George Monbiot (UK writer and commentator) on Exxon support for climate change denialists (2006): “ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy? The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science"…
While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies” (George Monbiot, “Heat. How to stop the planet from burning”, Allen Lane, 2006; George Monbiot, “The denial industry”, The Guardian, 20 September 2006: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2 ).
[Editor note: re “reckless endangerment” by Exxon and Phillip Morris, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states: “More than 16 million Americans are living with a disease caused by smoking. For every person who dies because of smoking, at least 30 people live with a serious smoking-related illness… Worldwide, tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths per year, and current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030. Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day” (CDC, “Smoking and tobacco use”: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/ ) and climate change and air pollution kill about 10 million people each year. Thus the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 7 million people die from the effects of air pollution each year and climate change impacts the 17 million Third Worlders who die avoidably from deprivation each year and accordingly “Because climate change impacts global avoidable mortality in the Third World it is likely that the DARA estimate of 0.4 million climate change-related deaths each year is a considerable under-estimate. One can accordingly estimate that the annual deaths from climate change and air pollution total about 10 million” (Gideon Polya, “Humanity Must Pledge Inescapable Dispossession And Custodial Retribution For Climate Criminals”, Countercurrents, 20 December 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/12/20/humanity-must-pledge-inescapable-dispossession-and-custodial-retribution-for-climate-criminals/ ].