Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air August 30, 2019

- ExxonMobil largest publicly traded corporation at $339 billion

- company vehemently opposes any governmental regulation that would require significantly
expanded investments in clean energy technologies or reductions in global warming
emissions

- spent millions to confuse and deceive public about the truth of global warming —
underwritten most sophisticated and successful disinformation campaign since Big Tobacco
misled the public about incontrovertible scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer
and heart disease

- ExxonMobil is most profitable corporation in history

• 2005 company netted $36 billion, nearly $100 million in profit each day

- 138 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2004 and roughly same
levels of emissions in 2005 from just company operations

- Gasoline, heating oil, kerosene, diesel products, aviation fuels, and heavy fuels resulted in
1,047 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions

• if ExxonMobile was a country, it’d rank 6th in emissions after US, China, Russia, Japan,
India

- Tools the fossil fuel (ExxonMobil mainly) industry uses are very similar to the tools Big
Tobacco used to confuse the public about the health problems smoking caused

• manufacture uncertainty: raising doubts

• information laundering: used/created seemingly independent front organizations to make

industry’s case and confuse public

• promoted scientific spokespeople: invested in scientific research to show legitimacy to

their PR efforts

• recast the debate: saying evidence found my legitimate science was not actually based on
“sound science”

• cultivated close ties with government officials: enormous leverage because of size and
power

- They don’t have to prove anything is safe, they just have to “maintain doubt” on the scientific
front

- 1989 Global Climate Coalition was formed (twice chaired by former CEO of ExxonMobile Lee
Raymond)

• responded aggressively to emerging scientific studies about global warming by opposing

governmental action designed to address the problem, emphasized remaining
uncertainties about climate change

- Kyoto Protocol (1997) majority of world’s industrialized nations committed to begin reducing
they global warming emissions on specified timetable

- 1998 ExxonMobile helped create small task force “Global Climate Science Team” (GCST)

• invest millions to manufacture uncertainty

- By late 1990s scientific evidence on global warming was so strong it became difficult to find
scientists who disputed the reality of human-caused climate change

- Several articles for the Marshall Institute came out positing that solar activity might actually
be responsible for global warming

- ExxonMobil created fake letters and claimed that petitions were signed by over 17,000
scientists but when a random search was done only about 1% of those scientists actually
held a Ph.D. in a climate science related field

• NAS (National Academy of Sciences) issued a statement disavowing Frederick Seitz’s

petition and disassociating the academy from the formatted paper

- Frederick Seitz was a big player with Big Tobacco disinformation campaign and came
out of retirement to help the climate change disinformation campaign

- ExxonMobil is emulating a proven corporate strategy for successfully deflecting attention

when one’s cause lacks credible scientific evidence with “sound science”