Exxon Targeted as Villain in Suppressing What it Knew About Climate Change

November 1, 2015 – Last July I wrote a posting (link provided) expressing why I was so put off by companies like ExxonMobil. In it I revealed that ExxonMobil’s own engineers back in 1981 had already identified the burning of fossil fuels as a principal contributor to global warming. The engineer described the “carbon bomb” that Exxon (at that time they had not yet merged and absorbed Mobil) was pursuing in the development of a new field off Indonesia.

Well now the proverbial “sh–t has hit the fan” for the oil giant with all manner of organizations and Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, calling for a U.S. probe into Exxon. The other Democratic candidate of consequence, Bernie Sanders, has sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney General calling for a task force to investigate the company. The “what did they know and when did they know it” questions need answers although the 1981 email memo pretty much answers both questions.

Joining Clinton and Sanders are nearly 50 environmental, civil rights and indigenous people’s groups. It is not so much the “what they knew” that has put off all of these people. It is the question that when they knew it, why did they fund climate denial groups such as the Heartland Institute? Why did their chairman, Rex Tillerson, at the May 27, 2015 annual shareholder’s meeting, tell his investors that climate change science is “not that good.”

Clinton at a New Hampshire town hall meeting is captured on video and posted to Twitter stating “there is a lot of evidence that they [referring to ExxonMobil] misled…..” One Senator in a speech to Congress describes the action of ExxonMobil as a  “deliberate smokescreen.”

In a jointly-signed letter sent to the U.S. Attorney General ExxonMobil is compared to tobacco companies whose scientists knew for decades that smoking their products had health consequences, yet the companies mounted external campaigns to discredit independent third-party science that had uncovered the same evidence.

ExxonMobil stopped directly funding the Heartland Institute in 2008 according to investigative reporting done by the Los Angeles Times. The decision came about because of some shareholder complaints as well as those coming from scientific organizations studying global warming. But instead the company gave money to third parties who then funneled it to the Heartland and other climate change denial groups.

And as for Tillerson’s negative remarks about climate change science, it was Exxon from the early 1970s that put money into climate change research. Exxon scientists created global circulation models working in cooperation with NASA and the Canadian Climate Centre. And it was a senior ice researcher for Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, that stated at a conference in 1991 that greenhouse gases are rising “due to the burning of fossil fuels….nobody disputes this fact.” That is nobody but ExxonMobil’s own chairman and its board.