As Antarctica thaws, ExxonMobil continues to fund global warming denial. Earlier this year ExxonMobil claimed to have stopped funneling grants to media groups that spread the myth (as Tom Tancredo did in Tuesday night’s presidential debate) that scientists are evenly divided on whether humans are causing global warming or not. That lie was exposed in the company’s “World Giving Report.” Greenpeace found that ExxonMobil recently gave $2.1 million for global warming denial. That’s more than half of what it gave in 2005.
There’s a term for this genre of lies: pseudoskepticism. It’s the same strategy that the tobacco industry used for decades to cast doubt over the dangers of smoking. And now the government is intervening, just as it finally did with tobacco in the mid-1990s.
Yesterday Brad Miller, the chairman of the House Science oversight committee, asked ExxonMobil to hand over a list of “global warming skeptics” it has funded. Predictably, the corporation’s public response employs the same tactic these “thinktanks” use to undermine science: stirring up doubt over whether grant recipients like Steve Milloy and the Competitive Enterprise Institute deny global warming or not. ExxonMobil spokesman Dave Gardner said, “The groups Greenpeace cites are a widely varied group and to classify them as ‘climate deniers’ is wrong.”
By the way, Mother Jones was the first to expose this scandal two years ago. Here’s a chart of the grant recipients.
