Exxon Just Can't Quit the Climate Skeptics

According to ExxonMobil's 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report and Worldwide Giving Report, the oil giant is still funding global warming skeptics. Following an unprecedented rebuke from Britain's Royal Society in 2006, Exxon said it would stop funding -- in the Society's words -- groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change." However, Exxon funding is still flowing to the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, the home of skeptics Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Baliunas "built her denial career downplaying the significance of the destruction of the ozone layer," at the George C. Marshall Institute, an Exxon-funded think tank. Soon has "become one of the go-to skeptics, appearing as a key speaker" at the Heartland Institute's conferences questioning climate change. Though the "Observatory is the research arm of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics," writes Greenpeace's Kert Davies, it "has little to do with either the Smithsonian or Harvard," while "Smithsonian has distanced itself from Baliunas, who discredits their name."