Exxon Mobil says the Rockefellers are part of a climate conspiracy
Exxon Mobil, under fire over its past efforts to undercut climate science, is accusing the Rockefeller family of masterminding a conspiracy against it. Yes, that Rockefeller family.
The company, which has been accused of scheming to pay surrogates to deny the threat of climate change, is trying to turn the tables by calling its opponents the real conspirators. It is fighting state attorneys general, journalists and environmental groups in an all-out campaign to defend its image.
But the oil and gas giant has directed some of its fiercest fire at the descendants of John D. Rockefeller, who in 1870 founded Standard Oil, the company that became Exxon Mobil. Rockefeller family charities, longtime backers of environmental causes, have supported much of the research and reporting that has called the company to account for its climate policies, and Exxon Mobil is crying foul.
The pressure on the company is intense. Journalists have published exposés of the company’s research into climate change, including actions it took to incorporate climate projections into its exploration plans while playing down the threat. Such reporting projects, financed in part by Rockefeller family charities, included last year’s work by Inside Climate News and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which published its results with the Los Angeles Times. The findings have been boiled down to the popular Twitter shorthand ExxonKnew.
Irving-based Exxon Mobil says it is the target of a well-funded and politically motivated conspiracy to harm its core business.
Yet where Exxon Mobil and its allies see a tangled conspiracy, members of the Rockefeller family see an effort to use the vast wealth generated by fossil fuels to combat the damage done by fossil fuels.
Now the family has taken the unusual step of going public to state its case in a rare interview and in a two-part essay in the New York Review of Books that lays out in detail Exxon Mobil’s research and funding of climate denial. David Kaiser, an author of the essay and a fifth-generation Rockefeller, said dryly, “The family generally doesn’t do public things in this way.”
He said he was aware that the “obvious historical irony of the fact that we are Rockefellers doing this would attract additional attention to the story — and we want attention to the story, because we think it will make clear to the public that the so-called debate over climate science has been a fake one, artificially manufactured, and a basically dishonest one from the beginning.”
State attorneys general, beginning last year with Eric Schneiderman of New York, began conducting fraud investigations that focus on whether the company’s decades-long research into climate change, and the likelihood that energy companies will not be able to exploit all of their fossil fuel reserves, makes recent valuation of those reserves questionable. The Securities and Exchange Commission also launched a probe of the company’s accounting of reserves.
Exxon Mobil says it has recognized the threat of climate change and the need to fight it for more than a decade; the company says it stopped funding the organizations that promote climate denial in the mid2000s. It has also argued that its early research has been mischaracterized.
The company is attacking the role of the Rockefeller family in encouraging, and in some cases bankrolling, the investigations and campaigns against it. Both journalism organizations that investigated the company were financed, at least in part, by Rockefeller philanthropies, though the organizations say that their donors have no control over what they write.
The Rockefeller funds have also provided support to groups like Greenpeace and 350.org that have investigated and criticized the company.
A conference in January to discuss activism and education efforts surrounding Exxon Mobil’s climate work was held at the offices shared by two Rockefeller family funds. One potential subject of discussion suggested by a participant was “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”
The two philanthropies have announced that they are divesting themselves of fossil fuels. When the family fund made its announcement in March, it denounced Exxon Mobil’s “morally reprehensible conduct” on climate change.
Alan Jeffers, an Exxon Mobil spokesman responded, “It’s not surprising that they’re divesting from the company since they’re already funding a conspiracy against us.”