May 22, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
The environmental advocacy group Greenpeace is heating up the debate over global warming by taking aim at claims by ExxonMobil that it has stopped financing organizations that work to prove that climate change is not happening.
On its Greenpeace Weblog, the organization points readers to its recent look into Exxon’s tax records.
After looking at the company’s books, Greenpeace determined that Exxon is still financing “climate skeptics”, even though it has said publicly that it is no longer spending money on such research.
“When our researchers looked into their tax records we discovered that Exxon was in fact lying,” Greenpeace’s Brian Fitzgerald writes on the blog. “They’d abandoned a couple of high-profile institutes, but continued funding 14 organizations in the ‘crisis? what crisis?’ racket.”
Greenpeace’s journey into the records determined that Exxon is still providing money to the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the George C. Marshall Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.
Those groups, Greenpeace says, have previously been linked to a communications strategy aimed at discrediting the Kyoto Protocol.
