We Now Know the Facts

Seems Like a Faceoff of ExxonMobil Vs. The World

Commentary by Marcelo Gleiser, Blog: 13.7 Cosmos & Culture (NPR), November 30, 2016

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, the president and the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), respectively, explain why the organization decided to divest its holdings on fossil fuel companies.

Although the divesting decision is broad-ranging, they single out ExxonMobil for its “morally reprehensible conduct.”

“For over a quarter-century the company tried to deceive policymakers and the public about the realities of climate change, protecting its profits at the cost of immense damage to life on this planet,” they write, condemning ExxonMobil for not only covering up its cutting-edge research findings on how fossil-fuel burning affects the global climate, but also for willfully promoting an agenda of deception, aiming at confusing and influencing public opinion by turning a scientific issue into a political one.

Could this be true? Could a trusted American company, with revenues larger than the gross domestic products of countries like Austria and Thailand, plot to deceive the public?

That’s what the RFF determined, after funding a team of independent investigative reporters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to research what ExxonMobil and other U.S. oil companies actually know about climate change.

In a nutshell, the team of journalists found that ExxonMobil has known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels is the dominant cause of global warming.

As early as 1965, Lyndon Johnson told Congress: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” Not surprisingly, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists understood quite well the mechanisms of climate change and its broad implications for the oil business.

A 1979 Exxon memo reported:

“Models predict that the present trend of fossil fuel use will lead to dramatic climatic changes within the next 75 years …. Should it be deemed necessary to maintain atmospheric CO2 levels to prevent significant climatic changes, dramatic changes in patterns of energy use would be required.”

This memo was circulated within the company, and sent to a number of the company’s leading scientists, who are supposed to report to the company’s leadership.

The investigative report from the RFF is quite clear in its findings. Yet, few people know about this. Shouldn’t the public be outraged at this? Shouldn’t people boycott ExxonMobil, stop buying its products? Shouldn’t all large investors (and smaller ones) divest their holdings from this company?

Divesting a company is a direct form of action based largely on a moral argument, aiming at both proving a point and at exerting pressure. It becomes the currency of those who want to make a difference without waiting for governmental regulations — which depend on slow-moving, fluctuating partisan political decisions — to take place.

The leaders of ExxonMobil and other oil companies want to maximize profit. This is not surprising, given that this is what any company wants to do. The more profitable a company, the more valuable it is and the more assets it has. This is the so-called bottom line, which, put simply, is the balance sheet of the company: The more it makes, the more its shareholders make.

There’s nothing wrong with a company wanting to maximize its profits. What is objectionable is how far it’s willing to go in order to do so. Where do you draw the line between healthy ambition and immoral greed?

Cigarette companies have done similar things, as reported in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Tobacco companies knew as early as 1953 that cigarette smoking can kill. Through a large-scale effort of deception, including undermining the credibility of serious scientific studies on the deleterious effects of smoking, the tobacco companies managed to stall public awareness for decades. Oil companies are using similar tactics, focusing on their short and midterm gains, caring nothing for what comes a few decades down the line — even if our global future, including the health and social stability of this and the next generation, is largely dependent on it.

We live in an era of rising corporate ethics, where many companies understand the importance of aligning with sound science to guarantee their long-term profitability. To declare war on scientific findings and public awareness is to declare war on our joint shared future. Divesting a company, be it at the individual or at the foundation portfolio level, packs a meaningful punch: It tells the company that it is acting against its main interest, in a process that can only be described as self-destructive — it is compromising the very resources that keep it alive. If people stop buying from a company at a large enough scale, the company folds.

The campaign against public awareness of climate change is a desperate decoy; like the scared octopus that jets out a cloud of black ink to hide itself from predators, the oil companies are trying to hide their findings to protect their morally questionable intentions. The tragedy here is that what the oil companies consider to be a “predator” is the climate science they once led.

The octopus doesn’t have any other choice. But the oil companies do. They could invest a fraction of their huge profits to reinvent themselves, becoming true leaders in the search for alternative renewable fuels, while retraining their work force into the emerging new technologies. This way, instead of holding back the planet and millions of workers in a decadent economics model, they would become the companies of the future, working to ensure, and not to destroy, our collective well-being.

ExxonMobil Stockholders Meeting - Houston

Exxon-Mobil is abusing the first amendment (and worse)

From an Op-Ed by Robert Post, Washington Post, Page A-27, Sunday, June 26, 2016

<< Prof. Robert Post is dean and a professor of law at the Yale Law School, New Haven, CT>>

Global warming is perhaps the single most significant threat facing the future of humanity on this planet. It is likely to wreak havoc on the economy, including, most especially, on the stocks of companies that sell hydrocarbon energy products. If large oil companies have deliberately misinformed investors about their knowledge of global warming, they may have committed serious commercial fraud.

A potentially analogous instance of fraud occurred when tobacco companies were found to have deliberately misled their customers about the dangers of smoking. The safety of nicotine was at the time fiercely debated, just as the threat of global warming is now vigorously contested. Because tobacco companies were found to have known about the risks of smoking, even as they sought to convince their customers otherwise, they were held liable for fraud. Despite the efforts of tobacco companies to invoke First Amendment protections for their contributions to public debate, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found: “Of course it is well settled that the First Amendment does not protect fraud.”

The point is a simple one. If large corporations were free to mislead deliberately the consuming public, we would live in a jungle rather than in an orderly and stable market.

Raising the revered flag of the First Amendment, ExxonMobil and its supporters loudly object to investigations recently announced by attorneys general of several states into whether ExxonMobil has publicly misrepresented what it knew about global warming.

The National Review has accused the attorneys general of “trampling the First Amendment.” Post columnist George F. Will has written that the investigations illustrate the “authoritarianism” implicit in progressivism, which seeks “to criminalize debate about science.” And Hans A. von Spakovsky, speaking for the Heritage Foundation, compared the attorneys general to the Spanish Inquisition.

Despite their vitriol, these denunciations are wide of the mark. If your pharmacist sells you patent medicine on the basis of his “scientific theory” that it will cure your cancer, the government does not act like the Spanish Inquisition when it holds the pharmacist accountable for fraud.

The obvious point, which remarkably bears repeating, is that there are circumstances when scientific theories must remain open and subject to challenge, and there are circumstances when the government must act to protect the integrity of the market, even if it requires determining the truth or falsity of those theories. Public debate must be protected, but fraud must also be suppressed. Fraud is especially egregious because it is committed when a seller does not himself believe the hokum he foists on an unwitting public.

One would think conservative intellectuals would be the first to recognize the necessity of prohibiting fraud so as to ensure the integrity of otherwise free markets. Prohibitions on fraud go back to Roman times; no sane market could exist without them.

It may be that after investigation the attorneys general do not find evidence that ExxonMobil has committed fraud. I do not prejudge the question. The investigation is now entering its discovery phase, which means it is gathering evidence to determine whether fraud has actually been committed.

Nevertheless, ExxonMobil and its defenders are already objecting to the subpoena by the attorneys general, on the grounds that it “amounts to an impermissible content-based restriction on speech” because its effect is to “deter ExxonMobil from participating in the public debate over climate change now and in the future.” It is hard to exaggerate the brazen audacity of this argument.

If ExxonMobil has committed fraud, its speech would not merit First Amendment protection. But the company nevertheless invokes the First Amendment to suppress a subpoena designed to produce the information necessary to determine whether ExxonMobil has committed fraud. It thus seeks to foreclose the very process by which our legal system acquires the evidence necessary to determine whether fraud has been committed. In effect, the company seeks to use the First Amendment to prevent any informed lawsuit for fraud.

But if the First Amendment does not prevent lawsuits for fraud, it does not prevent subpoenas designed to provide evidence necessary to establish fraud. That is why when a libel plaintiff sought to inquire into the editorial processes of CBS News and CBS raised First Amendment objections analogous to those of ExxonMobil, the Supreme Court in the 1979 case Herbert v. Lando unequivocally held that the Constitution does not preclude ordinary discovery of information relevant to a lawsuit, even with respect to a defendant news organization.

The attorneys general are not private plaintiffs. They represent governments, and the Supreme Court has always and rightfully been extremely reluctant to question the good faith of prosecutors when they seek to acquire information necessary to pursue their official obligations. 

If every prosecutorial request for information could be transformed into a constitutional attack on a defendant’s point of view, law enforcement in this country would grind to a halt. Imagine the consequences in prosecutions against terrorists, who explicitly seek to advance a political ideology.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Tom Bond being interviewed by WBOY

Exxon’s Culpability is a Subject of Concern across America

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Everyone knows by this time that by the 70′sand 80′s Exxon became aware at the highest levels of global warming. They even realized ” Through their own studies and their participation in government-sponsored conferences, company researchers had concluded that rising CO₂ levels could create catastrophic impacts within the first half of the 21^st century if the burning of oil, gas and coal wasn’t contained.”

Scientists elsewhere were aware before Exxon that it was happening as far back as the 1930′s. Exxon maintains a staff that became aware of this thinking who convinced the money men to finance research within Exxon. (Incidentally, in that reference a detailed timeline of oil and coal burning is included. It is produced by the American Institute of Physics) Thus Exxon was among the first to do measurements and quantification on which today’s science is built.

Their research was widely disseminated in Exxon, in particular a 46 page memo to 15 executives and managers November 12, 1982, with a cover letter by Marvin B. Glasser that said, “the CO₂ ‘Greenhouse Effect’ which is receiving increased attention in both the scientific and popular press is an emerging environmental issue” and “The material has been given wide circulation to Exxon management and is intended to familiarize Exxon personnel with the subject.” He also warned, “It should be restricted to Exxon personnel and not distributed externally.”

Exxon has never publically agreed with climate warming. There wasn’t much said until NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming in 1988. By this time Exxon gave the world the impression the science was controversial. Those who had studied the matter agreed by the next year to create the Global Climate Coalition to “present the views of the industry on the global warming debate.” In other words, to sow confusion.

How much has Exxon spent to sow confusion? One source shows nearly $31 million from 1998 to 2014.

Exxon’s peers knew, too. The American Petroleum Institute (API) and the nation’s oil companies set up an organization to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1982, about the same time Exxon was doing its research. Other companies were Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio as well as Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil. So Exxon was a leader, not out there alone. API at first used the name the Carbon Dioxide and Climate Task Force, but changed its name to Climate and Energy Task Force in 1980. It is clear they were thinking the oil industry would have to bare some of the responsibility, and that it would affect their operations. By 1988 API had started a campaign to convince the American public and lawmakers that climate science was too tenuous for the United States to ratify the Kyoto Protocol treaty. See the reference article for more details.

Exxon is not alone in funding climate change denial. A study by Justin Farrell, a professor at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has published results from an analysis of “all known organizations and individuals promoting contrarian viewpoints, as well as the entirety of all written and verbal texts about climate change from 1993 – 2013 from every organization, three major news outlets [the New York Times, the Washington Times, and USA Today], all US presidents, and every occurrence on the floor of the US Congress.” The Koch brothers were linked in also. This was achieved by machine-reading more than 39 million words.

In “This Changes Everything,” Naomi Klein says, “According to one recent study … what sociologist Robert Brulle the sociologist, calls the ‘climate change counter-movement’ are collectively pulling in more than $900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wind causes, most of it in the form of dark money funds from conservatives foundations that cannot be fully traced.”

So let’s see where things are today. New York State and California are engaged in legal action to find out what Exxon knew. Previous knowledge has been on the basis of a study by Inside Climate News. New York has filed an injunction seeking documents covering four decades of research and internal communications concerning climate change plus advertising materials. More recently, the Maryland State Attorney General has suggested his office may investigate, too.

Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers reply includes: “We unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research contained in media reports that are inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research that was conducted publicly in conjunction with the Department of Energy, academics and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Or, more succinctly, “We never done nothin.’”

In an online petition drive, in public statements and behind the scenes, environmental advocates and their political allies are pressing federal and state authorities to launch investigations, subpoenas or prosecutions to pin down what Exxon knew and when. The oil giant’s critics say Exxon might be held liable either for failing to disclose the risks to shareholders and financial regulators, or for manufacturing doubt to deceive people about the science of climate change.

New York state’s comptroller and four other major ExxonMobil shareholders asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to force the oil producer to include a climate change resolution in its annual shareholder proxy, according to a filing seen by Reuters. Exxon is digging in against the effort and has succeeded with holding stockholders uninformed up to this point. And it is fighting a move by investors holding more than $3.4 trillion who have decided to sell their stock.

Exxon has supported the American Geophysical Union, the largest of its kind. 60,000 members world-wide for years, now the question arises: Why is the AGU allowing its support when Exxon is supporting Climate Denial, too? Over 100 members of AGU have written a letter to drop Exxon as a sponsor of its annual earth science conference.

One of the front line actions now is to get proper education on climate change. In recent years there have been many “academic freedom” bills in state legislatures which permit teaching creationist material as science, although creationism is contrary to the opinion of scientists. Now such bills include climate denial clauses as well. In the face of local opinion, teachers sometimes have a hard time keeping science consistent with expert opinion. Teachers need materials, in-service training, and support from both the education hierarchy and parents.

There is much less problem in universities, but the general public needs links to current events. The succession of increasingly hot years and sea rise which are observed, along with disappearance of glaciers and earlier appearance of migratory species in the spring, and earlier plant development need to be pointed out. Explanations of why there are changes in the rate of temperature rise and the continuing accumulation of ice at the South Pole are difficult to explain to persons without a thorough education in basic science.

Why do sincere people with no interest in the carbon industry accept this special pleading? At least one person, Katharine Hayhoe, has suggested that the real basis of both religious and political opposition to climate change is that a solution implies some sort of cooperative action among people. The American ideology of individualism is contrary to trying to have the community (i. e. government) act to effect a change. Ms. Hayhoe crosses boundaries, she is both an Evangelical and a scientist who accepts climate change.

There is an endless number of analyses. If you doubt this, do a Google search on “climate change denial religion.” In the face of overwhelming physical evidence, why do people still doubt? Catastrophic change is ahead. The answer must lie in deep psychology. As Carl Jung, a great figure in psychology, once said, “people can’t take too much reality.”

Exxon paid $35 billion for XTO

Judge Rules Exxon Must Face Criminal Charges Over 50,000 Gallon Fracking Waste Dumping

From an Article by Emily Atkin, ThinkProgress, January 3, 2014

ExxonMobil Corp. subsidiary XTO Energy will have to face criminal charges for allegedly dumping tens of thousands of gallons of hydraulic fracturing waste at a Marcellus Shale drilling site in 2010, according to a Pennsylvania judge’s ruling on Thursday. (NOTE. Exxon acquired XTO in 2009 at a cost of about $35 billion. Where did Exxon get all this money? DGN)

Following a preliminary hearing, Magisterial District Judge James G. Carn decided that all eight charges against Exxon – including violations of both the state Clean Streams Law and the Solid Waste Management Act – will be “held for court,” meaning there is enough evidence to take the fossil fuel giant to trial over felony offenses.

Pennsylvania’s Attorney General filed criminal charges back in September, claiming Exxon had removed a plug from a wastewater tank, leading to 57,000 gallons of contaminated water spilling into the soil. The Exxon subsidiary had contested the criminal charges, claiming there was “no lasting environmental impact,” and that the charges could “discourage good environmental practices” from guilty companies.

“The action tells oil and gas operators that setting up infrastructure to recycle produced water exposes them to the risk of significant legal and financial penalties should a small release occur,” Exxon said at the time.

Hydraulic fracturing is a method of extracting fossil fuels that generally increases the flow of oil or gas from a well. It is done by injecting high-pressure water and chemicals miles deep into the ground into subsurface rock, effectively “fracturing” the rock and allowing more spaces for oil and gas to come through. The tactic is generally paired with horizontal drilling.

The high-pressure water and chemical injections generally result in a good amount of wastewater, which is what Exxon is charged with illegally dumping. The specific chemical makeup of that wastewater is a large part of why the practice is so controversial, as public disclosure of what exactly is used in the water is largely self-regulated by the fracking companies. Due  to laws pushed by corporate front groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), sponsored by ExxonMobil, states have allowed minimum disclosure of the chemicals used in the fluid. Though Pennsylvania does now require disclosure to regulators, it has a “gag rule” banning doctors from talking about the health risks.

The most recent study of health risks related to fracking was released in mid-December by the journal Endocrinology, which found the presence of hormone-disrupting chemicals in surface water and groundwater samples in Garfield County, Colorado – one county at the center of the U.S. fracking boom. The chemicals have been linked to infertility, birth defects, and cancer.

Additionally, a July study from the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences of USA found that the closer residents live to wells used in fracking, the more likely drinking water is contaminated, with 115 of 141 wells found to contain methane.