openpolitics.com

“Tillerson’s own views about climate science were not greatly different from Lee Raymond’s,” though Tillerson “did not claim or wish to project the same sort of independent scientific expertise that Raymond had offered about climate science.” But Tillerson did see that the company needed to reposition itself.

.. Its 2007 Corporate Citizenship report announced that the company would “discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

.. Tillerson “brought a more clever approach, a more PR-savvy approach, to climate at Exxon, but the company really didn’t change its stripes much,” said Kert Davies, who leads the Climate Investigations Center and was the creator of ExxonSecrets

.. In June 2009, the House passed a bill to set up a cap-and-trade system limiting carbon emissions. But that legislation failed to gain traction in the Senate. Exxon undertook an aggressive lobbying campaign that year, spending $27.4 million ― more than the entire environmental lobby combined, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The American Petroleum Institute ― of which Exxon Mobil is a member ― launched its own PR campaign against the legislation.

 .. he said publicly he preferred a tax on carbon ― a policy that was not under debate in Congress at the time, but was also politically implausible at best, considering it was in the middle of the Great Recession.

.. Supporting a carbon tax wasn’t necessarily a cynical ploy to undermine the cap-and-trade bill; there are practical reasons a company like Exxon would support of a carbon tax. A handful of fossil-fuel companies already assign a price to carbon emissions for their internal accounting, including Exxon. As more countries take steps to cut carbon emissions as part of the Paris agreement, Exxon has said it prefers a predictable tax on carbon to a cap-and-trade system that is open to market fluctuations.

.. And unlike many of its industry rivals, Exxon has failed to invest seriously in renewable energy

.. Tillerson has openly mocked the clean-energy industry for years, joking once that he wasn’t “really against renewables” because wind turbine operators bought Exxon’s oil as a lubricant. “The more windmills are built, the more oil we sell,”

.. the company funded a Big Tobacco-style disinformation campaign.

..It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the world’s largest oil company is good at greenwashing ― they spend more money on it than they do on renewable energy development.”