Green activists who have been working with their allies in government to take down Exxon Mobil and other energy companies are on a losing streak. Most recently, the Competitive Enterprise Institute published a trove of their emails with an accompanying report exposing their efforts to lobby state attorneys general to investigate Exxon Mobil. The report comes on the heels of an SEC decision to discontinue an investigation into the energy company without issuing any penalties. The SEC had been probing allegations Exxon Mobil had misled investors about the risk of climate change. What’s more, this argument being propelled by activists and public officials alike isn’t holding up any better in the courtroom. In July, U.S. District Judge John Keenan dismissed a climate change case brought by New York City against Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell.
Keenan said in his opinion that “Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.” A federal judge dismissed similar cases in San Francisco and Oakland earlier this year against the same companies.
What has become known as the #ExxonKnew campaign is based on the idea that Exxon Mobil deliberately deceived the public and their own shareholders about the dangers of climate change. Newly uncovered emails reveal the previously unreported efforts of plaintiffs’ attorneys and wealthy environmentalists to enlist state attorneys general, who wield enormous power and influence, in the #ExxonKnew campaign.
The origins of the campaign can be traced to a June 2012 meeting held in San Diego’s seaside community of La Jolla, Calif. Attorneys, academics and environmental activists who were in attendance described the meeting as a “Workshop on Climate Accountability, Public Opinion, and Legal Strategies” that “sought to compare the evolution of public attitudes and legal strategies related to tobacco control with those related to anthropogenic climate change, fostering an exploratory, open-ended dialogue about whether we might use the lessons from tobacco-related education, laws, and litigation to address climate change,” according to an online document that summarized the meeting’s major objectives.
There is now a growing body of scientific evidence that lays waste to claims that human activity is responsible for unnatural levels of global warming, the campaign fails to account for the fact that what is now Exxon Mobil was two different companies until they merged in 1999. The research conducted by one company should not be conflated with the information distributed by the other prior to that year; yet, it has. This seemingly obvious point was omitted in a September 2017 report from Harvard University researchers who accused Exxon Mobil of misleading the public on climate change.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, coauthored the study with Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow working with her in Harvard’s Department of History of Science. Oreskes played a key role in organizing the La Jolla meeting and is quoted in the workshop summary as saying: “When I talk to my students I always say tobacco causes lung cancer, esophageal cancer, mouth cancer. … My question is: What is the ‘cancer’ of climate change that we need to focus on?”
The Harvard report claims Exxon Mobil produced research that found human activity does contribute to climate change, but then deliberately covered up this research, in part, by purchasing advertorials in the New York Times that said quite the opposite. Oreskes and Supran discussed their report and its major findings in an opinion piece for the New York Times just after the study was published. Their analysis of Exxon Mobil communications on climate changed ranged from 1989 to 2004.
But remember, Exxon and Mobil did not merge until 1999, which means the Oreskes’ study was primarily comparing the climate research of one company with the advertorials of another. The climate research came mostly from Exxon while the advertorials came from Mobil.
Here’s the other problem with the study: The advertorials were drawn from a database of material the environmental advocacy group known as Greenpeace had pulled together. Since the Harvard team saw fit to lean heavily on the word of an anti-fossil fuel organization, researchers with the Energy in Depth blog site decided to take a deep dive into the New York Times advertorial database and determined that it “omits dozens of climate-related advertorials run by the company that, had they been counted by Oreskes and Supran, would have severely weakened their case.”
But now that the facts and evidence are catching up to the La Jolla strategists, it’s important for the public to know how much influence well-funded climate activists exerted over public officials.
Chris Horner, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., has done the heavy lifting to obtain emails and other records through Freedom of Information Act requests to provide much needed exposure.
Horner obtained the FOIA records from George Mason University and the state attorneys general complicit in the campaign on behalf of the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, based in Washington, D.C., which is devoted to “strategic litigation,” “policy research,” and “public education.”
In August, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a report from Horner that describes how elective law enforcement offices work in coordination with activist pressure groups and donors to implement a policy agenda that could be achieved through the democratic process. Horner’s report explains how the use of open records laws and media scrutiny helped to bring down this coalition. But he also describes how former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg “reconstituted” this network through a nonprofit organization that funnels money into offices of state attorneys general. The funds are used to hire “research fellows” who assume an activist role in partnership with compliant government attorneys.
Apparently, this is far from over.
Kevin Mooney (@KevinMooneyDC) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. who writes for several national publications.
