The Wonk Room

ExxonMobil Continues Funding Global Warming Denial Groups Despite Repeated Pledges to Stop

From 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil directed almost $16 million to a group of 43 lobby groups in an effort to confuse Americans about global warming. After being criticized by the Royal Society in 2006, Exxon promised to end funding to groups questioning climate change. In May 2008, Exxon again issued a public mea culpa and pledged to cut funding to groups that “divert attention” from the need to develop and invest in clean energy. Yet, in 2008, while cutting contributions to the most extreme groups, Exxon still funded the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, all groups which publicly question or deny global warming:

Company records for 2008 show that ExxonMobil gave $75,000 (£45,500) to the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas and $50,000 (£30,551) to the Heritage Foundation in Washington. It also gave $245,000 (£149,702) to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington. The list of donations in the company’s 2008 Worldwide Contributions and Community investments is likely to trigger further anger from environmental activists, who have accused ExxonMobil of giving tens of millions to climate change sceptics in the past decade.

Exxon’s continued duplicity should come as no surprise. Just as ExxonMobil makes public promises to end funding to groups that work to deny climate change, it also has devoted millions to ad campaigns touting clean energy without actually investing significantly in renewable energy. In 2007, Exxon-Mobil spent $100 million on advertising and “green-washing” campaigns in an attempt to exaggerate their commitment to renewable energy, producing ads that focused on global warming, efficiency, and alternative energy. That’s despite the fact that ExxonMobil spent more on CEO Rex Tillerson’s salary than on renewable energy in 2007. While Tillerson took in $21.7 million, Exxon invested only $10 million or so in renewable energy – just a tenth of the amount they spent talking about investing in clean energy.

Exxon is staffed by and supports those who deny the most basic facts of climate change and global warming. In June 2005, White House official Philip Cooney had to resign from Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality after being caught altering documents to hide links between fossil fuels and global warming. ExxonMobil waited only three days to hire him. In fact, ExxonMobil didn’t admit that global warming is occurring until 2007.

This latest evidence of Exxon’s continued opposition to clean energy comes less than a month after the American Petroleum Institute released a report revealing just how little the top Big Oil companies invest in renewable energy – and how far they’ll go to try and say otherwise.

Report: Clean Energy Economy Creates 1.7 Million Jobs

America’s emerging clean energy economy will create 1.7 million jobs and spur $150 billion in clean investments a year if our nation takes strong action, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. Today, CAP and the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst released The Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy, the first study to project the combined effect of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA) on the US economy. Thoroughly debunking Republicans’ oft-repeated claims that passage of clean energy and climate legislation would be “ruining America’s prosperity,” the report finds the American economy would see a net gain of 1.7 million jobs a year:

Understanding the specific features of ARRA and ACESA and how they will work in combination allows us to estimate the level of public and private-sector investments in clean energy. As we will demonstrate, the two programs together could create $150 billion a year in new investment and 1.7 million net new jobs a year—that is, 1.7 million more jobs each year than would be the case without a $150 billion shift in spending from conventional fossil fuels to clean energy investments.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February, ensures direct government spending on clean energy. In the stimulus, the federal government committed to $24.4 billion in spending on energy efficiency, $23 billion for transportation investments, and $25.3 billion for renewable energy from 2010 to 2014. The Waxman-Markey clean-energy economy legislation, if passed, will contribute to green job growth by promoting new private-sector investments over the ensuing decades. Waxman-Markey contains regulations to promote clean energy, a market-based cap on carbon emissions, and initiatives to help American businesses and families transition to clean energy.

Investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency create more than three times as many jobs as equivalent spending on fossil fuels. A $1 million investment in clean energy creates 16.7 jobs while the same spending on fossil fuels yields only 5.3 jobs:

Most of the 1.7 million green jobs created by the $150 billion investment will be generated by retro-fitting buildings for energy efficiency and creating new clean-energy projects, like wind farms. In their words, investing in clean energy means more work for machinists, truck drivers, builders, roofers, insulators, electricians, engineers, and dispatchers. The addition of these 1.7 million jobs to the US economy this year would have meant a full point drop in national unemployment, from 9.4 to 8.4 percent.

In addition to the national projection of job creation that would result from a $150 billion investment in clean energy, the report estimates the net increase in investment revenue and jobs in all fifty states. For example, global warming denier Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has claimed Waxman-Markey would “relocate American jobs overseas in pursuit of an unproven environmental agenda.” Today’s report finds that Indianans would see a net increase of $3.1 billion in investment and 38,000 jobs. Had the United States made this clean energy investment in 2008, those 38,000 jobs would have brought Indiana’s level of unemployment down more than a percent, from 5.9 to 4.7 percent.

Republicans have tried everything from calling a cap on global warming pollution a “national energy tax” to name-calling — disparaging green jobs and claiming that the clean energy industry is “as real as the Jolly Green Giant.” Opponents of clean energy reform have now lost yet another avenue of protest with this proof that the green economy legislation currently in Congress will help spur billions in investment and create 1.7 million jobs.

Big Oil Releases Report Exposing Continued Refusal To Invest In Renewables

A new report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API) focuses on their finding that of $132.9 billion invested by US public and private sectors in greenhouse gas-mitigating technologies from 2000 to 2008, $58.4 billion came from the oil and gas industry. While API called the oil and gas industry’s investment “pretty impressive,” their report just reinforces that Big Oil has all the wrong priorities:

Kyle Isakower, API’s director of policy analysis, called the oil and gas companies’ $58.4 billion investment a “pretty impressive” number when put in context. “Our members’ primary responsibility is to be able to provide the fuels our country needs,” Isakower explained.

Let’s put this investment into context. The claim that the oil and gas industry invested $58.4 billion in clean energy technologies from 2000 to 2008 is overstated — about ten times over. API lumped in spending on renewable technologies with other “alternative” energies to exaggerate their purported commitment to renewable energy. In fact, the oil and gas industry spent only $6.7 billion on “non-hydrocarbon technology” including ethanol, wind, and solar. $21.1 billion of the $58.4 billion, or more than a third, was invested in liquefied natural gas, yet another fossil fuel. Another $30.6 billion went “mostly to energy efficiency.” Their total investment in renewable energy was little more than a tenth of the $58.4 billion “investments to cut greenhouse gases.”

The oil and gas industry has long invested only a small percentage of their profits in renewable and alternative energy ventures. The API-commissioned report from T² and Associates and the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas leaves out any accounting of total oil and gas profits, which totaled over $100 billion in 2008 for the top five companies alone. Analysis from the Center for American Progress showed that these top five oil companies — BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell — committed just 4 percent of their total profits to low-carbon investments in 2008. Exxon-Mobil, the biggest of the big oil companies, made more than $45 billion in net income in 2008 — and invested less than 1 percent of its profits in renewable energy. In fact, the API report reveals that the entire oil and gas industry is as bad as or worse than Exxon when it comes to under-investing in renewable energy:

Big Oil Invested Less Than One Percent Of 2000-2008 Profits In Renewables. The top five oil companies raked in $656 billion from 2000 to 2008, meaning that the $6.7 billion investment by the entire US oil and gas industry in renewable energy represents just 1 percent of the profits of the top five oil companies alone. [API, CAP]

Other examples of Big Oil’s attempt to inflate their commitment to renewable energy include multi-million dollar investments in advertising and “green-washing” campaigns, despite investing heavily in organizations that question the existence of global warming. In 2007, Exxon-Mobil spent $100 million on advertising, producing ads that focused on global warming, efficiency, and alternative energy. Chevron has created an “I Will” ad campaign in spite of its record of investing only 5 percent of its $23.9 billion in profits in renewable energy in 2008.

House GOP Energy Bill Mentions Oil Three Times More Often Than It Mentions Renewable Energy

Yesterday, House Republicans, led by Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), introduced the “American Energy Act,” an energy bill that shares not just the title but most of its content with the “American Energy Act” of 2008, the Republican energy bill that died in the House last year.

House Republicans are quick to try to call the new American Energy Act a “substitute” and an “alternative” to the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454). Yet, like the 2008 version, the 2009 “American Energy Act” is heavy on dirty energy and light on the clean energy that generates American jobs.

Like its predecessor, Pence’s bill would continue the Bush/Cheney tactic of giveaways to oil companies. The GOP bill also makes a point of denying global warming — just as in 2008. This new bill merely restates the wrong-headed priorities of the past, mentioning “oil” three times more often that it mentions “renewable” energy and barely mentioning “climate change” at all.

This word frequency chart is a quick way to visualize the differences in priorities between the GOP energy plan and the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy bill:

The word “oil” appears 93 times in Pence’s legislation — much as it made 95 appearances in the 2008 bill — while there are just 29 mentions of renewable energy, only a few more than in the 2008 version. In the Waxman-Markey legislation, which would make historic investments in clean and renewable energy and create millions jobs, there are 141 references to renewable energy. The Pence “substitute” claims that it will “encourage greater efficiency and conversation,” but mentions “efficiency” only seven times. Waxman-Markey brings up “efficiency” more than 240 times.

Even the updated portions of the bill are just warmed-over, previously rejected Republican ideas: one of the biggest (and only) changes to the bill is the new emphasis on nuclear energy, but it’s just more of the same out-of-touch rhetoric on nuclear power that Sen. John McCain tried to push during the 2008 presidential election. As Joe Romm points out, this risky nuclear scheme could actually amount to an energy tax on American families.

Politico reports, “Republicans have proposed most of these ideas in the past.” A Media Matters fact-check exposes the similarities between Pence’s legislation and President Bush’s failed plans.

We’ve seen where this obsession has gotten us: the Bush energy system made us more dependent than ever on oil and increased annual energy costs for American families by $1,100. The House GOP just hasn’t gotten the message that we can’t afford more of the same.