Exxon-Funded Skeptics

The Exxon corporation has long been involved in creating confusion regarding global warming and the creation and funding of Global warming skeptics.

A study by the US Union of Concerned Scientists reports that ExxonMobil funded 29 climate change denial groups in 2004 alone. Since 1990, the report says, the company has spent more than $19 million funding groups that promote their views through publications and Web sites that are not peer reviewed by the scientific community. 

See exxonsecrets.org for fact-sheets on funding recipients.

During 2002, ExxonMobil donated $5.6 million to public policy organizations which share its agenda, either on climate change denial or general extreme free market advocacy. These included:


 * Acton Institute, ($30,000)
 * American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ($200,000)
 * Atlas Economic Research Foundation ($50,000)
 * Cato Institute ($30,000)
 * Center for Strategic and International Studies ($145,000)
 * Committee for Economic Development ($75,000)
 * Competitive Enterprise Institute ($405,000)
 * Foundation for American Communications ($175,000)
 * Frontiers of Freedom ($233,000)
 * George C. Marshall Foundation (90,000)
 * Reason Foundation ($50,000)

In October 2006, two US Senators, Olympia Snowe, (R-Maine), and Jay Rockefeller, (D-W.Va.) wrote to ExxonMobil's chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, asking that it "end any further financial assistance" to groups "whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth." The Senators singled out the Competitive Enterprise Institute and TechCentralStation as such groups. They wrote that "we are convinced that ExxonMobil's long-standing support of a small cadre of global climate change skeptics, and those skeptics' access to and influence on government policymakers, have made it increasingly difficult for the United States to demonstrate the moral clarity it needs across all facets of its diplomacy". 

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 * Global warming skeptics