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ExxonMobil Caves To Science
Slick Maneuvering By Oil Giant On
Climate Change
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| Ross Gelbspan is a veteran
newspaper editor and reporter, and the Pulitzer Prize winning
author of The Heat Is On, published by Perseus Books in
1998. He maintains the Web site The Heat Is
On-Line. |
ExxonMobil deserves a measure of
congratulations for finally acknowledging what has long been
accepted by more than 2,000 scientists, some 160 nations and
virtually every other oil company in the world.
The world's largest oil company softened its long-standing
campaign of disinformation against mainstream science by
acknowledging the potential risks of climate change and announcing a
10-year $100 million grant to Stanford University for research on
"low-emissions" technologies.
Still, ExxonMobil can't seem to break its disinformation habit.
Even as ExxonMobil declared that renewable technologies remain
years in the future, Toyota announced it is putting a fleet of
hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars on the streets of Tokyo in December.
Its New York Times op-ad on November 22, 2002 drew howls
of ridicule when the world's third largest corporation declared:
[M]any ... alternative energy approaches
are not as energy efficient, environmentally beneficial or
economic as competing fossil fuels. They are often sustained only
through special advantages and government subsidies. This is not a
desirable basis for public policy or the provision of
energy.
Currently ExxonMobil benefits from federal subsidies of about $25
billion a year for fossil fuels. That figure does not include an
estimated additional $15 billion to protect oil supplies from the
Middle East. Under the Bush administration, renewable technologies
will receive about $920 million a year in subsidies for five years.
The oil giant contends that the government has extended "special
advantages" to renewable energy providers. But during the formation
of the administration's Energy Plan, the renewable energy industry
was essentially invisible.
By contrast, ExxonMobil, the second biggest energy funder of the
Bush Campaign, met on numerous occasions with Vice President Cheney
and his staff in preparation of the administration's Energy Plan.
Those meetings followed a memo from ExxonMobil to the White House
which led to the ouster of Dr. Robert Watson as head of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Moreover, ExxonMobil hand-picked the Bush administration's new
climate negotiator, who promptly announced the United States will
not engage the Kyoto process for at least 10 years.
ExxonMobil's 10-year research grant amounts to one-tenth of one
percent of the money the oil giant will spend on oil exploration in
the next decade, according to Campaign ExxonMobil. It amounts to
about 40 percent of the annual salary of its CEO.
ExxonMobil's change of posture was designed to deflect further
demonization of the company, which has been the object of a
widespread European boycott and the victim of an unexpectedly
successful shareholder campaign at its annual meeting. An
alternative resolution, calling on the company to cease its
"disinformation" and develop a plan for renewables, gained a
remarkable 21 percent last May.
Still, despite ExxonMobil's effort to project a kinder, gentler
tone of denial, it is still having problems with the scorched-earth
rhetoric of CEO Lee Raymond.
Raymond proclaimed recently: "The mainstream of some so-called
environmentalists or politically correct Europeans isn't the
mainstream of all scientists or the White House. The world has been
a lot warmer than it is now and it didn't have anything to do with
carbon dioxide."
So much for 100 years of peer-reviewed scientific research into
the heat-trapping qualities of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
By contrast, more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries
reporting to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in what
is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific
collaboration in history found in 1995 that human beings are
changing the climate by our burning of fossil fuels. In 2001, the
IPCC found:
Climate change is occurring much more
rapidly than scientists anticipated ... temperatures in this
century could rise by as much as 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit as
impending climate impacts occur ... most of earth's people will be
losers.
On balance, ExxonMobil's change of posture is a welcome step. If
it is an indicator of future corporate policy, ExxonMobil could
become a central engine of positive change for the world.
But if, as many climate activists worry, ExxonMobil's latest
initiative is simply a prolonged stall to avoid dealing with the
climate crisis, it will soon be hard pressed to prove that its
corporate behavior does not constitute a crime against humanity.
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Published: Nov 27 2002
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