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Exxon Continues to Fund ‘Science’ Group Steeped in Climate Denial and Delay
Exxon Continues to Fund ‘Science’ Group Steeped in Climate Denial and Delay
ExxonMobil, under chief executive Darren Woods, center, has cut ties with some groups over their climate denial work, but continues to fund the American Council on Science and Health. Photo credit: Exxon via Twitter
ExxonMobil is funding a little-known nonprofit that calls itself a “pro-science advocacy organization,” but whose scientific advisory board includes several renowned climate deniers and has worked for decades to sow doubt about the health impacts of climate change.
Records show the ExxonMobil Foundation provided grants of at least $60,000 in both 2017 and 2018 to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a group that says its mission is to “publicly support evidence-based science and medicine.”
Members of the ACSH scientific advisory board, however, include a who’s who of climate deniers, including Patrick J. Michaels, who has worked for more than 30 years on behalf of the fossil fuel industry; S. Fred Singer, who last year wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal falsely claiming that sea level rise is not caused by climate change; and William Happer, a current member of President Trump’s National Security Council who as recently as 2016 argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
Documents recently revealed in an investigation by The Guardian show ExxonMobil’s current funding of the ACSH began prior to 1999, when Exxon and Mobil merged to become Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the largest oil companies in the world.
“ACSH is a front group for libertarian billionaires, fossil fuel companies, and basically every other industry selling dangerous products,” said Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University researcher who in 2017 published a study that showed how Exxon’s internal memos take the climate issue seriously while its public communications emphasize doubt about the science.
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Toronto Will Explore Suing Big Oil for Climate Costs
Toronto Will Explore Suing Big Oil for Climate Costs
Toronto could be the next major city to file a climate liability suit to recoup climate costs from the fossil fuel industry. Photo credit: City of Toronto
Toronto became the latest city to explore possible litigation to make fossil fuel companies pay for the costs of climate change, joining an accountability movement spurred by cities in North America.
The city council’s Infrastructure and Environment committee passed a motion on Thursday that had been filed by City Councillor Mike Layton in March. It directs the city to consider suing greenhouse gas emitters for billions of dollars in adaptation and repairs cost to confront the challenges of increasing extreme weather events, like the floods that swept the city in 2013, and other climate impacts.
“It had gotten to a point where it was kind of a white noise in the background, ‘Yes, we have to do something about climate change.’ It became so abstract. And then it all changed when I had kids and started realizing that we’re actually running out of time,” Layton said during a debate preceding the vote.
Layton said climate change will present the city with budget challenges in the years to come.
”We have to make sure that those that are profiting pay their fair share,” he said.
The motion asks the city staff to report back to the city council about the cost of making the city resilient to extreme weather events, which have grown more frequent and more damaging with rising global temperatures. The city can then seek compensation for those costs in litigation.
“For decades and decades, there has been an industry that has been made out of blurring the line between greenhouse gasses, fossil fuels and climate change—much like they tried to blur the line between cancer and smoking,” Layton said.
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Shell Sued in the Netherlands for Insufficient Action On Climate Change
Shell Sued in the Netherlands for Insufficient Action On Climate Change
Plaintiffs allege Shell’s current business model threatens human rights because the oil giant is knowingly undermining the world’s chances to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Photo Credit: Paul Ellis/Getty Images
Seven environmental and human rights organizations in the Netherlands have filed suit against Royal Dutch Shell for failing to align its business model with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.
The suit, which is the first to directly challenge an oil company’s business model, was filed Friday in The Hague by Friends of the Earth Netherlands/ Milieudefensie, Greenpeace Netherlands, five other organizations and more than 17,000 Dutch citizens.
The plaintiffs are not seeking financial compensation, but are asking Shell to adjust its business model in order to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, as recommended by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They allege that by following a business model that it knows will not reach these goals, Shell is violating a Dutch law prohibiting “unlawful endangerment” and is violating human rights by taking insufficient action against climate change.
“If successful, the uniqueness of the case would be that Shell – as one of the largest multinational corporations in the world – would be legally obligated to change its business operations,” said Milieudefensie attorney Roger Cox, who also represented plaintiffs in the landmark Urgenda suit.
Urgenda was the first case in which a court ordered a government to reduce its emissions and the first time a court ruled that not taking sufficient action on climate change is a human rights violation.
Plaintiffs allege Shell’s current business model threatens human rights because the oil giant is knowingly undermining the world’s chances to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. They maintain that rather than guarantee emission reductions, Shell’s current plan would contribute to a much larger global temperature increase.
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U.S. Government Knew Climate Risks in 1970s, Energy Advisory Group Documents Show
U.S. Government Knew Climate Risks in 1970s, Energy Advisory Group Documents Show
The National Petroleum Council, once chaired by former Exxon chief Lee Raymond, has long advised the U.S. government on energy issues. Documents show it downplayed fossil fuels’ role in climate change. Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A series of newly discovered documents clarify the extent to which the U.S. government, its advisory committees and the fossil fuel industry have understood for decades the impact carbon dioxide emissions would have on the planet.
The documents obtained by Climate Liability News show how much the National Petroleum Council (NPC), an oil and natural gas advisory committee to the Secretary of Energy, knew about climate change as far back as the 1970s. A series of reports illuminate the findings of government-contracted research that outlined the dangers associated with increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
They also shed light on how this advisory group to the federal government understood the fossil fuel industry’s contributions to climate change, and unveil the strategies it used to downplay the industry’s role.
“These documents reaffirm that, to one extent or another, the fossil fuel industry as a whole has known for decades about the basics of climate change and its implications. But rather than warning the public and taking action, many of them turned around and orchestrated anti-science, anti-policy denial campaigns dwarfing even those of Big Tobacco,” said Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who has extensively studied those denial campaigns.
Many of the documents were compiled by Hugh MacMillan, then a senior researcher on water, energy and climate issues for Food & Water Watch, an environmental nonprofit. He was preparing to file a public comment to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to the Trump Administration’s plan to replace the Clean Power Plan.
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Trade Group Targets Shareholders Pressuring Big Oil on Climate Change
Trade Group Targets Shareholders Pressuring Big Oil on Climate Change
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a 123-year-old trade group that has worked diligently to defend Big Oil in the burgeoning climate liability battles, has also taken on another opponent to the status quo: investors.
In addition to filing briefs in defense of the fossil fuel industry, launching campaigns to discredit the communities filing suits and intervening on the side of the federal government in a landmark constitutional climate lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, NAM has rallied behind efforts to keep corporate shareholders from influencing how oil companies conduct business.
In recent years, shareholders concerned about climate-related risks to the companies’ bottom lines, which includes liability suits, have introduced proposals urging oil and gas companies to reduce their carbon footprint and be more forthcoming about the climate risks to their bottom line.
Once largely unmoved by a hard-to-imagine future threat, investors now need only look out their windows or turn to news reports to see firsthand the catastrophic effects of climate change: The charred remains of entire communities in the aftermath of California wildfires; parts of Texas submerged by more than 4 feet of water in the wake of Hurricane Harvey; countless unnamed weather events from the record-shattering rain that swept through Louisiana in 2016 to the now-routine flooding in Florida and areas along the Atlantic seaboard.
While most shareholder proposals have failed, there have been some victories: In 2017, investors forced Exxon to produce its first climate-risks report and other proposals prompted Occidental Petroleum, BP and Shell to increase reporting on climate risks. BP announced in February that it will support a resolution calling for even more disclosure that will be proposed at its May 2019 shareholder meeting.
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