Oil giant ExxonMobil has for years been the world’s most controversial oil firm for its opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and its role in convincing the US government to abstain from effective measures to combat climate change. Despite growing pressure, the company continues to fuel the work of climate sceptic think tanks and lobby groups in North America and Europe. Last year ExxonMobil distributed $2,9 million to 39 such groups. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that aggressively challenges the need to act against global warming, was the biggest US beneficiary of ExxonMobil funding last year.

In Europe, ExxonMobil has funded virulent opponents of EU efforts to combat climate change such as the International Policy Network, the Centre for The New Europe, Tech Central Station and the International Council for Capital Formation – the latter three based in Brussels. In 2005, ExxonMobil funded the climate change programmes of Centre for The New Europe and the International Policy Network for $50,000 and $130,000 respectively. With these expenses ExxonMobil wants to create an environment where climate scepticism appears to come from respectable sources, whereas in reality the climate skeptics are paid by a vested interest to pollute the climate debate with non-scientific arguments.

Earlier this year, the Royal Society, the UK’s most prestigious scientific body, wrote to the oil giant to demand that it withdraws its funding for these groups because they have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”. This demand was echoed in an open letter sent to ExxonMobil in October by two United States senators. The senators, one Republican and one Democrat, called upon the company to show corporate responsibility and “end any further financial assistance” to groups “whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth.”

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Links:

Letter to Nick Thomas, Director Corporate Affairs, Esso UK Ltd., The Royal Society, 4 September 2006

Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial, The Guardian, 20 September 2006

Pundits who contest climate change should tell us who is paying them, George Monbiot, The Guardian, 26 September 2006

Covert industry funding fuels the expansion of radical rightwing EU think tanks, Corporate Europe Observatory, July 2005

ExxonMobil’s Worldwide Giving Report 2005, Public Information and Policy, ExxonMobil Corporation, 2006