‘Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air’

January 3, 2007

The Union of Concerned Scientists has been taking a very close look at how ExxonMobil has been spending its “public information and policy research” funds. The UCS’s findings aren’t surprising, but they are devastating. (thanks to K.Z. for the tip)

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

“ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy & Policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years.”

The UCS report, “Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to ‘Manufacture Uncertainty’ on Climate Change,” notes striking similarities between the tactics of the world’s largest oil company and the tobacco industry, including manufacturing doubts about indisputable scientific evidence, financing front groups to push bogus evidence, putting greed above public interest, and exploiting ties to Republican officials to block progress.

“When one looks closely, ExxonMobil’s underhanded strategy is as clear and indisputable as the scientific research it’s meant to discredit,” said Seth Shulman, an investigative journalist who wrote the UCS report. “The paper trail shows that, to serve its corporate interests, ExxonMobil has built a vast echo chamber of seemingly independent groups with the express purpose of spreading disinformation about global warming.”

UCS has the goods. Bring on the hearings.

Great!

Now I can slap down my dumbass Exon management brother-in-law another time 😉

  • This is the kind of evidence that will show the idiots who fall for Exxon’s tobacco science in no uncertain terms that they are being played for chumps. Even they can understand that greed makes people do strange things, so seeing the money trail should clear up some uncertainty.

    But goddam it if PBS doesn’t consistently put shills from AEI etc on TV, giving Exxon an “unbiased” backer at almost every discussion.

    Definitely consider sending a little money to the UCS, they totally rock.

  • That’s great work by the UCS.

    Hey that’s what Republicans have done. They’ve also followed the Tobacco model. They set up phony groups with names that mean the opposite of what they’re doing. They name initiatives as if they mean something they don’t. They use “fair and balanced” new orgs to spread their partisan lies. I guess it is systemized Newspeak.

  • Must be some kind of reality-based trick. Everybody knows Al Gore invented global warming in order to promote the war on quarterly dividends.

    (Wouldn’t it make more sense to dump some of those profits into alternative fuel research rather than deny the inevitable? You know, use some of that good old entrepreneurial spirit to one-up the competition? Guess not.)

  • Talk about a Parliament of Whores.

    I’m no believer in the Vast White Straight Male Oppressor HiveMind…until I read things like this.

    And even in the case of RJ Reynolds and the Big Chimp, I find dirty tricks for profit or power slightly more understandable. When we start talking about cooking the books and the environment for fun and profit, it is a bit like watching a guy saw away at the tree limb he’s sitting on. If they know enough to try to bury the truth, doesn’t the truth concern them? At the very least they might realize a population dead of starvation, freak storms, heat stroke, drowning, doesn’t buy much gas. I don’t get it.

    Give him one for the rest of us Lance.

  • So does this mean that is a pretty good chance that the Feds can take away Jabba Raymond (the retired CEO of EXXON MOBILE)’s $400 MILLION dollar pension? The way EM and the rest of Big Oil is behaving sounds almost RICO esque. Lying and deception for profit is still a crime (for now.)

    Gee, that would be AWFUL…

  • “At the very least they might realize a population dead of starvation, freak storms, heat stroke, drowning, doesn’t buy much gas.” — taio

    By the time that happens, they’ll have their fat bank accounts and waterfront property in Tennessee, so who cares?

  • “Now I can slap down my dumbass Exon management brother-in-law another time”

    Ditto for my geophysics PhD cousin who started out as a college prof & sold out to be an Exxon environmental impact assessment specialist.

  • Beep52’s comment #4 echoes my thoughts — why not channel this disinformation campaign money into something good instead? But, alas, this is the problem with American business these days. Of their own volition they won’t look to new markets and new profit centers. Government has to bribe them to do that. They’d rather pay good money to keep a business that is becoming rapidly outmoded around than change their business model.

    But now that foreign brains that used to populate our universities and then corporate labs are staying in their home countries in droves, I guess we’ll have to buy our alt-fuel technologies from overseas instead, further driving up our trade defictits. Energy companies do not have the best interests of America in mind — at all.

  • Bring on the hearings, indeed. Who–beside the shills paid for by the oil companies themselves–would stand up for them? I think the Democrats could earn some easy points by holding their feet to the fire. Especially if it begins to look like the Democratic legislative agenda is flagging.

    • Comments are closed.