My Chat with Exxon
By Today I participated in a conference call with Ken Cohen, vice-president of PR at ExxonMobil. Also present were Erik Loomis from Alterdestiny, Mark Nikolas from Bluegrass Report, Matt Stoller from MyDD, and Julie Marsh from The Parental is Political. Matt and Erik have already given their impressions of the meeting.
I was a bit skeptical of the entire meeting, as I have no expertise in energy or environmental policy. Indeed, no one else was really an expert either, which I think limited what we could accomplish. Rather than give a blow by blow, I’ll concentrate on two points; Exxon’s reluctance to acknowledge its past efforts to distort climate change science, and its refusal to think seriously about the consequences of its behavior.
Cohen took pains to note that Exxon is trying to change its public image. It has decided to defund several organizations that exist only by virtue of their global warming skepticism, and to acknowledge that climate change is, indeed, taking place. However, Cohen argued that the extant perception of Exxon as anti-science is simply a PR problem; Exxon hasn’t really turned over a new leaf, they just weren’t doing a good enough job of talking about all the good things that Exxon does. As Chris Mooney points out, this argument is indefensible. Cohen actually argued that Exxon has simply been participating without bias in the scientific debate, waiting until a consensus arrivved such that action could be taken. Again, this is absurd; the essential facts about climate change have been widely known since the late 1980s, and Exxon has fought with tooth and nail against the application of any of that science to public policy. I had half a mind to ask whether Exxon, in the spirit of the free exchange of ideas, gave an equal amount of money to Marxist economists as to their free market opposites, but deferred.
Stoller pointed out that Exxon’s belated conversion probably had a lot more to do with Democratic victory in the 2006 elections that with any change of heart. This helped set up a fine question by Erik Loomis, which focused on Exxon’s culpability in and responsibility for the environmental damage that climate change has already caused. Unsurprisingly, Cohen dodged the question. I doubt that it’s one he could have answered without potential legal repurcussion. Nevertheless, it is an important question; Exxon’s behavior, if only as an enabler of anti-science rhetoric on the right, has served to increase damage to the environment.
As I mentioned, our lack of expertise in environmental science limited what the call could accomplish. Still, we understood enough to challenge Cohen on some of the more important points. In the big picture, I’m really not sure what Exxon is trying to accomplish, as the lefty blogosphere is obviously an unsympathetic audience.