ExxonMobil fights back after study accuses it of misleading public on climate change

A pair of Harvard academics took up a 2015 challenge from ExxonMobil to review company reports to see for themselves if the oil giant had engaged in a conspiracy to raise doubts about climate change.

Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard history of science professor, and Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow, did just that.

They released a peer-reviewed report Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters concluding that in fact, ExxonMobil "misled" the public to raise doubts about the causes and seriousness of global warming, and whether or not it was even real.

Now the company, a major oil producer in Alaska, is accusing Oreskes and Supran of misleading the public with an "inaccurate and preposterous" report.

ExxonMobil's response, issued Wednesday on its website, is complete "hogwash," said Oreskes, reached by phone Wednesday in Massachusetts.

Oreskes and Supran said they analyzed 187 documents published from 1977 to 2014. Many of them were internal company reports, and some were provided by the company itself in response to reporting in 2015 by the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News.

InsideClimate News had reported that ExxonMobil was blocking solutions to climate change though it knew the potentially catastrophic effects.

Oreskes said she and Supran also reviewed weekly paid columns — "advertorials" — written by ExxonMobil that had been published for nearly three decades on the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

The two reported that about 80 percent of ExxonMobil's internal documents and peer-reviewed papers acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused. But 81 percent of the advertorials, messages that reached millions of people, expressed doubt.

"There was a very clear discrepancy between what is said inside ExxonMobil, versus what is said to the American people," said Oreskes.

ExxonMobil faces investigations into its public and private positions on climate change, including from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

The company on Wednesday blasted the report's authors as "activists" who have "acknowledged a goal of extracting money from our shareholders and attacking the company's reputation."

Oreskes said she didn't know what the company was talking about.

"They are making stuff up," she said.

Efforts to speak with an ExxonMobil official were unsuccessful.