Bribing experts to deny global warming

February 2, 2007

Back in September, it appeared that ExxonMobil was beginning to turn a corner. The “Competitive Enterprise Institute,” a propaganda machine for Big Oil that created some unintentionally hilarious ad campaigns, would no longer be funded by the energy behemoth. What’s more, ExxonMobil told the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, that the company would “not be providing any further funding” to groups that distort global warming science. Progress?

Apparently not.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered. […]

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

Well, it makes some sense. If ExxonMobil isn’t going to fund its own propaganda machine anymore, it stands to reason that they’d start outsourcing the propaganda efforts to freelancers through fairly lucrative bribes.

Of course, in this instance, it’s particularly egregious. Legitimate policy experts and professionals already have outlets in which they can comment on the “strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.” But that’s not really what ExxonMobil is going for here — they wanted experts to manufacture concerns about the IPCC report in exchange for money. In other words, ExxonMobil wanted to perpetrate a fraud about an environmental crisis. And got caught.

What’s more, as Brad Plumer noted, even the good news about ExxonMobil severing ties to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is a bit of a sham.

So let’s see: Exxon has donated $1.6 million to AEI over the years, and there’s no indication that it plans to stop anytime soon. And that’s not all. Two weeks ago, ExxposeExxon — a coalition of environmental groups, including the NDRC and the Sierra Club — asked Exxon whether it had cut off funds for all of the 43 organizations on its payroll that have attacked climate-change science. Exxon never replied. There’s a strong suspicion that the company hasn’t really decided to quit spreading confusion about global warming. Instead, it just stopped funding CEI and a few other unnamed groups in order to garner some positive press, and that’s it. I believe “greenwashing” is the appropriate term here.

I can think of a few other terms that might apply, but none of them are “appropriate.”

Reading this, a Futurama Quote came to mind:

(Hookerbots/Moron Tanks): Bender honey we love you!
(Bender/Exxon as a Pimp) Shut up baby I know it!

  • This is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous byproduct of the concentration of wealth: the ability and clear intent to fund disinformation campaigns to defraud the public. The perps at ExxonMobil know that any doubt in the minds of willfully uninformed people can be spun into reasonable doubt regarding the conclusions, in this case, of the IPCC. Submitting “doubt” based on either ignorance, prejudice, or fraud amounts to the same thing: obfuscation.

    The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI…

    An oxymoron if there ever was one.

  • What is it about Exxon that makes it so much more evil than its rivals? Itchy seats at the corporate boardroom? What??

  • If the free enterprise system were perfect, the bribe money ExxonMobil laid out would instead have been spent on developing the next wave of energy resources to make the company a future profit. But rich folks can be just as slothful as the poor folks they like to bitch about and instead these bribes are the intersection of greed and laziness.

  • The corporate leaders at EXXon think like Bush – magical thinking. If people don’t believe in global warming, then it isn’t happening.

    Why corporate types insist on not changing, not growing, is beyond me. Short term profits are everything, it seems, even when long term thinking is so desperately needed.

  • If those freedom hating scientists would just shut up and say what they’re told, there would be no reason to bribe them. Obviously, it’s all their fault.

    Seriously? In a rational world, Exxon’s behavior makes the case to nationalize the entire petroleum industry.

  • Peteroado (#5) is so right. In all the years I have been aware of this and the other environmental disasters (peak oil, etc.), it has always amazed me that the reaction of American corporations was to stick their heads in the sand, when they could have seen it as the opportunity it is – a chance for American business to create a new technological edge by creating the technology to clean up the environment, deal with global warming, create new energy sources, etc., etc., etc. Aren’t we (theoretically) the country that can always “build a better mouse trap” – or is that all in the past?

    Actually, what it is, is that over the past 30 crucial years, the fifth-raters who can’t get in anywhere but an MBA program in school, who are all in it for memememe in making money now and the devil take the rest, have created a situation where American companies only look 90 days in the future (while the rest of the world takes a longer view), with the result that all of American industry is like the American car industry, and headed to the same ultimate graveyard.

    Much as I hate using tax power to reward these guys, it looks like a “carrot and stick” approach would be worthwhile: tax breaks for all long term research investments in the areas we need it, and increased taxes on all “short term” profits.

  • Corporations are about costly enterprise.

    This gamble to make a high profit for a bit longer may be far costlier than they think. Even money may not be able to cushion them from the consequences of their inactions.

  • Am I the only one here who sees how much of a similarity there is between CEI and AEI? The only real difference between the two is that “C” is made up mostly from mid-level oil lobbyists who didn’t get picked for “Bush hack” policy positions, and “A” seems to have an unusually-large number of ” former Bush campers” in their ranks. These people are like evil neocon locusts. Where’s the bug-spray?

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