ExxonMobil Attacks Greenpeace, Then Says It's Not A Global Warming Denier - Guardian

[hatrack]

ExxonMobil criticised Greenpeace, the Kyoto treaty and the European carbon trading system yesterday but insisted it was not a "climate change denier" and said it wanted to play a constructive role in countering global warming.

The world's biggest non-state-owned oil group said its position on global warming had been repeatedly misunderstood and it had come to accept there should be a US federal - and preferably global - carbon tax through a cap-and-trade system.

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The firm's funding of third-party thinktanks, which have produced papers questioning the human role in climate change, has recently been heavily criticised in a Greenpeace report. Exxon retaliated yesterday by saying some of Greenpeace's facts were "just flat wrong" and in one case "absurd", though the company hinted that it may stop funding the controversial thinktanks.

"For you to suggest we should stop funding all groups and Greenpeace to cherry-pick which groups we can fund or not, I reject that," said Mr Cohen, who would not say whether the more controversial thinktanks such as the Heartland Institute and the George C Marshall Institute would lose donations. (Ed. - emphasis added).

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http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2103541,00.html

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In 2005 the company withdrew support for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which the following year ran an advertising campaign promoting carbon dioxide, which said "we call it life".

It still funds groups such as the Heartland Institute, which describes global warming as "a prime example of the alarmism that characterises much of the environmental movement". But Cohen said Exxon had only ever funded such groups because they were against the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, negotiated in the late 1990s, and which Exxon still rejects -- and not because they cast doubt on climate change.

"We started funding a number of these groups because we were opposed to the Kyoto Protocol. We were slow to stop funding."

Exxon could terminate its support of more groups, Cohen added -- "It's a question we're asking ourselves," he said.

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http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/42616/story.htm

[Phredicles]

1. Of course Exxon's not a global warming denier: It's a global warming supplier.

[Eugene]

2. upstream cap and trade?!?

Oh dear! ExxMo wants a carbon emissions market for the fossil
fuel suppliers, not consumers. That approach entrenches fossil
fuels in the energy mix while keeping incentives to switch
to alternatives away from consumers. Nice try!

ExxMo may have stopped denying that global warming is real,
but they have only softened their denial that something needs
to be done about it, like moving away from fossil fuels. If they
cannot stop reform, maybe they can hijack it.

[NNadir]

3. Without commenting on Exxon, I would say that Greenpeace's record on scientific integrity is rather

dubious.

Greenpeace makes the argument that addressing the half of problem in innumerate "percents" two generations from now is enough.

This bit of distracted crap is about as full of denial as anything in public discourse:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/releases/launch-of-a-comprehensive-glob

This argument is so pathetic that it is, in fact, pernicious. Climate change is happening now and it makes no difference whether one engages in Newt Gingrich like futurism and science fantasy about 2050.

Greenpeace and Exxon are in my mind, birds of a feather. Both are rather egregrious practioners of the denial game and both of them have attempted to manufacture science from a wholly ideological perspective. I am at a loss to explain why anyone would believe that Greenpeace is an environmental group. It is nothing of the sort.