Tuesday, July 20, 2010

ExxonMobil spent ~ $25 million since 1998 to fund climate denier groups

They promised they would stop doing this in 2007. They haven't stopped at all, though: last year they gave 1.5 million dollars to climate denier groups - funding much of the still ongoing Climategate frenzy (yes all scientists and scientific organisations have since been cleared by a number of independent investigations) ...which erupted so conveniently right before the climate talks in Copenhagen that the process was utterly derailed and ended in failure.

No wonder the public is confused about climate change, there has been a sustained, well funded campaign of deliberate disinformation poured over their heads. And on the other side, underfunded, under siege climate scientists (who by definition are not very good at PR and campaigning). It's an uneven fight, it's an unfair fight. And the victims are us, the planet and all that lives on it. All for higher profits for a select few.

I get so mad that this is allowed at all - this has nothing to do with free speech. If you yell fire in a packed movie house and people die as they get trampled in the rush, that's going to get you before a judge. Why is this different? Because the time scale is larger and most of the dead are in countries far away, where they are poor and without influence?

I think ExxonMobil's behaviour is criminal. If a corporation is a person in the eyes of the law, perhaps it's time they were treated as one.


Found this on desmogblog, the Times article is subscription only.

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