might be, too. “The revelation that Exxon knew about the link between climate change and carbon pollution as early as 1981 and yet continued to support decades-long campaign of denial described in the [July] UCS report, strengthens the parallel with the tobacco-industry conduct that led to a civil [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] verdict against tobacco,” Whitehousetold The Nation in July. “Whether [the Justice Department] pursues this or not is their call, but if nothing else, the UCS report shows these are legitimate questions to ask.”

Sharon Eubanks, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted the racketeering case against the tobacco industry, also has called for a federal investigation. “It appears to me, based on what we know so far, that there was a concerted effort by Exxon and others to confuse the public on climate change,” she said in an October 20 interview with Climate Progress. “They were actively denying the impact of human-caused carbon emissions, even when their own research showed otherwise.”

In any case, absent a full investigation, it would be premature draw to any conclusions about the legality of ExxonMobil’s conduct. At this point, we don’t know. What we do know is, in light of the evidence uncovered by UCS, InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and others, investigations of whether ExxonMobil violated any state or federal laws are undoubtedly warranted.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

Morocco’s Giant Solar Plant to Bring Energy to 1 Million People

Another Historic Day in the Battle to Stop the Tar Sands

Ted Cruz Calls Obama’s ‘Radical’ Climate Plan ‘Tyranny’

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

I do like it. Idiots are funny.

What do you find humorous about this.

It's humorous that anyone takes that idiot seriously.

 

[TyroneSlothrop]

 

[NoNukes]

You think this controversy is driven by money? Well guess what? HERE'S the MONEY.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/23/exxon-still-fund-climate-deniers/1/

Viewers were treated to a rare moment of candor at the end of a recent PBS NewHour interviewwith Kenneth Cohen, ExxonMobil‘s vice president of public and government affairs.

NewsHour host Judy Woodruff pressed Cohen about an accusation New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman made during a taped interview that aired just before Cohen’s segment. Schneiderman—who had announced the week before that he was investigating ExxonMobil over whether it had misled the public and shareholders about climate change risks—had charged that ExxonMobil funds climate change denier organizations to malign mainstream climate science.

“Has Exxon been funding these organizations?” she asked.

“Well, the answer is yes,” Cohen replied. “And I will let those organizations respond for themselves.”

Putting aside the fact that no one from any of the denier groups was on the program, Cohen’s admission is noteworthy because technically “has been funding”—which, grammatically speaking, is in the present perfect progressive tense—describes an action that began in the past and continues in the present.

To avoid any doubt, it would have been helpful if Woodruff had used the present tense—as Schneiderman did—and had asked if ExxonMobil is funding these groups. Ambiguous or not, Cohen’s statement still calls into question recent assertions by Richard Keil, ExxonMobil’s senior public affairs adviser, that the company is no longer funding them. And second, it would appear to contradict a claim the company had stopped funding denier groups that Cohen himself made eight years ago.

In any case, as I spelled out in a July blog post, no matter how Cohen or Keil answer the funding question, it’s an indisputable fact that ExxonMobil has been—and still is—a leading sponsor of think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations and contrarian scientists that peddle lies about climate science and the viability of renewable energy. Only the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries, have spent more on the climate disinformation network.

Equally interesting was Cohen’s attempt to dismiss the funding question. In so many words, he told Woodruff that although ExxonMobil may have financed climate science denier groups, the groups are ultimately responsible for their anti-science message, not ExxonMobil.

That response may well signal that ExxonMobil plans to use this legal tactic to counter the charge that it financed a massive climate change disinformation campaign. It would certainly make sense for the company to plant seeds of doubt about its responsibility. After all, hasn’t its modus operandi all along been to emphasize uncertainty?

ExxonMobil Exposed

The NewsHour interview with Cohen came on the heels of a string of public relations disasters for ExxonMobil. The first came in July, when the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report documenting that ExxonMobil and five other top carbon polluters—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, coal giant Peabody Energy and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change for decades but spent tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be false. UCS also uncovered evidence that Exxon had been factoring climate change into its oil and gas extraction plans as early as 1981—much earlier than anyone had realized and years before there was much public awareness of the problem.

Since then, two news organizations have published a series of articles that fill out the details of what Exxon scientists knew and when they knew it. Both InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times dug up evidence from company archives and interviews with former employees showing that Exxon, a leader in climate research in the 1970s and 1980s, became one of the most ardent climate science deniers, rejecting the warnings of its own scientists that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic.

Partly due to these revelations, several members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidates, and more than 60 leading environmental, science and social justice groups (including UCS) have called for the Justice Department to investigate ExxonMobil for deliberately deceiving the public, much in the same way the tobacco industry lied about the link between smoking and disease. And then, on November 4, Schneiderman launched his criminal investigation to determine, as he told PBS NewsHour, whether Exxon was “using the best science and the most competent [climate] models for their own purposes, but then telling the public, the regulators and shareholders that no competent models existed.” If that’s the case, he said, the company could be guilty of fraud.

ExxonMobil’s Counterattack

Cohen and other ExxonMobil officials, including CEO Rex Tillerson and the aforementioned Richard Keil, hit back with a flurry of press releases, newspaper columns, TV and radio interviews, and tweets. Right out of the box, they attacked the credibility of InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, calling them “activists” and mischaracterizing their reporting.

“Activists deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers,” Cohen said in an October 21 press release, for example. “These activists took those statements out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time, which, in fact, mirrored global understanding.”

In fact, both news organizations did report there were differences of opinion among Exxon scientists early on. As InsideClimate News put it, company researchers “acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science.” By the early 1980s, however, internal documents show that company scientists had concluded that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences within the first half of the 21st century if fossil fuel emissions weren’t significantly reduced. It was later in that decade when the company turned a deaf ear to what its scientists were saying, presumably because it feared heightened awareness about climate change could lead to government controls on carbon emissions.

The turning point came in 1988. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the same year the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress that global warming had already begun, Exxon’s public affairs director defined the “Exxon Position” in a draft memo titled “The Greenhouse Effect.” Acknowledging the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is driving global warming, the memo recommended that the company “emphasize the uncertainty.”

That’s just what a number of key Exxon researchers did from then on, turning their backs on their previous work. As InsideClimate News characterized it, they “became vocal climate contrarians” and ridiculed IPCC findings.

ExxonMobil’s Disinformation Network

In the 1990s, Exxon participated in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an alliance of more than 60 U.S. and British corporations and trade groups formed in 1989 to thwart international and domestic efforts to address global warming by, you guessed it, emphasizing scientific uncertainty.

By end of the decade, however, Exxon and other key GCC members began enlisting the help of a number of think tanks that had been surreptitiously assisting the tobacco industry in its fight against tighter controls on smoking. Why? To hide their fingerprints. Exxon, which quickly proved to have the deepest pockets—at least until the Koch brothers surpassed it in 2005—kicked off its spending spree on these think tanks and other nonprofit advocacy groups in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil and Kenneth Cohen became the company’s VP for public and government affairs.

In January 2007, UCS issued a report that revealed that between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil had spent at least $16 million on a network of more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks and advocacy groups to launder its message. A few weeks later, when asked about the report by a Greenwire reporter, Cohen said ExxonMobil had stopped funding them.

That claim is as preposterous today as it was eight years ago. Just last year the company spent $1.9 million on 15 climate science denier groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and 10 of last year’s grantees were among those cited in UCS’s 2007 report. All told, Greenpeace has documented that ExxonMobil has spent $31 million since 1998 on denier groups, but there is good reason to suspect that’s not even the half of it. A former highly placed ExxonMobil executive who requested anonymity told UCS that the company paid out as much as $10 million annually on what insiders called “black ops” from 1998 through 2005, significantly more than what UCS was able to pin down in its 2007 report from company tax records.

So what should we make of Cohen’s apparent admission on PBS NewsHour about ExxonMobil’s role in the climate-denial funding game? Well, Cohen may not be much of a grammarian, but he is top-notch lawyer who worked for 22 years in Exxon’s legal department before becoming VP for public affairs. As noted above, Cohen was likely taking a new tack designed to shield ExxonMobil from blame for the climate disinformation campaign. Lawyers call it “plausible deniability.” ExxonMobil may have paid denier groups for their services, the argument goes, but those groups are solely responsible for their actions.

Legally proving a quid pro quo may be difficult, but at least one prominent denier-group funder has spoken candidly about the power such funding entails. In Brian Doherty’s 2007 book,Radicals for Capitalism: The Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, David Koch put it plainly. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our interest,” Koch said. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding. We do exert that kind of control.”

Cohen can trot out the “plausible deniability” line all he likes, but there is little doubt that ExxonMobil has exerted that kind of control, too.

ExxonMobil’s Culpability

The big question is, are ExxonMobil’s actions illegal?

The Washington Post doesn’t think so. It ran an editorial on Nov. 14, Exxon deserves criticism, but it didn’t commit a crime. Syndicated columnist Robert J. Samuelson doesn’t think so, either. A week before the Post editorial, he wrote a column maintaining that ExxonMobil is being vilified for “expressing its opinions,” which deserve protection. For Samuelson, the company is exercising its constitutional right of free speech.

Attorney General Schneiderman obviously thinks they might be, hence his investigation. “In New York,” he told PBS NewsHour, “we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.” And, it goes without saying, there is no legal protection for fraud.

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, thinks they might be, too. “The revelation that Exxon knew about the link between climate change and carbon pollution as early as 1981 and yet continued to support decades-long campaign of denial described in the [July] UCS report, strengthens the parallel with the tobacco-industry conduct that led to a civil [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] verdict against tobacco,” Whitehousetold The Nation in July. “Whether [the Justice Department] pursues this or not is their call, but if nothing else, the UCS report shows these are legitimate questions to ask.”

Sharon Eubanks, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted the racketeering case against the tobacco industry, also has called for a federal investigation. “It appears to me, based on what we know so far, that there was a concerted effort by Exxon and others to confuse the public on climate change,” she said in an October 20 interview with Climate Progress. “They were actively denying the impact of human-caused carbon emissions, even when their own research showed otherwise.”

In any case, absent a full investigation, it would be premature draw to any conclusions about the legality of ExxonMobil’s conduct. At this point, we don’t know. What we do know is, in light of the evidence uncovered by UCS, InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and others, investigations of whether ExxonMobil violated any state or federal laws are undoubtedly warranted.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

Morocco’s Giant Solar Plant to Bring Energy to 1 Million People

Another Historic Day in the Battle to Stop the Tar Sands

Ted Cruz Calls Obama’s ‘Radical’ Climate Plan ‘Tyranny’

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

I do like it. Idiots are funny.

What do you find humorous about this.

It's humorous that anyone takes that idiot seriously.

I was talking about what he said, not who said it.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Where is the Democrat one? The one where they fear vaccines, nuclear energy and GMOs?

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

You think this controversy is driven by money? Well guess what? HERE'S the MONEY.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/23/exxon-still-fund-climate-deniers/1/

Viewers were treated to a rare moment of candor at the end of a recent PBS NewHour interviewwith Kenneth Cohen, ExxonMobil‘s vice president of public and government affairs.

NewsHour host Judy Woodruff pressed Cohen about an accusation New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman made during a taped interview that aired just before Cohen’s segment. Schneiderman—who had announced the week before that he was investigating ExxonMobil over whether it had misled the public and shareholders about climate change risks—had charged that ExxonMobil funds climate change denier organizations to malign mainstream climate science.

“Has Exxon been funding these organizations?” she asked.

“Well, the answer is yes,” Cohen replied. “And I will let those organizations respond for themselves.”

Putting aside the fact that no one from any of the denier groups was on the program, Cohen’s admission is noteworthy because technically “has been funding”—which, grammatically speaking, is in the present perfect progressive tense—describes an action that began in the past and continues in the present.

To avoid any doubt, it would have been helpful if Woodruff had used the present tense—as Schneiderman did—and had asked if ExxonMobil is funding these groups. Ambiguous or not, Cohen’s statement still calls into question recent assertions by Richard Keil, ExxonMobil’s senior public affairs adviser, that the company is no longer funding them. And second, it would appear to contradict a claim the company had stopped funding denier groups that Cohen himself made eight years ago.

In any case, as I spelled out in a July blog post, no matter how Cohen or Keil answer the funding question, it’s an indisputable fact that ExxonMobil has been—and still is—a leading sponsor of think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations and contrarian scientists that peddle lies about climate science and the viability of renewable energy. Only the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries, have spent more on the climate disinformation network.

Equally interesting was Cohen’s attempt to dismiss the funding question. In so many words, he told Woodruff that although ExxonMobil may have financed climate science denier groups, the groups are ultimately responsible for their anti-science message, not ExxonMobil.

That response may well signal that ExxonMobil plans to use this legal tactic to counter the charge that it financed a massive climate change disinformation campaign. It would certainly make sense for the company to plant seeds of doubt about its responsibility. After all, hasn’t its modus operandi all along been to emphasize uncertainty?

ExxonMobil Exposed

The NewsHour interview with Cohen came on the heels of a string of public relations disasters for ExxonMobil. The first came in July, when the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report documenting that ExxonMobil and five other top carbon polluters—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, coal giant Peabody Energy and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change for decades but spent tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be false. UCS also uncovered evidence that Exxon had been factoring climate change into its oil and gas extraction plans as early as 1981—much earlier than anyone had realized and years before there was much public awareness of the problem.

Since then, two news organizations have published a series of articles that fill out the details of what Exxon scientists knew and when they knew it. Both InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times dug up evidence from company archives and interviews with former employees showing that Exxon, a leader in climate research in the 1970s and 1980s, became one of the most ardent climate science deniers, rejecting the warnings of its own scientists that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic.

Partly due to these revelations, several members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidates, and more than 60 leading environmental, science and social justice groups (including UCS) have called for the Justice Department to investigate ExxonMobil for deliberately deceiving the public, much in the same way the tobacco industry lied about the link between smoking and disease. And then, on November 4, Schneiderman launched his criminal investigation to determine, as he told PBS NewsHour, whether Exxon was “using the best science and the most competent [climate] models for their own purposes, but then telling the public, the regulators and shareholders that no competent models existed.” If that’s the case, he said, the company could be guilty of fraud.

ExxonMobil’s Counterattack

Cohen and other ExxonMobil officials, including CEO Rex Tillerson and the aforementioned Richard Keil, hit back with a flurry of press releases, newspaper columns, TV and radio interviews, and tweets. Right out of the box, they attacked the credibility of InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, calling them “activists” and mischaracterizing their reporting.

“Activists deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers,” Cohen said in an October 21 press release, for example. “These activists took those statements out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time, which, in fact, mirrored global understanding.”

In fact, both news organizations did report there were differences of opinion among Exxon scientists early on. As InsideClimate News put it, company researchers “acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science.” By the early 1980s, however, internal documents show that company scientists had concluded that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences within the first half of the 21st century if fossil fuel emissions weren’t significantly reduced. It was later in that decade when the company turned a deaf ear to what its scientists were saying, presumably because it feared heightened awareness about climate change could lead to government controls on carbon emissions.

The turning point came in 1988. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the same year the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress that global warming had already begun, Exxon’s public affairs director defined the “Exxon Position” in a draft memo titled “The Greenhouse Effect.” Acknowledging the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is driving global warming, the memo recommended that the company “emphasize the uncertainty.”

That’s just what a number of key Exxon researchers did from then on, turning their backs on their previous work. As InsideClimate News characterized it, they “became vocal climate contrarians” and ridiculed IPCC findings.

ExxonMobil’s Disinformation Network

In the 1990s, Exxon participated in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an alliance of more than 60 U.S. and British corporations and trade groups formed in 1989 to thwart international and domestic efforts to address global warming by, you guessed it, emphasizing scientific uncertainty.

By end of the decade, however, Exxon and other key GCC members began enlisting the help of a number of think tanks that had been surreptitiously assisting the tobacco industry in its fight against tighter controls on smoking. Why? To hide their fingerprints. Exxon, which quickly proved to have the deepest pockets—at least until the Koch brothers surpassed it in 2005—kicked off its spending spree on these think tanks and other nonprofit advocacy groups in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil and Kenneth Cohen became the company’s VP for public and government affairs.

In January 2007, UCS issued a report that revealed that between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil had spent at least $16 million on a network of more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks and advocacy groups to launder its message. A few weeks later, when asked about the report by a Greenwire reporter, Cohen said ExxonMobil had stopped funding them.

That claim is as preposterous today as it was eight years ago. Just last year the company spent $1.9 million on 15 climate science denier groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and 10 of last year’s grantees were among those cited in UCS’s 2007 report. All told, Greenpeace has documented that ExxonMobil has spent $31 million since 1998 on denier groups, but there is good reason to suspect that’s not even the half of it. A former highly placed ExxonMobil executive who requested anonymity told UCS that the company paid out as much as $10 million annually on what insiders called “black ops” from 1998 through 2005, significantly more than what UCS was able to pin down in its 2007 report from company tax records.

So what should we make of Cohen’s apparent admission on PBS NewsHour about ExxonMobil’s role in the climate-denial funding game? Well, Cohen may not be much of a grammarian, but he is top-notch lawyer who worked for 22 years in Exxon’s legal department before becoming VP for public affairs. As noted above, Cohen was likely taking a new tack designed to shield ExxonMobil from blame for the climate disinformation campaign. Lawyers call it “plausible deniability.” ExxonMobil may have paid denier groups for their services, the argument goes, but those groups are solely responsible for their actions.

Legally proving a quid pro quo may be difficult, but at least one prominent denier-group funder has spoken candidly about the power such funding entails. In Brian Doherty’s 2007 book,Radicals for Capitalism: The Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, David Koch put it plainly. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our interest,” Koch said. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding. We do exert that kind of control.”

Cohen can trot out the “plausible deniability” line all he likes, but there is little doubt that ExxonMobil has exerted that kind of control, too.

ExxonMobil’s Culpability

The big question is, are ExxonMobil’s actions illegal?

The Washington Post doesn’t think so. It ran an editorial on Nov. 14, Exxon deserves criticism, but it didn’t commit a crime. Syndicated columnist Robert J. Samuelson doesn’t think so, either. A week before the Post editorial, he wrote a column maintaining that ExxonMobil is being vilified for “expressing its opinions,” which deserve protection. For Samuelson, the company is exercising its constitutional right of free speech.

Attorney General Schneiderman obviously thinks they might be, hence his investigation. “In New York,” he told PBS NewsHour, “we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.” And, it goes without saying, there is no legal protection for fraud.

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, thinks they might be, too. “The revelation that Exxon knew about the link between climate change and carbon pollution as early as 1981 and yet continued to support decades-long campaign of denial described in the [July] UCS report, strengthens the parallel with the tobacco-industry conduct that led to a civil [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] verdict against tobacco,” Whitehousetold The Nation in July. “Whether [the Justice Department] pursues this or not is their call, but if nothing else, the UCS report shows these are legitimate questions to ask.”

Sharon Eubanks, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted the racketeering case against the tobacco industry, also has called for a federal investigation. “It appears to me, based on what we know so far, that there was a concerted effort by Exxon and others to confuse the public on climate change,” she said in an October 20 interview with Climate Progress. “They were actively denying the impact of human-caused carbon emissions, even when their own research showed otherwise.”

In any case, absent a full investigation, it would be premature draw to any conclusions about the legality of ExxonMobil’s conduct. At this point, we don’t know. What we do know is, in light of the evidence uncovered by UCS, InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and others, investigations of whether ExxonMobil violated any state or federal laws are undoubtedly warranted.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

I do like it. Idiots are funny.

What do you find humorous about this.

It's humorous that anyone takes that idiot seriously.

I was talking about what he said, not who said it.

What he said was idiotic.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Where is the Democrat one? The one where they fear vaccines, nuclear energy and GMOs?

The Democrat's Guide to Talking Politics with Your Republican Uncle

it's here, they're given their talking points, see "97%" Polly want a cracker braaaaaaaaaaaa 97%

 

[NoNukes]

You think this controversy is driven by money? Well guess what? HERE'S the MONEY.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/23/exxon-still-fund-climate-deniers/1/

Viewers were treated to a rare moment of candor at the end of a recent PBS NewHour interviewwith Kenneth Cohen, ExxonMobil‘s vice president of public and government affairs.

NewsHour host Judy Woodruff pressed Cohen about an accusation New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman made during a taped interview that aired just before Cohen’s segment. Schneiderman—who had announced the week before that he was investigating ExxonMobil over whether it had misled the public and shareholders about climate change risks—had charged that ExxonMobil funds climate change denier organizations to malign mainstream climate science.

“Has Exxon been funding these organizations?” she asked.

“Well, the answer is yes,” Cohen replied. “And I will let those organizations respond for themselves.”

Putting aside the fact that no one from any of the denier groups was on the program, Cohen’s admission is noteworthy because technically “has been funding”—which, grammatically speaking, is in the present perfect progressive tense—describes an action that began in the past and continues in the present.

To avoid any doubt, it would have been helpful if Woodruff had used the present tense—as Schneiderman did—and had asked if ExxonMobil is funding these groups. Ambiguous or not, Cohen’s statement still calls into question recent assertions by Richard Keil, ExxonMobil’s senior public affairs adviser, that the company is no longer funding them. And second, it would appear to contradict a claim the company had stopped funding denier groups that Cohen himself made eight years ago.

In any case, as I spelled out in a July blog post, no matter how Cohen or Keil answer the funding question, it’s an indisputable fact that ExxonMobil has been—and still is—a leading sponsor of think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations and contrarian scientists that peddle lies about climate science and the viability of renewable energy. Only the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries, have spent more on the climate disinformation network.

Equally interesting was Cohen’s attempt to dismiss the funding question. In so many words, he told Woodruff that although ExxonMobil may have financed climate science denier groups, the groups are ultimately responsible for their anti-science message, not ExxonMobil.

That response may well signal that ExxonMobil plans to use this legal tactic to counter the charge that it financed a massive climate change disinformation campaign. It would certainly make sense for the company to plant seeds of doubt about its responsibility. After all, hasn’t its modus operandi all along been to emphasize uncertainty?

ExxonMobil Exposed

The NewsHour interview with Cohen came on the heels of a string of public relations disasters for ExxonMobil. The first came in July, when the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report documenting that ExxonMobil and five other top carbon polluters—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, coal giant Peabody Energy and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change for decades but spent tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be false. UCS also uncovered evidence that Exxon had been factoring climate change into its oil and gas extraction plans as early as 1981—much earlier than anyone had realized and years before there was much public awareness of the problem.

Since then, two news organizations have published a series of articles that fill out the details of what Exxon scientists knew and when they knew it. Both InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times dug up evidence from company archives and interviews with former employees showing that Exxon, a leader in climate research in the 1970s and 1980s, became one of the most ardent climate science deniers, rejecting the warnings of its own scientists that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic.

Partly due to these revelations, several members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidates, and more than 60 leading environmental, science and social justice groups (including UCS) have called for the Justice Department to investigate ExxonMobil for deliberately deceiving the public, much in the same way the tobacco industry lied about the link between smoking and disease. And then, on November 4, Schneiderman launched his criminal investigation to determine, as he told PBS NewsHour, whether Exxon was “using the best science and the most competent [climate] models for their own purposes, but then telling the public, the regulators and shareholders that no competent models existed.” If that’s the case, he said, the company could be guilty of fraud.

ExxonMobil’s Counterattack

Cohen and other ExxonMobil officials, including CEO Rex Tillerson and the aforementioned Richard Keil, hit back with a flurry of press releases, newspaper columns, TV and radio interviews, and tweets. Right out of the box, they attacked the credibility of InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, calling them “activists” and mischaracterizing their reporting.

“Activists deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers,” Cohen said in an October 21 press release, for example. “These activists took those statements out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time, which, in fact, mirrored global understanding.”

In fact, both news organizations did report there were differences of opinion among Exxon scientists early on. As InsideClimate News put it, company researchers “acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science.” By the early 1980s, however, internal documents show that company scientists had concluded that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences within the first half of the 21st century if fossil fuel emissions weren’t significantly reduced. It was later in that decade when the company turned a deaf ear to what its scientists were saying, presumably because it feared heightened awareness about climate change could lead to government controls on carbon emissions.

The turning point came in 1988. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the same year the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress that global warming had already begun, Exxon’s public affairs director defined the “Exxon Position” in a draft memo titled “The Greenhouse Effect.” Acknowledging the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is driving global warming, the memo recommended that the company “emphasize the uncertainty.”

That’s just what a number of key Exxon researchers did from then on, turning their backs on their previous work. As InsideClimate News characterized it, they “became vocal climate contrarians” and ridiculed IPCC findings.

ExxonMobil’s Disinformation Network

In the 1990s, Exxon participated in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an alliance of more than 60 U.S. and British corporations and trade groups formed in 1989 to thwart international and domestic efforts to address global warming by, you guessed it, emphasizing scientific uncertainty.

By end of the decade, however, Exxon and other key GCC members began enlisting the help of a number of think tanks that had been surreptitiously assisting the tobacco industry in its fight against tighter controls on smoking. Why? To hide their fingerprints. Exxon, which quickly proved to have the deepest pockets—at least until the Koch brothers surpassed it in 2005—kicked off its spending spree on these think tanks and other nonprofit advocacy groups in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil and Kenneth Cohen became the company’s VP for public and government affairs.

In January 2007, UCS issued a report that revealed that between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil had spent at least $16 million on a network of more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks and advocacy groups to launder its message. A few weeks later, when asked about the report by a Greenwire reporter, Cohen said ExxonMobil had stopped funding them.

That claim is as preposterous today as it was eight years ago. Just last year the company spent $1.9 million on 15 climate science denier groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and 10 of last year’s grantees were among those cited in UCS’s 2007 report. All told, Greenpeace has documented that ExxonMobil has spent $31 million since 1998 on denier groups, but there is good reason to suspect that’s not even the half of it. A former highly placed ExxonMobil executive who requested anonymity told UCS that the company paid out as much as $10 million annually on what insiders called “black ops” from 1998 through 2005, significantly more than what UCS was able to pin down in its 2007 report from company tax records.

So what should we make of Cohen’s apparent admission on PBS NewsHour about ExxonMobil’s role in the climate-denial funding game? Well, Cohen may not be much of a grammarian, but he is top-notch lawyer who worked for 22 years in Exxon’s legal department before becoming VP for public affairs. As noted above, Cohen was likely taking a new tack designed to shield ExxonMobil from blame for the climate disinformation campaign. Lawyers call it “plausible deniability.” ExxonMobil may have paid denier groups for their services, the argument goes, but those groups are solely responsible for their actions.

Legally proving a quid pro quo may be difficult, but at least one prominent denier-group funder has spoken candidly about the power such funding entails. In Brian Doherty’s 2007 book,Radicals for Capitalism: The Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, David Koch put it plainly. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our interest,” Koch said. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding. We do exert that kind of control.”

Cohen can trot out the “plausible deniability” line all he likes, but there is little doubt that ExxonMobil has exerted that kind of control, too.

ExxonMobil’s Culpability

The big question is, are ExxonMobil’s actions illegal?

The Washington Post doesn’t think so. It ran an editorial on Nov. 14, Exxon deserves criticism, but it didn’t commit a crime. Syndicated columnist Robert J. Samuelson doesn’t think so, either. A week before the Post editorial, he wrote a column maintaining that ExxonMobil is being vilified for “expressing its opinions,” which deserve protection. For Samuelson, the company is exercising its constitutional right of free speech.

Attorney General Schneiderman obviously thinks they might be, hence his investigation. “In New York,” he told PBS NewsHour, “we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.” And, it goes without saying, there is no legal protection for fraud.

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, thinks they might be, too. “The revelation that Exxon knew about the link between climate change and carbon pollution as early as 1981 and yet continued to support decades-long campaign of denial described in the [July] UCS report, strengthens the parallel with the tobacco-industry conduct that led to a civil [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] verdict against tobacco,” Whitehousetold The Nation in July. “Whether [the Justice Department] pursues this or not is their call, but if nothing else, the UCS report shows these are legitimate questions to ask.”

Sharon Eubanks, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted the racketeering case against the tobacco industry, also has called for a federal investigation. “It appears to me, based on what we know so far, that there was a concerted effort by Exxon and others to confuse the public on climate change,” she said in an October 20 interview with Climate Progress. “They were actively denying the impact of human-caused carbon emissions, even when their own research showed otherwise.”

In any case, absent a full investigation, it would be premature draw to any conclusions about the legality of ExxonMobil’s conduct. At this point, we don’t know. What we do know is, in light of the evidence uncovered by UCS, InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and others, investigations of whether ExxonMobil violated any state or federal laws are undoubtedly warranted.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

Morocco’s Giant Solar Plant to Bring Energy to 1 Million People

Another Historic Day in the Battle to Stop the Tar Sands

Ted Cruz Calls Obama’s ‘Radical’ Climate Plan ‘Tyranny’

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

I do like it. Idiots are funny.

What do you find humorous about this.

It's humorous that anyone takes that idiot seriously.

I was talking about what he said, not who said it.

What he said was idiotic.

Why?

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Prince Charles: Climate Change Root Cause of Syrian War

I do like it. Idiots are funny.

What do you find humorous about this.

It's humorous that anyone takes that idiot seriously.

I was talking about what he said, not who said it.

What he said was idiotic.

Why?

Which CO2 causes drought? the old "natural" 280 ppm?
Is it the 280-320 ppm? Maybe the 320-360ppm?
What would the rainfall have been if CO2 was only 360 ppm today?
How much if it was 440 ppm?
If Chuck will provide his evidence that CO2 causes drought, I'll be happy to look it over.

 

[Crick]

If you want to hold that increasing CO2 will have no effect on the climate, then there's no point in discussing the details with you. If, on the other hand, you think mainstream science, working on the relationship between GHGs and climate change for the last half century, might have acquired SOME usable knowledge, you'll have to admit that there is very likely a connection between increased GHGs and changes in long term rainfall patterns. So, Todd, which will it be? Mainstream science or fringe nonsense?