1
Science Team.” GCST developed a strategy to spend millions of dollars manufacturing climate
2
change uncertainty. Between 2000 and 2004, Exxon donated $110,000 to Milloy’s efforts and
3
another organization, the Free Enterprise Education Institute and $50,000 to the Free Enterprise
4
Action Institute, both registered to Milloy’s home address.121
137.
5
Defendants by and through their trade association memberships, worked directly,
6
and often in a deliberately obscured manner, to evade regulation of the emissions resulting from
7
use of their fossil fuel products.
138.
8
Defendants have funded dozens of think tanks, front groups, and dark money
9
foundations pushing climate change denial. These include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the
10
Heartland Institute, Frontiers for Freedom, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and Heritage
11
Foundation. From 1998 to 2014 Exxon spent almost $31 million funding numerous organizations
12
misrepresenting the scientific consensus that Defendants’ fossil fuel products were causing climate
13
change. Several Defendants have been linked to other groups that undermine the scientific basis
14
linking Defendants’ fossil fuel products to climate change, including the Frontiers of Freedom
15
Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute.
139.
16
Exxon acknowledged its own previous success in sowing uncertainty and slowing
17
mitigation through funding of climate denial groups. In its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report,
18
Exxon declared: “In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research
19
groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on
20
how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally
21
responsible manner.”122 Despite this pronouncement, Exxon remained financially associated with
22
several such groups after the report’s publication.
140.
23
Today, Defendants, including Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips
24
publicly purport to accept the consensus embodied in the most recent IPCC reports, that global
25
warming is occurring, and that human activity has been the dominant cause of global warming and
26
Seth Shulman et al. Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture
Uncertainty
on
Climate
Science,
Union
of
Concerned
Scientists,
19
(Jan.
2007),
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon_report.pdf.
122
ExxonMobil, 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report (Dec. 31, 2007), http://www.documentcloud.org/
documents/2799777-ExxonMobil-2007-Corporate-Citizenship-Report.html.
121
27
28
SHER
EDLING LLP
COMPLAINT
62
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