Damn I wish I had Times Select. I also wish I had a subscription to Le Monde Diplomatique and the Economist, but I can read those online through my work for free. But not Times Select. So fellow bloggers you will have to be content with second hand content (but hey- we’re all members of the underclass- second hand is hipster cool)

From Rox Populi

Krugman on Exxon Mobil:

A leaked memo from a 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, in which
Exxon (which hadn’t yet merged with Mobil) was a participant, describes a
strategy of providing “logistical and moral support” to climate change
dissenters, “thereby raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing
scientific wisdom.’ ” And that’s just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants
have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming
skeptics.

The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren’t actually engaged in
climate research. They’re the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco
Studies in the movie “Thank You for Smoking,” whose purpose is to fail to find
evidence of harmful effects.

But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of “balanced” journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics — a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil — roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.

Has Exxon Mobil’s war on climate science actually changed policy for the worse? Maybe not. Although most governments have done little to curb greenhouse gases, and the Bush administration has done nothing, it’s not clear that policies would have been any better even if Exxon Mobil had acted more responsibly.

But the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because Exxon Mobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science. And that, not the paycheck, is the real scandal of Mr. Raymond’s reign as Exxon Mobil’s chief executive.