More than 40 of the nation’s leading environmental and social justice groups demanded a federal investigation of
Exxon Mobil on Friday, accusing the huge
oil and gas company of deceiving the American public about the risks of
climate change to protect its profits.
In a
letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the groups, citing recent news reports, suggested that Exxon Mobil might be guilty of the same kind of fraud that the tobacco companies were found to have perpetrated when they hid the risks of smoking. Those violations ultimately cost the companies tens of billions of dollars in penalties.
The call for an investigation echoes demands made in recent days by three Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and by several Democrats in Congress.
Exxon Mobil rejected the comparison to the tobacco industry, declaring that it had helped to finance accurate scientific research about
climate changeand that it had made its research public from the 1970s to the present.
“There is a definite risk from climate change,” the company’s vice president for public affairs, Kenneth P. Cohen, said on Friday in an interview. “We have an unbroken record of participation in significant and serious scientific inquiry into this problem.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Wyn Hornbuckle, said the department was reviewing the letter from the advocacy groups, but had no additional comment on it.
An investigation of Exxon Mobil on the climate issue would be politically touchy, given that many Republicans in Congress oppose action on climate change and would most likely come to the company’s defense. The administration has walked a fine line in recent years, pushing stronger climate policies but avoiding overt battles with the
oil companies, and continuing to approve drilling leases and permits.
The letter from the groups follows recent articles from two news organizations,
Inside Climate News and
The Los Angeles Times, about Exxon Mobil’s role in blocking political action on global warming.
The broad outlines of the company’s activities have been known for years. From the time the scientific community first began worrying about the climate issue in the 1970s, the company financed research on the topic, with its scientists generally supporting an emerging consensus that fossil fuel emissions could pose risks for society. Company scientists have contributed to dozens of scientific papers that supported this view and explored the extent of the risks.
But in the late 1990s — under a new chairman and chief executive, Lee R. Raymond — Exxon also joined with many business groups to try to block American participation in an international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol.
For at least a decade, it helped to finance right-leaning ideological organizations that not only fought the treaty, but also mounted attacks on climate science, raising lingering doubts in the public mind about whether the situation was as serious as most scientists believed it to be.
The recent news reporting has found, for example, that Exxon’s senior leaders and board decided to go forward with their political activities even though they had been briefed extensively on the risks of global warming by the company’s own scientists. (Exxon merged with Mobil in 1999.)
The letter sent on Friday drew a comparison to the activities of the major tobacco companies. In the 1950s and ’60s, they financed internal research showing tobacco to be harmful and addictive, but mounted a public campaign that said otherwise, and helped finance scientific research later shown to be dubious. In 2006, the companies were found guilty of “a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public.”
From what is publicly known so far, the Exxon situation appears to differ from the activities of the tobacco companies.
The science conducted by its in-house researchers has never been kept secret — company scientists have appeared as authors on more than
50 published papers on climate change — and has generally lined up with the findings of other climatologists. Exxon scientists have also participated extensively in the reports of the United Nations panel that periodically reviews and summarizes climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
At least two company scientists, Haroon Kheshgi and William Landuyt, played active roles in the most recent series of I.P.C.C. reports, published in 2013 and 2014. Those reports warned of
profound risks from climate change and an
urgent need to rein in emissions.
Exxon has on occasion funded science that mainstream researchers considered to be dubious. It was, for example, one of several fossil fuel companies that financed the research of Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tried to show that recent climate change could be explained by solar variations. Dr. Soon’s failure to disclose these ties was recently
exposed in documents made public by environmental advocates.
Under rising criticism for its role in funding organizations that promulgated climate denialism, Exxon Mobil began scaling back such ties late in the last decade, and awarded its last grant to Dr. Soon in 2010. In a major shift, the company endorsed a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide in 2009.
Any effort to convict the company of fraud might involve trying to hold it responsible for the scientific statements of the advocacy groups it helped to finance, or for its own public statements about the Kyoto treaty or other government policies. Several experts said in interviews on Friday that, without compelling evidence of an intent to deceive, such advocacy would most likely be protected as free speech.
“A leading obstacle would be the First Amendment, as climate change is a matter of robust public debate,” said John C. Coffee Jr., a law professor at Columbia University, who added that he was “not assuming that Exxon behaved honorably.”
The letter to the Justice Department was signed by numerous environmental, justice and indigenous groups, including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the League of Conservation Voters. Among them was Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who has a track record of working closely with corporate leaders.
“We don’t have all the facts about what Exxon knew, and we’re not prejudging what happened,” Mr. Krupp said in a statement. “But what several teams of journalists have reported is detailed, troubling, and deserving of further investigation.”
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