Guess who said this, and when:
While my departure may be satisfying to ExxonMobil, I can assure you that this will not make the scientific challenge of climate change and its impacts go away. That 150 countries unanimously agree about the science of this issue is not because of some "green" conspiracy, but because of the solid scientific underpinning for this issue. Certainly, there are uncertainties, but decisions are made under uncertainty all the time–that is what executives are well paid to do. In this case, ExxonMobil is on the wrong side of the international scientific community, the wrong side of the findings of all the world’s leading academies of science, and the wrong side of virtually all of the world’s countries as expressed, without dissent, in the IPCC reports….To call ExxonMobil’s position out of the mainstream is thus a gross understatement.
Answer: Michael MacCracken, one of four members of the U.S. Global Change Research Program Office fired early in Bush’s first term at the behest of ExxonMobil (the so-called “ExxonMobil Four”), in a 2002 letter to everyone on the ExxonMobil board of directors.
Update [2006-11-27 8:35:41 by David Roberts]: Hm, seems I mischaracterized the Exxon Four. Reader RH writes:
Mike was the only one of the four who worked in the US GCRP and none was fired. Mike retired later in the Administration’s term (around 2003 or 2004), Bierbaum left to accept an academic job (she had a political appointee job from Clinton anyway), Miotke remained a career State Department employee and is still there (not working on climate though), and Watson wasn’t even in the employee of the government at the time (he was at the World Bank – the US didn’t support him in the new IPCC nominations).
