The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report today arguing that oil giant 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 report said that a task force that Exxon Mobil helped create on global climate science in 1998 included someone who had led a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, “which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke.â€
This report comes on the heels of an unprecedented step by the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, which in September 2006 wrote the oil giant to demand that the company withdraw its support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”. The scientists also strongly criticised the company’s public statements on global warming, which they described as “inaccurate and misleading.” (see article)
Exxon Mobil raked in $10.5 billion in net earnings in the third quarter of 2006– a near record in American corporate profits that was second only to the $10.7 billion it recorded for the fourth quarter of 2005.
See the Union of Concerned Scientists Press Release
Read the whole report:
“Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil uses Big Tobacco Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science” (pdf)
