WALL STREET JOURNAL COMMENTARY
The ‘Obfuscation Agenda’
December 4, 2006; Page A16
The following are excerpts from an Oct. 27 letter to Rex W. Tillerson, chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil, from Sens. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Olympia Snowe of Maine. A related editorial appears nearby:
We are convinced that Exxon Mobil’s longstanding support of a small cadre of global climate change skeptics, and those skeptics’ access to and influence on government policymakers, have made it increasingly difficult for the United States to demonstrate the moral clarity it needs across all facets of its diplomacy. Obviously, other factors complicate our foreign policy. However, we are persuaded that the climate change denial strategy carried out by and for Exxon Mobil has helped foster the perception that the United States is insensitive to a matter of great urgency for all of mankind, and has thus damaged the stature of our nation internationally…
We fervently hope that reports that Exxon Mobil intends to end its funding of the climate change denial campaign of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) are true. Similarly, we have seen press reports that your British subsidiary has told the Royal Society, Great Britain’s foremost scientific academy, that Exxon Mobil will stop funding other organizations with similar purposes. However, a casual review of available literature, as performed by personnel for the Royal Society reveals that Exxon Mobil is or has been the primary funding source for the “skepticism” of not only CEI, but for dozens of other overlapping and interlocking front groups sharing the same obfuscation agenda…
Large corporations in related industries have joined Exxon Mobil to provide significant and consistent financial support of this pseudo-scientific, non-peer reviewed echo chamber. The goal has not been to prevail in the scientific debate, but to obscure it. This climate change denial confederacy has exerted an influence out of all proportion to its size or relative scientific credibility. Through relentless pressure on the media to present the issue “objectively,” and by challenging the consensus on climate change science by misstating both the nature of what “consensus” means and what this particular consensus is, Exxon Mobil and its allies have confused the public and given cover to a few senior elected and appointed government officials whose positions and opinions enable them to damage U.S. credibility abroad…
A study to be released in November by an American scientific group will expose Exxon Mobil as the primary funder of no fewer than 29 climate change denial front groups in 2004 alone. Besides a shared goal, these groups often featured common staffs and board members. The study will estimate that Exxon Mobil has spent more than $19 million since the late 1990s on a strategy of “information laundering,” or enabling a small number of professional skeptics working through scientific-sounding organizations to funnel their viewpoints through non-peer-reviewed websites such as Tech Central Station. The Internet has provided Exxon Mobil the means to wreak its havoc on U.S. credibility, while avoiding the rigors of refereed journals…
We would recommend that Exxon Mobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, Exxon Mobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world’s largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts.
WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Global Warming Gag Order
December 4, 2006; Page A16
Washington has no shortage of bullies, but even we can’t quite believe an October 27 letter that Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe sent to Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Its message: Start toeing the Senators’ line on climate change, or else.
We reprint chunks of the letter here and the full text on OpinionJournal.com, so readers can see for themselves. But its essential point is that the two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate about the issue must stop and Exxon Mobil should “end its dangerous support of the [global warming] ‘deniers’.” Not only that, the company “should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history.” And in extra penance for being “one of the world’s largest carbon emitters,” Exxon should spend that money on “global remediation efforts.”
The Senators aren’t dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can’t refuse. But in case the CEO doesn’t understand his company’s jeopardy, they add that “Exxon Mobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years.” (Our emphasis.) The Senators also graciously copied the Exxon board on their missive.
This is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but we didn’t know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media around by the nose, too. Congratulations.
Let’s compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country. We’ll grant that’s a fair intellectual fight. But if the Senators are so afraid that a handful of policy wonks at a single small think-tank are in danger of winning this debate, they must not have much confidence in the merits of their own case.
The letter is so over-the-top that we also wonder if Mr. Rockefeller in particular has even read it. (He and Ms. Snowe didn’t return our call.) The Senator hails from coal-producing West Virginia, where people know something about carbon emissions. Come to think of it, Mr. Rockefeller owes his own vast wealth to something other than non-carbon energy. But perhaps it’s easier to be carbon free when your fortune comes from a trust fund.
The letter is of a piece with what has become a campaign of intimidation against any global warming dissent. Not only is everyone supposed to concede that the planet has been warming — as it has — but we are all supposed to salute and agree that human beings are the definitive cause, that the magnitude of the warming will be disastrous and its effects catastrophic, that such problems as AIDS and poverty are less urgent, and that economic planners must therefore impose vast new regulatory burdens on everyone around the world. Exxon is being targeted in this letter and other ways because it is one of the few companies that still thinks some debate on these questions is valuable.
Every dogma has its day, and we’ve lived long enough to see more than one “consensus” blown apart within a few years of “everyone knowing” it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they’ve made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it’s useful to have a few folks outside the “consensus” asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.
Imagine if this letter had been sent by someone in the Bush Administration trying to enforce the opposite conclusion? The left would be howling about “censorship.” That’s exactly what did happen earlier this year after James Hansen, the NASA scientist and global warming evangelist, complained that a lowly 24-year-old press aide had tried to limit his media access. The entire episode was preposterous because Mr. Hansen is one of the most publicized scientists in the world, but the press aide was nonetheless sacked.
The Senators’ letter is far more serious because they have enormous power to punish Exxon if it doesn’t kowtow to them. A windfall profits tax is in the air, and we’ve seen what happens to other companies that dare to resist Congressional intimidation. It’s to Exxon’s credit that, in its response to the Senators, the company said that it will continue to fund free market research groups because “there is value in the debate” that helps promote “optimal public policy decisions.” Too bad that’s not what the Senators care about.