Deniers
Myron Ebell: Competitive Enterprise Institute
Mr. Ebell, a lobbyist and climate change denier, is Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. CEI stands in the way of a global agreement on climate change and aims to contain “scaremongering” on global warming. Between 1998 and 2005, it received over $2 million from ExxonMobil. For information concerning recent efforts to identify Ebell, Chris Horner, James Taylor (not the singer), Marc Morano, and Fiona Wild as climate criminals when they were at the 2015 climate talks in Paris, see: https://www.lifegate.com/avaaz-7-climate-criminals-cop21-paris. Chris Horner, a Senior Fellow at CEI, is an attorney specializing in hounding climate scientists, behavior the Washington Post described as “harassment.” He is the author of three climate change denial books and receives financial support from coal companies.
Richard Edelman: Edelman PR
Mr. Edelman is CEO of the global communications firm Edelman PR, which made tens of millions of dollars over the years by working with fossil fuel companies. His firm has created multi-pronged PR, advertising and lobbying campaigns with ExxonMobil, TransCanada, the American Petroleum Institute and Shell, prompting high-profile clients and executives to leave over the firm’s work peddling climate denial. In 2015, Edelman announced that the firm would stop accepting climate change denier assignments, but he has since claimed that the firm’s work for Shell, ExxonMobil and more don’t technically qualify as climate change denial. Tax filings show that since that 2015 announcement, the firm has raked in $12m for its work with the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers alone, whose most recent focus has been increasing criminal penalties for pipeline protesters.
Charles Koch: Koch Industries
Mr. Koch is the Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, and alongside his now-deceased brother David, he has a long résumé of climate malfeasance. The multibillionaire is the longtime head of Koch Industries, a refining, petrochemical and pipeline company labeled by Greenpeace as a “kingpin of climate denial.” The Kochs, and particularly Charles, moved early to politicize climate change. Charles founded and funded the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank known to coordinate and distribute climate change denial, which became the first organization to stoke the ideological divide on the climate crisis. Koch Industries went on to spend nearly $150 million financing climate change denial groups between 1997 and 2018 alone. Since his brother’s death, Charles has attempted to backtrack on his legacy of sowing hyper-partisan division. But according to OpenSecrets, Koch Industries remains one of the top spenders on annual lobbying for oil and gas.
Mitch McConnell: United States Senate (R-Kentucky)
Mr. McConnell, currently the Senate minority leader, is the chief architect of ongoing Republican obstructionism. He admitted to believing in human-caused climate change only in 2020. Under President Obama, whose climate actions he smeared as a “war on coal,” McConnell used the filibuster to block even tepid climate reforms supported by a majority of Americans. Under President Trump, McConnell nuked the judicial filibuster in order to put three anti-science, pro-corporate justices on the supreme court, including Amy Coney-Barrett, who maintains deep family ties to big oil (her father worked at Shell for decades). And now, McConnell is ensuring that 100% of Republicans will vote against all of Biden’s climate agenda. McConnell is also heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry, to the tune of more than $3 million over the course of his infamous career.
Marc Morano: Climate Depot
Mr. Morano runs the website ClimateDepot.com, a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a climate change denial organization. He describes climate change activist Greta Thunberg as an "autistic prophet" and has been criticized for publishing the email addresses of climate scientists on ClimateDepot.org.
Rupert Murdoch: News Corp
Mr. Murdoch is an Australian-born American billionaire businessman, media tycoon, and investor. He has overseen his companies’ rampant spreading of misinformation and climate change denial for decades. Through his holding company News Corp, he owns hundreds of local, national and international publishing outlets, in the UK, Australia and the US as well as numerous television broadcasting channels including Sky News and Fox News. With a net worth of $22.4 billion as of 28 July 2021, Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world. Many of Murdoch's newspapers and television channels have been accused of biased and misleading coverage to support his business interests and political allies. Some critics have credited his influence with major political developments in the UK, US, and Australia, including but not limited to climate change denial.
James M. Taylor: Heartland Institute
Mr. Taylor is a senior fellow in environment and energy policy at the Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian think tank founded in 1984. The Institute has worked with the tobacco company Phillip Morris to discredit the risk of secondhand smoke and is a leading promoter of climate change denial. According to Taylor, speaking for the Heartland Institute, a climate denial lobby group, climate change has stopped; there has been “absolutely no warming during the past 10 years.” According to Heartland’s brochures, individual donors provide significant funding; for example, a single anonymous donor provided $4.6 million in 2008, and $979,000 in 2011. Oil and gas companies have contributed to the Institute, including ExxonMobil. The Institute has also received funding and support from tobacco companies Phillip Morris, Altria, and Reynolds American, pharmaceutical firms such as GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly. State Farm Insurance, USAA and Diageo are former supporters. Heartland has also received funding from foundations such as the Castle Rock Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Between 2002 and 2010, Donors Trust, a conservative nonprofit donor-advised fund, granted $13.5 million to the Institute. According to the organization's audited financial statements for 2014 and 2015, approximately 27% and 19% of revenues, respectively, came from a single unidentified donor. The Heartland Institute at one time employed Naomi Seibt, a youthful climate change denier known as the Anti-Greta.
Rex Tillerson:
Retired
Mr. Tillerson, 70 years old and worth more than 300 million dollars, was the ExxonMobil CEO from 2006-2017). For more than 50 years Exxon has peddled misinformation on climate collapse. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company—then just Exxon—conducted extensive research on the subject. Its scientists found that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate dramatically and warned that "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered." Exxon promptly discontinued its research efforts and began to try to undermine those of others. This policy continued when Tillerson served as CEO, attacking the work of government scientists, and donated generously to groups that did the same. According to data collected by Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets project, ExxonMobil has given more than $33 million since 1997 to over 60 different organizations that work to spread misinformation about man-made climate change and deny the scientific consensus. In addition to decades of work denying climate collapse, Mr. Tillerson is also known for his Russia connections, including being awarded Moscow’s Order of Friendship Award. When Tillerson was nominate by Donald Trump to be Secretary of State, Republican Senator John McCain said Tillerson’s connections to Vladimir Putin were “a matter of concern to me” and promised to examine them closely if he were appointed. Tillerson remained as Trump’s Secretary of State for a little over a year, one of the shortest tenures in history; and it was not, experts say, a distinguished one. “Tillerson would be at or near the bottom of the list of secretaries of state, not just in the post-Second World War world but in the record of US secretaries of state,” says Paul Musgrave, a scholar of US foreign policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "I think he really will go down as one of the worst secretaries of State we've had," Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department under President George W. Bush, told Axios’s Jonathan Swan. “He will go down as the worst Secretary of State in history,” tweeted Ilan Goldenberg, an Obama-era State Department official. Today Mr. Tillerson enjoys the fruits of years of climate denial, spending time at his various lavish Texas homes and operating a horse ranch called Bar RR Ranches.
Fiona Wild: BHP Melbourne
Ms. Wild, the Vice President of Sustainability and Climate Change at BHP Melbourne, Australia, represents BHP Billiton, the world’s top mining company. She promotes the importance of fossil fuels and downplays climate collapse. BHP supported Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s repeal of the carbon tax in Australia, helping cement Australia’s role as one of the leading greenhouse gas emitters in the world.
Harry Wilkerson: Net Zero Watch
Mr. Wilkinson is Head of Policy at Net Zero Watch, a UK think tank founded by climate change denier Nigel Lawson with the purpose of combating what the foundation describes as “extremely damaging and harmful policies” that set out to mitigate climate change. Wilkinson was previously a researcher at the Forum. He is also a regular contributor to the right-wing Conservative Woman blog.
Michael Wirth: Chevron
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Mr. Wirth is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Chevron, responsible for one of the highest total carbon emissions of any private company worldwide. Under Wirth’s direction, Chevron has pursued several greenwashing tactics to downplay the company’s environmental impact. A coalition of environmental groups filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint against Chevron earlier this year, saying it misled the public by claiming responsibility only for carbon emissions associated with refining and transporting oil, not the total emissions created by the product it sells. Wirth also sits on the board of the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade group with a long track record of spreading climate change denial and delaying legislative efforts to curb carbon emissions.
Darren Woods: ExxonMobil
Mr. Woods is the Chairman of the Board of ExxonMobil, publicly known as one of the first oil companies to become aware of climate change, more than 40 years ago. Still, Exxon has spent millions of dollars spreading climate change denial while simultaneously contributing the fourth largest amount of carbon emissions of any investor-owned company in the world. Woods, who has been with the company since 1992, makes more than $20 million a year. And though he expressed support for the 2015 Paris agreement to substantially reduce global pollution, leaked documents showed his plan for the company to increase its emissions by 17% through 2025. Earlier this year, Exxon lobbyists were captured on video revealing the company’s efforts to obstruct climate legislation in Congress. Woods later tried to distance himself and the company from the lobbyists, saying they “in no way represent” Exxon’s position.
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook
Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, whose net worth is $120 billion dollars, shows a consistent willingness to profit off the spread of climate change denial on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. In April 2021, Zuckerberg told Congress that climate misinformation was “a big issue,” yet Facebook has done little to rein in climate change deniers or challenge the fossil fuel industry. Last year, pro-fossil fuel Facebook ads were viewed 431 million times. In just the first half of 2020, ads on Facebook calling climate change a hoax were viewed at least 8 million times in the United States alone. In 2019, an article falsely attributing climate change to Earth’s solar orbit went viral, accumulating millions of views without intervention by the company. And one report found that in just the first two months of 2021, Facebook spread climate change denial to more than 25 million people, including posts about wind turbines being to blame after Texas froze over in February. Meanwhile, Facebook has muzzled actual climate scientists trying to share peer-reviewed research.