Friday, 12 Apr 2002

AUSTIN, Texas

Oh boy. Today starts with the hard drive on my laptop expiring. That’s inconvenient! I’m hitting the road tomorrow for five days of fast-paced action and work. I hand over the computer to Ray the computer guy and pray. Then it’s back to the office, where I rig a spare laptop and get to work.

Today I’m making progress on one of the more humorous tactics for Campaign ExxonMobil. Many people are familiar with those obnoxious “advertorials” that ExxonMobil runs in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, with their smug headlines and oh-so-balanced sounding text. From the tone, you’d think they were written by someone who was brought up on — and never grew out of — “Father Knows Best.”

These ads are where ExxonMobil commits some of its most egregious sins of omission and plain old twisting of the truth. Take the classic “Unsettled Science,” which acknowledges that global warming could be real but then reminds readers that weather is unpredictable and cautions against taking hasty action. What a load of bunk! The questions ExxonMobil raised in that ad were settled years ago by scientists. We had some fun with that ad — putting it up on the website with all the nonsense highlighted in yellow. (Yes, most of the ad wound up yellow.) You can click on the highlighted parts to read the truth behind the distortions, and when you’re mad enough, you can click through to send the board of directors a letter.

Since “Unsettled Science,” ExxonMobil came up a with a whole spate of similar ads — how renewable energy is nice but (too bad!) just won’t work; how committed ExxonMobil is to reducing emissions (even though it refuses to set goals); and how the company’s first priority is to meeting customer preferences (as long as those don’t include the oft-repeated request for less pollution).

After reading enough of this nonsense, Campaign ExxonMobil decided it was time to have some fun and make our own “op-ads” mocking the company’s ludicrous claims. The first one — inspired by the use of a debunked petition written by non-scientists from a non-institution as proof that ExxonMobil isn’t so crazy — was presented to shareholders by Global Warmer in Chief Lee Raymond himself (company chair and CEO). It’s called “Put a Climate Scientist in Your Think Tank.” In response to an ExxonMobil ad claiming that pollution reductions in the U.S. have declined due to voluntary actions and goodwill by polluters, we put together “Blowing Smoke” — which, after we posted it on the Internet, spawned about 3,500 letters to ExxonMobil.

Now I’m working on one to commemorate ExxonMobil’s recent efforts to oust Bob Watson, the chief of the international panel on global warming. You can read all about it on our website. Its my best guess as to what ExxonMobil execs are actually thinking when they do this stuff. Satire is fun!

As one of my board members said as he recovered from attending his first ExxonMobil shareholder meeting with me, “These guys are so ludicrous the only thing left to do is make fun of them.”