ExxonMobil
Private Intelligence
• Stratfor provided intelligence on shale gas activism for Exxon • Stratfor provided intelligence on environmental activists and journalists for the American Petroleum Institute, described by Stratfor’s then-vice president as “our biggest client” • Targets of Stratfor’s espionage have included ProPublica, Earthworks, grassroots organizers and individual activists. Stratfor was contacted by the Rocky Mountain Energy Security Group in regards to a nationwide direct action campaign organized by Rising Tide. [1]
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.[2]
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.
Litigation
The state of New Jersey filed a lawsuit October, 2022 against ExxonMobil, Shell Oil Company, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's most powerful lobbying group in which the five oil companies were members.[3]
The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court, states that the companies knew about climate change for decades and actively sought to conceal that information from the public. Instead, they funded PR campaigns aimed at confusing and misleading the public. [4]
The oil companies “concealed and misrepresented the dangers of fossil fuels; disseminated false and misleading information about the existence, causes, and effects of climate change; and aggressively promoted the ever-increasing use of their products at ever-greater volumes,” the complaint states.
Sources
- ↑ http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/stratfor_provided_energy_industry_with_intel_on_environmental_groups/
- ↑ https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/4767068/Information_Warfare_2013_MacKay_and_Munro_OS.pdf
- ↑ https://www.desmog.com/2022/10/18/new-jersey-sues-shell-exxon-api-oil-public-deception-climate/
- ↑ https://www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases22/2022-1018_NJ-Climate-Complaint-FILED.pdf