Hot year for Exxon, planet

While Exxon sees the billions rolling in faster and faster, evidence that global warming is gathering pace is rapidly piling up. While most oil companies are making huge profits, what Exxon does -- and doesn't do -- with those profits is what marks them out as the world's number one climate criminal.

It's pretty easy to see why Exxon is rich. Higher oil and gas prices, a friendly US administration which subsidises big oil and goes easy on taxes and fees, and the kind of fiscal conservatism that holds back compensation for environmental disasters like the Exxon Valdez.  That $US 32 billion is the largest profit ever recorded by an American corporation.

But despite the worldwide consensus to the contrary, Exxon continues to fund the view that we just can't figure out what oil has to do with global warming. 

Last year, an industry lobby group called the Scientific Alliance was working the halls of government in Britain to soften Tony Blair's position of global warming.  They published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute in Washington that they claimed "undermined" studies that attribute global warming to human activity, and in particular the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. The Marshall institute has received more than a half a million dollars from ExxonMobil since 1998 including US$95,000 for its "global climate change programme."

And in September 2003 we uncovered a smoking-gun memo that revealed an Exxon-funded lobby group had been asked by conservative elements in the Bush Administration to sue their own colleagues at the Environmental Protection Agency.  An EPA study had dared to suggest there might be a link between oil and climate change.

Now the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has openly said the Bush administration is trying to censor the science of climate change.

James Hansen, who broke the news that 2005 was the hottest year on record, is facing an official review of all his written publications and being required to vet requests for interviews from reporters. His crime was telling the truth.

There is broad and overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, is caused in large part by human activities (such as burning fossil fuels), and if left unchecked will likely have disastrous consequences. 

Eight of the 10 warmest years since 1860 have occurred within the last decade.

Inaction could cost the Earth

There is solid scientific evidence that we should act now on climate change. So says the scientific community that is not paid by Exxon.  That includes declarations such as the Joint Statement last year by the national science academies of the US, UK, France, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada, Brazil, China and India.

"[Climate change is] the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible." --Former US President Bill Clinton, Davos, January 2006

Exxonmobil is streets ahead as the world's number one climate criminal. It has done more than any other company to stop the world from tackling climate change. Exxonmobil admits that it has a 'vested interest' in stopping governments from taking action on climate change. For over a decade, it has attempted to sabotage international negotiations on the issue and block agreements that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It's time the company took some of that massive profit and invested it in clean, safe, renewable energy. Write the new CEO of ExxonMobil and demand that the world's richest oil company stop funding inaction, and start working on solutions.