Sensible Centrists Brookings & CSIS Provided Political Cover For Exxon For Years @ Bargain Prices
EDIT
Rep. Ro Khanna, the chairman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment, is planning to look into Exxon’s ties to think tanks during a broader probe into fossil fuel industry misinformation efforts. “That’s exactly part of the investigation that our committee is launching,” the California Democrat told E&E News shortly before he invited Exxon’s lobbyist in for a transcribed interview with Oversight staffers (Climatewire, July 26). “It would be wrong to impugn a think tank like Brookings just on the basis of one sting operation,” Khanna added. “That said, it raises troubling allegations, and we have to get to the bottom of it. And I think that what McCoy would say under oath probably has much more credibility than what McCoy was saying on the phone conversation.”
Exxon’s senior director for federal affairs told the Greenpeace official that the company relies on think tanks to help steer climate policy discussions in Washington. “You control the debate if you have the paper. So if they produce the paper, you can control the debate,” McCoy said in an interview for what he believed was a job with a Middle East oil and gas investment fund (Climatewire, July 2). “You can start to say ‘This is how we think this legislation should look. And that bill that you have over there, here’s our paper of why that won’t work,'” he said, according to an unpublished transcript of the interview obtained by E&E News. “It’s extremely effective in terms of pushing away bad legislation.”
Exxon deployed that tactic to help defeat the only major climate legislation that’s ever passed the House, according to Coll’s award-winning book. Proposed by then-Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in the midst of the Great Recession, the bill would’ve capped greenhouse gas emissions and created a trading system for emission credits. Exxon lobbyists told “fence-sitting congresspeople and senators” that the cap-and-trade legislation would “destroy jobs and growth,” Coll reported.
The paper they wielded was “a Brookings Institution study that showed the proposal might take about 2.5 percent out of American gross domestic product during the next forty years — the equivalent of one year’s economic growth,” the book said. “That was not a daunting price if climate change was accepted as a grave national danger, but among congresspeople whose constituents in 2009 suffered from personal bankruptcies, mortgage defaults, and even homelessness, it was not an easy trade-off to accept.” While the Brookings study found the Waxman-Markey bill would have virtually no effect on employment outside the fossil fuel industry, “ExxonMobil emphasized those forecasted job losses to members of the Senate from the oil and coal states that would be hardest hit,” Coll wrote.
The landmark climate legislation ultimately died in the Senate after Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority and no Republicans were willing to support it (Climatewire, Nov. 27, 2019). “It’s not enough for a company to hire a lobbyist in D.C. to attempt to influence public policy,” said Brooke Williams, a Boston University journalism professor who co-authored a 2016 New York Times series that highlighted corporate influence at Brookings, CSIS and other Washington research institutions. “A company needs a think tank.”
EDIT
https://www.eenews.net/articles/exxon-sting-ensnares-think-tanks-with-climate-credentials/
