ExxonMobil
Climate Denial
In an interview with Chief Executive Magazine in October 2002, Lee Raymond, the CEO of ExxonMobil was quoted as saying "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."
ExxonMobil has long sponsored a network of advocacy organizations and lobbyists that deny the existence of climate change and its human causes. These are not scientific centres for the study of climatology, but lobby groups and policy think-tanks including the American Council for Capital Formation, the Fraser Institute, the Center for Policy Research, the George C. Marshal Institute, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and Foundation, the Centre for the New Europe, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the International Policy Network.[1]
In 2004, Greenpeace published a database called 'Exxon Secrets' exposing the extent to which ExxonMobil was funding climate denial. In 2006, they published that ExxonMobil has paid $3.5 million to 49 different organizations all of which actively campaigned against policies to address global warming in the year 2005. Subsequent research into this elaborate network of funding revealed that Exxon has paid out over $22 million to the climate change denial industry since 1998.