ExxonMobil Providing Big Bucks to Climate Skeptics Groups

Tuesday, December 08, 2009 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Tags: Exxon, climate skeptics, health news

(NaturalNews) In spite of a 2008 promise to stop funding global warming denial groups, oil giant ExxonMobil has given such groups hundreds of thousands of dollars since then, according to researchers from the London School of Economics.

"ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups," said researcher Bob Ward. "The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world's largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped."

In a 2008 report on its corporate citizenship practices, the oil company promised to cut funding to groups that "divert attention" from the need to shift away from fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. Yet according to company records, ExxonMobil donated $75,000 to the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) and $50,000 to the Heritage Foundation in 2008. both groups have, according to Ward, "published misleading and inaccurate information about climate change."

For example, the Heritage Foundation said in December that "growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007."

Climate scientists overwhelmingly accept that global average temperatures are rising due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels. The relative cooling experienced in 2008 is widely accepted as a natural, short-term change that is part of a larger warming trend.

The NCPA announces on its Web site that "NCPA scholars believe that while the causes and consequences of the earth's current warming trend is [sic] still unknown, the cost of actions to substantially reduce [carbon dioxide] emissions would be quite high and result in economic decline, accelerated environmental destruction, and do little or nothing to prevent global warming regardless of its cause."

On July 20, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that the costs of addressing global warming will balance or outweigh the costs.

Sources for this story include: www.guardian.co.uk.