HOT YEAR FOR EXXON & THE PLANET

[Anonymous]

Hot year for Exxon, planet
Global profits, global temperatures: both soaring
2006(GREENPEACE)
Houston,
United States – ExxonMobil announces record company profits of US$32
billion in 2005. Meanwhile, NASA notes that 2005 was the hottest year
on record for our warming planet. Coincidence? We don’t think so.
While
Exxon sees the billions rolling in faster and faster, evidence that
global warming is gathering pace is rapidly piling up. While most oil
companies are making huge profits, what Exxon does — and doesn’t do —
with those profits is what marks them out as the world’s number one
climate criminal.
It’s pretty easy to see why Exxon is rich. Higher
oil and gas prices, a friendly US administration which subsidises big
oil and goes easy on taxes and fees, and the kind of fiscal
conservatism that holds back compensation for environmental disasters
like the Exxon Valdez.  That $US 32 billion is the largest profit ever
recorded by an American corporation.
But despite the worldwide
consensus to the contrary, Exxon continues to fund the view that we
just can’t figure out what oil has to do with global warming.
Last
year, an industry lobby group called the Scientific Alliance was
working the halls of government in Britain to soften Tony Blair’s
position of global warming.  They published a joint report with the
George C Marshall Institute in Washington that they claimed
“undermined” studies that attribute global warming to human activity,
and in particular the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. The
Marshall institute has received more than a half a million dollars from
ExxonMobil since 1998 including US$95,000 for its “global climate
change programme.”
And in September 2003 we uncovered a smoking-gun
memo that revealed an Exxon-funded lobby group had been asked by
conservative elements in the Bush Administration to sue their own
colleagues at the Environmental Protection Agency.  An EPA study had
dared to suggest there might be a link between oil and climate change.

[Author]

March 7, 2006 at 11:00 AM