From 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil directed almost $16 million to a group of 43 lobby groups in an effort to confuse Americans about global warming. After being criticized by the Royal Society in 2006, Exxon promised to end funding to groups questioning climate change. In May 2008, Exxon again issued a public mea culpa and pledged to cut funding to groups that “divert attention” from the need to develop and invest in clean energy. Yet, in 2008, while cutting contributions to the most extreme groups, Exxon still funded the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, all groups which publicly question or deny global warming:

Company records for 2008 show that ExxonMobil gave $75,000 (£45,500) to the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas and $50,000 (£30,551) to the Heritage Foundation in Washington. It also gave $245,000 (£149,702) to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington. The list of donations in the company’s 2008 Worldwide Contributions and Community investments is likely to trigger further anger from environmental activists, who have accused ExxonMobil of giving tens of millions to climate change sceptics in the past decade.

Exxon’s continued duplicity should come as no surprise. Just as ExxonMobil makes public promises to end funding to groups that work to deny climate change, it also has devoted millions to ad campaigns touting clean energy without actually investing significantly in renewable energy. In 2007, Exxon-Mobil spent $100 million on advertising and “green-washing” campaigns in an attempt to exaggerate their commitment to renewable energy, producing ads that focused on global warming, efficiency, and alternative energy. That’s despite the fact that ExxonMobil spent more on CEO Rex Tillerson’s salary than on renewable energy in 2007. While Tillerson took in $21.7 million, Exxon invested only $10 million or so in renewable energy – just a tenth of the amount they spent talking about investing in clean energy.

Exxon is staffed by and supports those who deny the most basic facts of climate change and global warming. In June 2005, White House official Philip Cooney had to resign from Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality after being caught altering documents to hide links between fossil fuels and global warming. ExxonMobil waited only three days to hire him. In fact, ExxonMobil didn’t admit that global warming is occurring until 2007.

This latest evidence of Exxon’s continued opposition to clean energy comes less than a month after the American Petroleum Institute released a report revealing just how little the top Big Oil companies invest in renewable energy – and how far they’ll go to try and say otherwise.

UPDATE:  For a compilation of debunkings of Roger Pielke, Jr. by leading scientists and science bloggers (see “Foreign Policy’s “Guide to Climate Skeptics” includes Roger Pielke, Jr.“)

RealClimate has just eviscerated Roger Pielke, Sr. in an important post, “More bubkes.”  I am going to excerpt it at length because:

1. It thoroughly debunks some now-standard denier talking points on sea level rise, ocean heat content, and Arctic sea ice that the Pielkes, WattsUpWithThat, Inhofe, George Will and others have been pushing.
2. It has some excellent figures, including ones from the recent major peer-reviewed synthesis report of climate science since the 2007 IPCC report (which I wrote about here).
3. Pielke Sr. accused me of “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling” in a post (here) about ocean heat content (which was gleefully reprinted by the anti-scientific website WattsUpWithThat), even though, as RealClimate definitively shows, it is Pielke who either fails to understand the science or chooses to willfully misrepresent it.

In my post “Breaking: NOAA puts out ‘El Ni±o Watch,’ so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record,” I had noted that Pielke Sr. loves to cherry-pick climate data over short time spans to make misleading scientific claims about climate.  Climate, of course, is about long-term trends.

The basis for Pielke’s claim I don’t understand the science of climate:  “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003….  Even the last few years of the Levitus et al 2009 paper shows this lack of warming (see).”  And then he links to his discussion of that paper and puts up this figure:

What serious climate scientist would look at that data and have the nerve to tell the public it documents that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003.  If you wanted to play this game — and game is a kind word for this willful attempt to mislead the public — you could much more truthfully say “upper ocean warming has soared since 2002.”  But both statements are beside the point.

How could any serious climate scientist possibly look at such noisy data, which is full of short-term gyrations and brief, multi-year periods of little obvious warming — but an unmistakable upward trend for decades — and have the audacity to pick the year right after a staggeringly rapid increase in upper ocean warming as the basis of his public pronouncements on this issue?  And Pielke Sr. has the chutzpah to say my writing exhibits “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling.”  Doctor — heal thyself.  It’s sad, really, since, unlike his son, he is actually a “climatologist.”

Pielke Sr. tries the same crap on the climate scientists of RealClimate — and their devastating must-read response should end forever any notion that Roger Pielke, Sr. is a credible source on climate science:

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In its May 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report, ExxonMobil promised:

In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.

Bullshit.

Okay, you’re not shocked.  Still, it is worth publicizing their deceipt, as the UK’s Guardian did:

ExxonMobil continuing to fund climate denial groups, records show

The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published “misleading and inaccurate information about climate change.”

…  Ward said: “ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups. The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world’s largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped.“

The oil giant’s full list of 2008 grantees is here.  They also gave money to such purveyors of misinformation on climate change policy as American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research and American Council on Science and Health and Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and National Black Chamber of Commerce, which recently released this doozy:

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Contest: Replace the ‘Saudi Arabia’ Trope!

On Monday, as I was listening to a news call with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Ken Salazar, the Interior secretary, Mr. Reid spoke some proud words:

Nevada, he said, is the “Saudi Arabia of solar energy.”

But is it? Indeed, with all due respect to Mr. Reid, claims for “the Saudi Arabia of solar energy” have already been made on behalf of Australia and Africa.

Forbes recently suggested that Saudi Arabia was the Saudi Arabia of solar power….

But given that the planet’s oil supplies, including those in Saudi Arabia, are finite by their very nature, it might well be time to find a new metaphor “” particularly when referring to renewable energy sources.

After all, Matthew Simmons, the author of “Twilight in the Desert” (2005), has argued that Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are peaking, and could decrease far faster than Saudi officials say.

The environmental toll of plastics

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“… If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.“

If Obama wants the Senate to pass Waxman-Markey — preferably strengthened — then he needs to put the same effort into it that he has begun for health care.  And you, the informed public, must get more involved.

The NYT reported lasted month, “Obama to Forge a Greater Role on Health Care“:

After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say.

Terrific.  Awesome.  About time.  That, however, is also what passing strong climate and clean energy legislation will take, as I’ve said many times.  Tom Friedman argues in “Just Do It,” his recent column on House passing Waxman-Markey (despite its many flaws):

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