comm-appendix-support-cross

8/1/2016 Exxon's Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s, Too | InsideCiimate News
1979 to 1997, when the organization shifted its
approach on climate change from following the
science to intense lobbying to discredit it. DiBona
said in a phone interview that he did not remember
the climate task force. Like Nelson, he does not
accept the prevailing scientific consensus that
climate change is being driven by fossil fuel
combustion. "I think there is some question about
the broader scientific community. There's not much
evidence that there is real consensus," DiBona said.
In the 1990s, API argued that the science was too
weak to warrant action, even as research grew more
certain about the link between fossil fuel use,
greater C02 concentrations and rising global
temperatures. Exxon chief executive Lee Raymond
was API chairman from 1996 to 1997, when he
focused on the uncertainty. The GCC emphasized
the issue, too, in its public statements.
"Many people, politicians and the public alike,
believe that global warming is a rock-solid certainty,"
Raymond said in a 1997 speech in Beijing. "But it's
not."
API organized industry resistance to the possibility
of the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases in 1999.
When the Bush administration took office, former
API lobbyist Philip A. Cooney became chief of staff at
the Council on Environmental Quality, the White
House office that drove climate policy. Government
scientists accused Cooney of rewriting federal
research reports to sow doubt about man-made
climate change. Cooney resigned in 2005 and went
to work for ExxonMobil.
API's current position is that "fossil fuel
development and environmental progress are
not mutually exclusive," according to Jack Gerard,
the group's president. But API still rejects any
federal mandates to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Gerard decried President Obama's Clean
Power Plan to cut emissions from the country's
power plants, the cornerstone of the
App. 599
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-about-climate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-... 11/13