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The lies uttered and underwritten by the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil executives—as well as their employees and PACs’ contributions to climate science deniers in Congress—have had serious consequences.
I have spent the better part of the last 12 years writing about lies. My colleagues call it “disinformation,” and I generally do, too, but let’s call it for what it is: lying. During this stretch, I have written more than 200 articles and columns, and most of them were either about CEOs who lie, experts who lie, scientists who lie, attorneys general who lie, legislators who lie, or a president who lies. And I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill white lies. I’m talking about lies that have grave consequences for the future of the planet.
(I should add that I also wrote 65 columns featuring Q&As with scientists and experts who work for my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS. They don’t lie. They follow the science. The series is called “Ask a Scientist,” and the last one I wrote will run in mid-May.)
After a dozen years unmasking lies and five years before that overseeing UCS’s media relations operation, I am leaving the organization. But before I walk out the door, I wanted to provide a retrospective of some of my columns on the biggest sponsors of climate disinformation in the country: ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods; his predecessor, Rex Tillerson; and Charles Koch, CEO of the coal, oil, and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson appears at his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill. (Photo: NBC News/Screengrab)
I wrote more columns about ExxonMobil and its top executives than any other major source of climate lies. Most of these pieces were about the company’s support for a seemingly independent network of anti-regulation, “free-market” nonprofits that spread falsehoods about the reality and seriousness of climate change. ExxonMobil spent at least $39 million on some 70 of these organizations from 1998 through 2020, more than any funder besides Charles Koch and his brother David, co-owner of Koch Industries until his death in 2019.
I first wrote about ExxonMobil in March 2013 after I saw the company’s then-CEO, Rex Tillerson, on the Charlie Rose talk show, who provided me with fodder for perhaps my favorite of two dozen ExxonMobil-related columns.
Rose asked Tillerson open-ended questions on a range of subjects, including climate change and national energy policy. And Rose did, at times, ask follow-up questions. But in nearly every instance, Rose listened politely, refrained from challenging Tillerson on the facts, and went on to his next question. So I decided to write a column in which I pretended to have been on the show alongside Tillerson, calling it “Rex & Me: The Charlie Rose Show You Should Have Seen Last Friday,” a nod to Michael Moore’s first film, Roger & Me.
ExxonMobil wants to be seen as a good corporate citizen. It wants to protect what academics call its “social license,” meaning that it wants to be seen as being legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. At the same time, however, the company has continued to expand oil and gas development and fund climate science denier groups that undermine efforts to address climate change.
The column featured excerpts from Rose and Tillerson’s hour-long conversation with comments I inserted as if I were sitting there in the studio rebutting Tillerson’s statements.
Rose first asked Tillerson about his take on global warming. Repeating his company’s long-standing talking point, Tillerson emphasized scientific uncertainty, despite the fact that Exxon’s own scientists had been warning management about “potentially catastrophic” human-caused global warming since at least 1977. “We have continued to study this issue for decades…,” he said. “The facts remain there are uncertainties around the climate, climate change, why it’s changing, what the principal drivers of climate change are.”
In my retelling of the show, I quickly pointed out that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had by then concluded that “most” of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950 was “very likely” due to the increase in human-made carbon emissions.
When Rose asked Tillerson if there is a link between extreme weather events and global warming, Tillerson told Rose that he had “seen no scientific studies to confirm [one].” In the original broadcast, Rose went on to another topic. But before he was able to do that in my imaginary scenario, I corrected the record. “There is, in fact, substantial scientific evidence that there’s a strong link between global warming and heat waves and coastal flooding from sea-level rise,” I said. “There’s also a strong link to heavy precipitation and drought, depending on the region and time of the year.”
Later in the hour, Tillerson told Rose that the federal government should end subsidies for renewable energy. “I mean, wind has received subsidies for more than 20 years now,” he said. “Maybe if we took the subsidy off and it was challenged and had to perform, people would take it to a new level.”
It was a bogus argument that fossil fuel proponents would repeat ad nauseum over the next 10 years, so when Rose failed to provide some needed context, I jumped in.
“Rex,” I interjected, “it’s bizarre that your top national energy priority is ending federal support for renewables… [W]hat about the oil and gas industry’s subsidies and tax breaks?” I then explained that, at the time, the oil and gas industry had been receiving an average of $4.86 billion (in 2010 dollars) in federal tax breaks and subsidies for nearly 100 years. “Renewables,” I added, “have gotten peanuts in comparison.”
Four years later, when Tillerson testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after former President Donald Trump nominated him to be his secretary of state, a senator asked him if he would pursue the Group of 20 pledge to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. His reply? “I’m not aware of anything the fossil fuel industry gets that I would characterize as a subsidy.”
Exxon CEO Darren Woods speaks at an international energy conference. (Photo: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)
Tillerson’s successor, Darren Woods, now 59, has carried on his company’s tradition of deceit. During an October 2021 hearing the House Oversight and Reform Committee held on the oil industry’s decades-long climate disinformation campaign, Woods—one of four oil company executives testifying that day—was asked if he would “commit right here to stop funding organizations that reject the science of climate change.”
“We do not support climate denial,” he replied. “We do not ask people to lobby for anything different than our publicly supported [climate] positions.”
The history of that lie bears retelling. For years, ExxonMobil executives have acknowledged climate change is happening—but not its cause—and insisted they want to be “part of the solution.” And since 2015, they have claimed that their company supports the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which was brokered that year. Why? ExxonMobil wants to be seen as a good corporate citizen. It wants to protect what academics call its “social license,” meaning that it wants to be seen as being legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. At the same time, however, the company has continued to expand oil and gas development and fund climate science denier groups that undermine efforts to address climate change.
The genesis of ExxonMobil’s brazen hypocrisy can be traced back to 2007. In January of that year, UCS released consultant (now UCS editorial director) Seth Shulman’s report, “Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science,” revealing that the company had spent $16 million between 1998 and 2005 on more than 40 anti-regulation think tanks to launder its message. When asked by a Greenwire reporter a month later about the grantees identified in the UCS report, Kenneth Cohen, then ExxonMobil’s vice president of public affairs, said the company had stopped funding them. Hardly. In 2007 alone, the company gave $2 million to 37 denier groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, Heartland Institute, and Manhattan Institute.
In July 2015, after UCS discovered that Exxon (before it merged with Mobil) was aware of the threat posed by climate change more than 30 years earlier and had been intentionally deceiving the public for decades, reporters contacted ExxonMobil spokesman Richard Keil for comment. One reporter asked him about ExxonMobil’s long history of funding climate change denier groups. “I’m here to talk to you about the present,” Keil said. “…We do not fund or support those who deny the reality of climate change.”
I wrote a column a week later dissecting Keil’s carefully crafted whopper. “Technically [Keil was correct], perhaps, because practically no one can say with a straight face that global warming isn’t happening anymore,” I wrote. “Most, if not all, of the people who used to deny the reality of climate change have morphed into climate science deniers. They now concede that climate change is real, but reject the scientific consensus that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—is driving it. Likewise, they understate the potential consequences, contend that we can easily adapt to them, and fight government efforts to curb carbon emissions and promote renewable energy. ExxonMobil is still funding those folks, big time.”
By its own accounting, ExxonMobil has continued to fund those folks—albeit fewer of them—to this day. For at least a decade, the company has been listing its grantees in its annual World Giving Report, and beginning in 2015 I wrote a column every year citing how much it gave climate science denier groups the previous year until its 2021 report on its 2020 outlays, when it stopped listing grantees receiving less than $100,000. Previously, its reports included grants of $5,000 or more. That lack of transparency has made it impossible to discern exactly how much the company is still spending on climate disinformation, but nonetheless it amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
My 2021 column on the company’s grants from 2020, “Despite Cutbacks, ExxonMobil Continues to Fund Climate Science Denial,” ran two days before Woods and top executives from BP America, Chevron, and Shell testified before the House Oversight Committee. Despite Woods’s insistence at the hearing that his company does not support “climate denial” and does not ask its grantees to support anything other than its official climate-related pronouncements, three ExxonMobil grantees that received at least $100,000 in 2020 contradicted the company’s professed positions. They included a climate science-denying economist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received more than $5 million from ExxonMobil since 1998; George Washington University’s anti-regulation Regulatory Studies Center, which opposed stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would significantly reduce carbon emissions; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which at the time dubiously called for “the increased use of natural gas” to “further progress” in addressing climate change.
Since I wrote that column, my last one on ExxonMobil’s annual grants, the company’s Worldwide Giving Report in 2022 indicated that in 2021, ExxonMobil contributed another $150,000 to AEI and $150,000 to the GWU Regulatory Studies Center. The company has yet to publish a report for its grantmaking in 2022, let alone 2023.
Billionaire Charles Koch stands for a portrait on Monday, August 3, 2015 in Dana Point, California. (Photo: Patrick T. Fallon for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
My other bête noire is the 88-year-old libertarian industrialist Charles Koch—the 22th-richest person in the world with a net worth of $67.6 billion—and his network of uber-rich friends and “free-market” think tanks and advocacy groups. From 1997 through 2020,Koch family-controlled foundations donated more than $160 million to at least 90 groups to manufacture doubt about climate science and delay efforts to address global warming—four times more than even what ExxonMobil reportedly spent over the same time period.
Koch is a lot more doctrinaire than his current counterpart at ExxonMobil. Woods downplays the central role human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—plays in triggering climate change, but he has grudgingly conceded that global warming poses an “existential threat.” Koch, by contrast, has never acknowledged that climate change is a serious problem and has questioned—with no evidence—the veracity of climate models, which studies have found to be quite accurate.
For more than two decades, the Koch network has been diligently spreading disinformation to sabotage efforts to transition to a clean energy economy, more often than not by attacking proposed climate policies on economic grounds. Over the last 12 years, I wrote eight columns on the Koch network’s escapades, including:
But my favorite Koch column is my most recent one, “It’s Time for Charles Koch to Testify About His Climate Change Disinformation Campaign,” which ran in March 2022. I urged the House Oversight Committee to pull Koch in for questioning before it ended its investigation given the fact that he “is as consequential a disinformer as the four oil company executives who testified last fall … combined.”
Unfortunately, the committee did not take my advice, but the column did give me the opportunity to report on the considerable amount Koch Industries’ political action committees (PACs) and employees spend on campaign contributions, how much the company spends on lobbying, and the fact at least 50 Koch network alumni landed key positions in the Trump administration. They included Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, and… Vice President Mike Pence, who led Trump’s transition team. Egged on by Koch devotees both inside and outside the government—as well as by more than 60 executive branch staff from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation—the Trump administration rolled back at least 260 regulations, including more than 100 environmental safeguards.
As I said at the beginning of this essay, the lies uttered and underwritten by the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil executives—as well as their employees and PACs’ generous campaign contributions to climate science deniers in Congress—have had serious consequences.
Last year, the United States suffered an unprecedented number of climate change-related billion-dollar disasters, including record heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and floods, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 28 extreme weather events collectively caused nearly $93 billion in damage. Last year also was hottest in at least 173 years, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The annual temperature was 1.48°C (2.66°F) above the preindustrial average.
While the world is burning up, oil industry profits last year—while lower than in 2022—were still quite robust. The two U.S. oil giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron, netted $36 billion and $21.3 billion respectively. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, one of the oil company executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee in October 2021, boasted that Chevron “returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas [in 2023] than any year in the company’s history.” Meanwhile, Koch Industries’ annual revenue was $115 billion last year, down slightly from $125 billion in 2022. (Because the company is privately held, it is not required to divulge profit data.)
Cities, counties, states, and U.S. territories are now taking steps to hold these and other fossil fuel companies, as well as their trade associations, accountable. So far, some 40 of them have filed 28 lawsuits in state and territory courts for fraud and damages. Chicago and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 30 miles north of Philadelphia, are the most recent municipalities to file a climate lawsuit. In both cases, the defendants include BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Philips 66, and Shell, as well as the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s biggest trade association.
ExxonMobil has been named as a defendant in all of the cases. To date, Koch Industries has been named in only one, filed by the state of Minnesota in June 2020. That lawsuit alleges that API, ExxonMobil, and Koch Industries, which owns an oil refinery in the state, violated state consumer protection laws by misleading Minnesotans about the role fossil fuels play in causing the climate crisis.
As I pointed out in a column about Minnesota’s lawsuit, the state has a storied history when it comes to such litigation. It was one of the first states to sue the tobacco industry, and its lawsuit in the 1990s—the only one that made it to trial—resulted in a groundbreaking settlement of $6 billion over the first 25 years and $200 million annually thereafter. The case also pried 35 million pages of documents from tobacco company files revealing details of the industry’s campaign to sow doubt about the links between smoking and disease. As UCS pointed out in its 2007 exposé of ExxonMobil’s climate disinformation campaign, the tobacco and fossil fuel industries used many of the same strategies and tactics.
U.S. climate litigation is only expected to grow this year, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the oil industry’s attempts to transfer climate lawsuits from state courts to federal courts, where industry lawyers believe they are more likely to prevail. If the lawsuits are ultimately successful, courts could order oil companies and their trade associations to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars to impacted communities.
That eventuality, much like the deserved comeuppance the tobacco industry received, would be a just outcome. But even a huge payout wouldn’t begin to compensate for the damage already done by Koch and ExxonMobil lies.
Trump produced widespread disgust on Tuesday by accusing a 75-year-old peace activist in Buffalo New York who was put in the emergency room by police of being an Antifa plant. It is a lie. The man is part of the pacifist Catholic Worker movement, there is no Antifa (anti-Fascist) organization in the US as opposed to a handful of isolated young anarchists; and the FBI finds no Antifa involvement in the occasional violence that broke out when the protests against police brutality first began. Trump's line about a dangerous, violent, far left fifth column is extremely dangerous, since it aims at branding legitimate dissent as a form of terrorism. Making the urban middle class afraid of a far left takeover was one of the ways Hitler came to power in Germany.
But while Trump's slam of Martin Gugino is probably just tasteless, Trump's fervent belief in groundless conspiracy theories has harmed American interests abroad.
Three years ago, the big news in the Middle East was an attempt by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain to wipe out the small Gulf country of Qatar. It was a naked power grab, and perhaps a play for Qatari natural gas wealth. Not since Iraq's Saddam Hussein had attempted to wipe out Kuwait in 1990 had the Middle East seen such an ambitious act of aggression.
Qatar hosts the US al-Udeid Air Force Base, with some 10,000 military personnel as a favor to Washington. Many of the sorties flown in the US military struggle against ISIL, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Middle East took off from al-Udeid.
The United Arab Emirates set off the struggle by hacking Qatari news feeds and putting up deep fakes of Qatari Emir Tamim Al Thani, intended to smear him as an anti-American supporter of extremism. Sheikh Tamim is well-spoken in English and is extremely pro-American.
It even seemed to work for a brief moment, when Trump, always a sucker for phony conspiracy theories, tweeted out his support for the Saudi-UAE aggression.
The Saudis had floated a blockade of Qatar during the Obama administration, and the Obama administration had just told them "No!" It did not happen. In contrast, Trump let it go forward and backed it.
The blockade did long-term and severe damage to US interests in the Gulf. The Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates) was destroyed as a security pact. After a bruited invasion of Qatar by two GCC "partners," how could Qatar ever again trust Saudi Arabia and the UAE and integrate its armed forces and intelligence with them. I think the GCC is over with. It might have an afterlife in the economic realm. But not security.
Saudi Arabia may also have been emboldened by unstinting Trump support to murder Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and to continue its ruinous war on Yemen.
Ironically it had been founded in 1982 because the small Arab Gulf oil monarchies felt threatened by Iran during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).
But Qatar had no choice but to accept Iranian support during the blockade. Qatar Airlines initially could only fly with the help of Iranian air control, since Bahrain cut Doha off. Iran sent food after Saudi Arabia closed its land border with Qatar, and stopped Jordanian vegetable and fruit from being trucked in.
The Trump administration (or at least its few sane members) had hoped to use the GCC to pressure Iran, but now the GCC was broken and Qatar needed Iran. Oman also was never on board with hostility to Iran. The whole Iran policy in the Gulf fell apart, and Qatar was pushed into a position more like Iraq's than like Saudi Arabia's.
Among the charges leveled against Doha (Qatar's capital) was that it hosted a free press in the form of Al Jazeera, which carried reports sometimes unflattering to the Quartet. Al Jazeera had played an out-sized role in the Arab Spring youth revolts of 2011-2013, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE used their oil wealth to try to crush (succeeding everywhere but Tunisia). Qatar, in supporting multi-party democracy that made a place for the Religious Right like the Muslim Brotherhood, was seen by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as a dire threat to their vision of the Middle East as a set of right wing military dictatorships and absolute monarchies.
Qatar is a small peninsula sticking up from Arabia into the Gulf. It supplies natural gas to US allies (1/3 of Britain's natural gas comes from there). In fact, Qatari Liquified Natural Gas (LNG, which can be transported by container ships rather than needing pipelines) is a key part of US energy strategy, and Washington has been pressuring European countries to put in LNG receiving facilities at its ports so that it can become less dependent on the Russian Federation.
Then US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, knew how important Qatar is to the United States. So too did then US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, whose military was still fighting ISIL in Iraq and flying missions from al-Udeid. They are alleged to have spent the summer of 2017 working behind the scenes to undo the damage Trump did, and to stop the Saudi-UAE attempt to overthrow the Qatari government.
In the tense days, exactly three years ago, when it seemed that the Saudis and Emiratis might actually militarily invade Qatar and depose Sheikh Tamim, it appears to have been Turkey that intervened most effectively. The Turkish parliament authorized the stationing of some two hundred Turkish troops in Qatar, and their presence served as an effective warning to Saudi Arabia not to try anything. Turkey is a NATO country with a big well-trained army and excellent air force with the latest US weapons, and while Saudi Arabia has bought a lot of fancy equipment, its military's poor showing in Yemen since 2015 does not inspire confidence that they know how to use it or that their army has much esprit de corps. Turkey would wipe the mat with them.
By the fall of 2017, Trump had somehow been convinced to stop backing the blockade against Qatar, and relations between Doha and Washington improved. Some of this change was accomplished by Tillerson and Mattis. Some of it was effective Qatari lobbying (though Saudi Arabia and the UAE are bigger players in the inside-the-beltway lobbying scene).
Qatar had been punching above its weight in the region beginning in 2011, strongly supporting the Egyptian Revolution, rebels in Syria, rebels in Libya, and the Nahda or Renaissance Party in Tunisia. Its citizen population is only 300,000 or so, about the size of Pittsburgh or Cincinnati. Egypt's population is about 100 million. Some of the rebel groups Qatar favored were Muslim fundamentalist, such as the Muslim Brotherhood (though the MB in this period had committed itself to parliamentary democracy). But Qatar's politics can't be reduced to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is not important in Doha. Qatar has supported a free press and democratic elections whatever the outcome. It has given billions to multi-cultural Lebanon, and also welcomed strongly secular figures such as former Palestinian-Israeli lawmaker Azmi Bishara to Doha, giving them positions of importance. (The Saudis demanded that Qatar close down Al Jazeera and expel Bishara).
Since the blockade began, Qatar has retrenched in its foreign policy, leaving geopolitics largely to other players. Turkey has taken up some of the slack here as a champion of democratic pluralism that makes a place for the Religious Right, though its own democracy has been injured by the policies of President Tayyip Erdogan.
When Napoleon was accused of having a prominent enemy assassinated, a French politician observed that the act was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. That observation should be the epitaph for the Trump administration. It is certainly a true assessment of his initial support for the blockade of Qatar. That was a mistake that continues to harm US interests in the Gulf region. Is there no conspiracy theory Trump won't fall for, however damaging to US interests?
Environmentalists on Wednesday accused former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson--who served as CEO of ExxonMobil from 2006 to 2016--of continuing to lie about the fossil fuel giant's approach to climate change during his testimony in the historic New York v. Exxon trial.
The landmark securities fraud case, brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleges that Exxon knowingly deceived shareholders about the financial costs of the climate crisis.
Tillerson denied that charge during his testimony, insisting that Exxon knew the climate crisis "was a real issue" and took it seriously.
"The demand to make Exxon pay for climate chaos is only getting louder."
--Dominique Thomas, 350.org
"We would be misinforming ourselves," Tillerson said when asked if Exxon had an incentive to downplay the costs of climate change.
Lindsay Meiman, senior regional communications specialist at 350.org, strongly rejected Tillerson's account.
"Just now, at the New York County Supreme Court, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson spewed more deception claiming Exxon executives took the risks of climate change seriously, yet, in the same breath, denied the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground," Meiman wrote in an email to supporters.
"Absurdly, during his tenure at Exxon, Rex had a secret alias: Wayne Tracker," said Meiman. "Tillerson used his Wayne Tracker pseudonym to communicate all things related to climate change. He then left his Exxon post to serve as Trump's Secretary of State before getting the boot from the increasingly oily and corrupt administration. This guy is as shady as it gets."
Tillerson was not asked about the "Wayne Tracker" alias during his testimony.
\u201cToday Rex Tillerson denied in court that ExxonMobil committed fraud by concealing the financial impact of climate change from shareholders.\n\nWe all deserve justice for Big Oil's crimes against our communities & climate. Tell Congress to #MakeThemPay now: https://t.co/OTJS9cNtfc\u201d— 350 dot org (@350 dot org) 1572460915
The Guardianreported Wednesday that the New York attorney general's office "has sought to cast Tillerson as a central figure in the securities fraud case, with Kevin Wallace, acting head of the attorney general's investor protection bureau, telling the court last week that the former chief executive was 'deeply involved' in working out the impact of climate science upon Exxon's business prospects."
Dominique Thomas, 350.org's northeast regional organizer, said Tillerson "should get used to" appearing on the witness stand in climate accountability cases.
"As wildfires rage across California and the West, it's momentous to see Exxon's former CEO in court, on the witness stand, testifying to his role in lying to investors about climate-related risks," said Thomas. "The demand to make Exxon pay for climate chaos is only getting louder."