EXXON :FUNDING CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS

[Anonymous]

Exxon Still Funding Climate Change Deniers
Exxon is pumping out lies
So.
The day of reckoning has come – when we get to find out just how much
of the climate change denial industry ExxonMobil is still paying
for.This is the company which, apparently, has been “misunderstood” on
global warming and has said it has dropped its funding of the deniers.
The ExxonSecrets people have gone through the documents, and found a
clear answer:  last year Exxon spent $2.1 million on 41 groups who are
leading the climate skeptic industry.While the company has been forced
to drop the hottest potato of them all, the Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI) and another particularly vocal denier,  Steve “Junk
Science” Milloy,  the rest of them are still on the payroll.Like who? 
The Heartland Institute,  the Heritage Foundation, the George C
Marshall Institute, the American Enterprise Institute… all the groups
who’ve been at the heart of the climate change denial industry for more
than a decade.  These include the groups who were listed in a 1998
American Petroleum Institute memo outlining a communications strategy
for taking down the Kyoto Protocol.So despite its protestations, the
company is still running the skeptic industry.

So what else is Exxon not telling us?
ExxonSecrets
has obtained the company’s Exxon Foundation 2005 report to the IRS. 
Exxon told the IRS that that it funded 14 groups specifically for their
climate change work.  But somehow the company didn’t mention this in
public.Exxon has always been quick to point out that it just gives
these groups general funding and doesn’t tell them what to do or how to
spend the money.But giving money to the Frontiers of Freedom for their
“climate change efforts” seems pretty specific.  Especially when those
“efforts” included an eight-page report dedicated entirely to
questioning global warming science, policy and attacking Al Gore. “The
truth is, there is no conclusive or reliable scientific proof that the
sky is falling or that Earth’s climate is experiencing cataclysmic
warming caused by man’s activities,” says Frontiers for Freedom. Last
year Exxon rewarded these efforts with a $180,000 grant, up from
$80,000 the year before.

Another is the George C Marshall
Institute, whose CEO William O’Keefe (former American Petroleum
Institute officer and registered ExxonMobil lobbyist) recently referred
to the April 2007 ruling by the US Supreme Court (that the EPA has the
authority to regulate carbon dioxide) as “a triumph of judicial
activism…ideology… political science” by a court that “may have been
too influenced by political correctness and climate orthodoxy.”   The
institute got $85,000 from Exxon in 2006.This company has now funded
the climate change denial industry to the tune of $22 million since
1998.  Last  year the UK’s prestigious scientific body, the Royal
Society,  wrote to Exxon asking them to stop funding the groups who
were “misinforming the public about the science of climate change”. 
Exxon indicated to the Royal Society that they had – and they would. In
February this year Exxon did a big public relations round of the media,
saying it had been “misunderstood” on climate change and gave the clear
indication that it had dropped its funding of the climate skeptic
industry. “Exxon softens its stance on climate change” screamed the
headlines.  But very little has changed, except Exxon’s PR machine. 
It’s been business as usual at the Dallas HQ, no matter what they said
in public.

[Author]

July 19, 2007 at 11:48 AM