Exxon puts climate scientist on board
BESIEGED by court battles over its past positions on climate change, ExxonMobil has added a climate scientist to its board of directors.
The oil giant announced that it had added Susan Avery, a physicist and atmospheric scientist, and former president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. During her career, Avery wrote or co-wrote more than 80 peer-reviewed articles on atmospheric dynamics and variability.
Avery served in administrative posts from 2004 to 2007 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 1994 to 2004, Avery served as director of the Cooperative In s t i t ut e f or Research in Environmental Sciences, a collaboration between the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The appointment comes as the company’s former chief executive Rex Tillerson is taking up the position of secretary of state under President Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax”. In confirmation hearings, Tillerson said he believed climate change was real and that human activity contributed to it, though he hedged about the urgency of the threat.
The company is also in the midst of a fight with the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, who have issued subpoenas to determine whether ExxonMobil concealed from the public and investors what it knew about the climate effects of fossil fuels.
One of the environmental groups that has supported the efforts of the attorneys general said the appointment of Avery was a fig leaf. “This is a little late in the game,” 350.org’s communications director Jamie Henn said in a statement. “It’s hard to believe this is little more than a PR stunt meant to pave over the decades the company spent deceiving the public about the crisis.”
But the Union of Concerned Scientists saw it as “an important victory”, though the group noted that while she was director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Avery made controversial decisions to accept major funding from oil and gas companies.
Avery is “a respected climate scientist and clearly understands that one of the implications of climate science is the need to move away from burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible”, said Peter Frumhoff, UCS’s director of science and policy.