Four Democratic senators want ExxonMobil to turn over any documents showing the company donated to a group that sent money to anti-climate change researchers, according to a letter sent Thursday.
Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal signed a letter to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. The senators want Tillerson and ExxonMobil to turn over any evidence the company, its foundation or its affiliates donated, or matched employee donations, to Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.
Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund began to support climate change denial groups in the mid-2000s, not long after ExxonMobil pulled its funding from the group. The letter says Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund worked as a way for ExxonMobil to fund the research anonymously.
The senators take issue with a statement from a company vice president who said ExxonMobil works on climate science with governments and academic institutions in “an open and transparent way.”
“The correlation between ExxonMobil’s decision not to fund some groups openly associated with climate change denial, and the increase in funding from a group that does, is ‘suggestive of an effort’ to simply reroute its support,” the letter says.
The letter says ExxonMobil has worked with climate change denial groups openly.
The letter was sparked by a report in the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News earlier this month that the company knew in July 1977 that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels would warm the planet. After 10 years of exploring the problem, ExxonMobil — then just Exxon — decided to actively support researchers who would refute global warming.
According to the report, ExxonMobil learned in 1977 from a senior scientist that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet. A year later, the company began researching how carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels would affect the planet.
In 1982, the company prepared an internal document on carbon dioxide and climate change that said “major reduction” in fossil fuel use would be needed to avoid catastrophic events. While that was circulating, ExxonMobil didn’t tell regulators about the findings.
Six years after the internal document was produced, ExxonMobil went on the offensive, according to the report. The company began paying for efforts that would cast doubt on climate change, including founding the Global Climate Coalition.
Most scientists blame the burning of fossil fuels such as oil for releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to rise.
On Friday, the leaders of 47 environmental groups signed a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch calling on her to investigate ExxonMobil for possibly covering up evidence of fossil fuels causing climate change.
The environmental groups joined the three Democratic presidential candidates and two Democratic members of Congress in calling for a Justice Department investigation into the company.
“Given the damage that has already occurred from climate change — particularly in the poorest communities of our nation and our planet — and that will certainly occur going forward, these revelations should be viewed with the utmost apprehension,” the letter says. “They are reminiscent — though potentially much greater in scale — than similar revelations about the tobacco industry.”
ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers has repeatedly denied the allegations.
“We unequivocally reject [the] allegations, which are based on media reports that are inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s more than 30-year history of climate research that was conducted in conjunction with the Department of Energy, academics and the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change,” Jeffers said last week. “Suggestions that ExxonMobil suppressed climate research are completely without merit.”
