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If you care about free speech, you should pay attention to the campaign now being waged against Exxon Mobil. More than 50 environmental and civil rights groups have written Attorney General Loretta Lynch urging her to open a “federal probe” of the giant energy firm. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have also joined the chorus. The charge is that Exxon Mobil “systematically misled the public” on climate change, even as its executives recognized the dangers. New York’s attorney general has already launched an investigation.What’s behind the latest assault are two recent pieces of investigative journalism that, based on company documents, concluded that Exxon Mobil played a double game. In the 1970s, when global warming began attracting scientific attention, the firm “assembled a brain trust [that deepened] the company’s understanding” of climate change, reported InsideClimate News. But in the late 1980s, the company switched to “climate denial,” manufacturing “doubt about . . . global warming its own scientists” had confirmed. Stories in the Los Angeles Times told a similar tale.Robert J. Samuelson writes a weekly column on economics. View ArchiveNot so, responds Exxon Mobil (unsurprisingly). The investigative pieces “cherry-pick” their evidence, exaggerating the divide between the company’s scientists and corporate policy, says Ken Cohen, vice president of public and government affairs.As an example, he cites a scientific presentation made to Exxon’s board of directors in early 1989 concluding that global warming is, in the briefing’s words, “deeply imbedded in scientific uncertainty . . . [and] will require substantial additional investigation.” Instead, Cohen asserts, the Los Angeles Times portrayed the presentation as demonstrating that the enormity of global warming was settled.Nor, he says, does Exxon Mobil oppose all action against climate change. Since 2009, it has endorsed a carbon tax, a position shared by many environmentalists and economists. Taxing the carbon in fossil fuels — oil, coal, natural gas — would raise their prices. That would, at least in theory, encourage energy efficiency and switching to non-fossil fuels. (Exxon Mobil
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Topic: The war against Exxon Mobil (Read 184 times)
