Exxon "Chose to Mislead": Granddaughter of Former Exxon Climate Scientist
By Steve Horn • Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - 04:58
Anna Kalinsky, the granddaughter of former Exxon climate scientist James Black, has berated the company for bankrolling climate change denial despite her grandfather's attempts to inform the company of the risks of burning fossil fuels for the global climate.
“In 1977 my grandfather was a senior scientist at Exxon. He warned Exxon executives that the world was just a few years away from needing to rethink our energy strategy to prevent destructive climate change,” Kalinsky says.
“Instead, Exxon chose to mislead people about the risks of climate change – and continues to mislead people today. The company says they value their scientists and all the work they do, but that’s pretty hard to believe when they continue to fund organizations – both publicly and anonymously – that spread misinformation about the science.”
Kalinsky's comments came during a call with media prior to ExxonMobil's May 25 Annual General Meeting in Dallas, Texas, where shareholders will vote on a number of resolutions pertaining to climate change.
Kalinsky is slated to address ExxonMobil's executives and speak about her grandfather's scientific findings which were featured in a September investigative article by InsideClimate News.
As Kalinsky alluded to, Exxon spent $31 million dollars funding the climate change denial machine between 1998 and 2014 — by conservative estimates.
Among other climate-denying activity, Exxon still funds the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a “ corporate bill mill” that has long denied the reality of human-caused climate change. ALEC has been singled out by Climate Truth, which is calling on Exxon to drop its dues-paying membership with the organization.
Back in 1978, almost four decades ago, Black made ominous warnings about the potential perils of climate change to come if humanity did not stem fossil fuel usage and reverse course.
“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon higher-ups, according to InsideClimate News' reporting, in a presentation titled “ The Greenhouse Effect.” “Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”
Remarking that Black was a “man of science,” Kalinsky offered her thoughts on how Black may feel today, were he still alive, about the direction Exxon took and the “ road not taken” once it made scientific discoveries about climate change.
“He told my mother that a company is in trouble when it falls into the hands of the accountants,” Kalinsky stated. “I don't think he'd be proud of the company he'd worked so hard for.”
25 Years: Nixing Shareholder Climate ResolutionsWhile best known these days for its “ Exxon Knew” investigation, InsideClimate News also published an e-book and an article as part of its “ Climate Accountability Project” in June 2015 on ExxonMobil's intransigence pertaining to shareholder resolutions at its Annual General Meetings. According to their reporting, the types of resolutions slated for votes at the AGM in Dallas routinely get shot down.
Among the climate change-oriented resolutions the company's top brass has urged its shareholders to vote against:
- Add a member to the board of directors with environmental expertise.
- Increase capital distributions to shareholders instead of investing in development of oil reserves that may never be exploited.
- Change the company's method of accounting to better position Exxon to adapt to adapt to climate change by exploring non-fossil resources.
- Disclose funding of lobbyists and organizations dedicated to influencing climate policy.
- Acknowledge the moral imperative to limit global average temperature increases to 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and pledge to support the goal of limiting warming to less than 2 degrees.
Were shareholders to pass any of these resolutions, it would literally be unprecedented in the company's history, as the “resolutions rarely get the support of more than a few percent of a company's stock,” according to InsideClimate News. But with increased pressure and public scrutiny on the company and the fossil fuel sector at-large, some climate activists see Exxon's Annual General Meeting as a tipping point in the climate accountability sphere.
“This year’s shareholder meeting should be a moment of reckoning for Exxon. The company is facing mounting, well-deserved pressure due to its woefully out-of-touch approach to climate change,” said Naomi Ages, Climate Liability Project Lead at Greenpeace USA. “Exxon is being held to account for the years it denied any contribution to runaway climate change by state Attorneys General, regulators, and now even its major shareholders.”
DeSmog will monitor the votes on the resolutions and provide live updates as they receive votes.
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