Our good friend Lee Raymond, former CEO of ExxonMobil who received hundreds and hundreds of millions for his retirement, who heavily funded anyone who dared speak about climate change and who now sits on the board of the American Enterprise Institute and who chairs the Bush created committee on America's Alternative Energy Future, is showing that a he is unable to quit his smearing ways. This is what happens when you combine AEI - the folks who thought invading Iraq was a brilliant idea - and Raymond, the guy who loves his money but hates our world. No surprise here.
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.ExxonMobil is now saying that they will no longer give money to groups to smear the global warming opponents, but something tells me they will continue, but be more discrete and cautious about it. Until they prove otherwise, I expect the worst.
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 emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.
The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.
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.
