POLITICS - Exxon, Corporate Goons

"Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study" by Ian Sample, The Guardian

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasize the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organization had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

"Exxon's 'outlandish' earnings spark furor" by Shawn McCarthy, Globe and Mail

The world's largest publicly owned oil company announced yesterday the largest corporate profit ever, but news of its near $40-billion (U.S.) windfall in 2006 sparked an angry backlash, coming on the eve of a major report blaming the use of fossil fuels for wreaking devastation on the planet.

Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress have also urged Exxon to end its funding of organizations that deny the existence of -- or minimize the seriousness of -- human-made global warming.

Scientists yesterday accused the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which receives funding from Exxon, of offering scientists up to $10,000 for articles that undercut a report to be released today from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of the world's leading scientists who say global warming is human-made and blame it largely on the burning of oil and other fossil fuels.

Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental lobby group, said that Exxon has spent $16-million over the past 10 years financing organizations that deny the seriousness of climate change.

Alden Meyer, a strategist with the group, compared Exxon's efforts to discredit the science of global warming to the tobacco companies' efforts to sow doubts about the link between smoking and lung cancer in order to protect their profits.

Aha, come on, our poor-little oil companies just cannot hurt their bottom-lines...NOT! After all, all those people who are investors in Exxon really need bigger dividends. Especially the investors who own several million dollars in shares. It's not enough that Exxon make a profit, thy have the right to make ever-bigger profits, and to hell with the environment and the little guy.