*NEWS*HOT YEAR FOR EXXON & 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 10:58 AM