ExxonMobil spent approximately $16 million between 1998 and 2005 on 43 organizations that have cast doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming.
Funding ranged from $30,000 for the group Africa Fighting Malaria to $1.6 million to the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business think tank in Washington.
Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent for Reuters, sees a parallel between the energy company’s aim to discredit the science of global warming and the tobacco industry’s decades long “cancer causing” cover up.
I see more bad PR for a firm with a long-standing curse on its house.
[via Hill | Holliday]
Exxon’s favorite vendor for this kind of thing seems to be The Competitive Enterprise Institute.
If you go to http://www.globalwarming.org, for example, you’ll see an entire faux grassroots website put together by CEI (funded by Exxon) to debunk the science. They have done lots of other things that are too numerous to mention. Astroturfing, as it’s called, is a tactic used heavily by the Tobacco industry who cobbled together smokers rights groups to fight anti-smoking regulations. Lots of industries have started employing this technique.
Ha. Scratch that. It appears that over the past month, they took that site down. Probably got busted in cyberspace.