Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute
OCT 23, 2019
ExxonMobil says it
believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being
part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also
says it supports
a federal carbon tax and the Paris
climate agreement.
Then why, after all these
years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and
business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate
crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts
to rein in carbon emissions?
According to the company’s
latest grantmaking
report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include
its annual dues to trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute,
which opposes
a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock
directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65
million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the
2017-18 election cycle went to climate
science deniers.
Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s
2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan
Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the
company has spent some $37
million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record
of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late
David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.
The shred of good news here is
that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half
of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the
company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off
such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want
to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.
So what did ExxonMobil get for
its money in 2018?
Underwriting Climate Denial at
the U.S. Chamber
In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5
million to the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period on top
of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting
climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year,
the company kicked in $350,000 for
the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for
the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to
$365,000.
Two years ago, the Chamber
sponsored a widely debunked report that
wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S.
economy. President Trump used that report as his primary
rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.
Earlier this year, however,
the Chamber posted a new statement on
its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position.
“We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today
and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are
contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website
also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate
policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale
renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international
cooperation.”
Does that mean the Chamber has
finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the
Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power
plant carbon emissions, and supports the
Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber
spokesman told Politico
in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris
climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was
unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so
we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the
United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken
the U.S. commitment to it.
Backing Denial at the American
Enterprise Institute
The American Enterprise
Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has
received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier
organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000,
bringing its total to $4.65
million since 1998.
Economist Benjamin Zycher, an
Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate
issues, argues that
a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the
Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers
by John Christy, Judith Curry and other
outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate
alarmism.”
Last fall, for example, Zycher
took aim at the second volume of
the Fourth National
Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of
peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by
the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands
of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump
administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would
receive limited attention.
Zycher took issue with the
report’s conclusions in a blog
post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on
climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included
half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims,
human activity is responsible for more
than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950;
sea level rise has accelerated due
to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency
of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase
in hurricane
intensity over the past 40 years.
Zycher also posted a column belittling
a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges
ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate
climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for
internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22,
alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its
oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be
left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target
and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that
she filed the suit to advance her career.
Financing the Manhattan
Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables
The Manhattan Institute, a New
York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from
ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company
has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3
million.
Like the Enterprise Institute,
the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren
Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration
climate efforts, alleges the
international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think
tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for
an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric
vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the
oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.
Cass’s colleague, Senior
Fellow Robert Bryce,
has been bashing wind power for years and, like President
Trump, he wildly overstates its
threat to birds. In fact, the top
human-caused threats to birds are climate
change, buildings,
power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas
industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his
bogus argument.
Still another Manhattan
Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall
Street Journal in May titled “What
if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind,
solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains
far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new
electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a
June report by
Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and
solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills
also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution.
The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at
least $85
billion in damages.
Aiding and Abetting
Congressional Gridlock
On top of the hundreds of
thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last
year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67
percent of the $1.65
million it spent during the 2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1
million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate
science deniers.
It then spent $11.15
million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more
than any other oil and gas company.
One of the most talked-about
climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite
ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded
senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at
least five
nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a
majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent,
voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding
priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in
the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once
again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution,
which passed by
a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had
received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.
ExxonMobil first announced its
support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade
bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million
over two years to Americans for Carbon
Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral
carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a
coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government
officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for
dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution
regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate
lawsuits.
In a surprise move, however,
the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends
recently deleted the
provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently
abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and
ExxonMobil, which are facing more
than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate
change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but
based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers
who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case
that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep
bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol
Hill.
Author’s note: Besides the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000)
and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave
grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups:
American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and
International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution
($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of
Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).
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