 My name is Cindy Baxter. I have been chasing deniers for 25 years and I am the author of Exxon Secrets where we reveal funding of the denial campaign by ExxonMobil. In the early days we used to see every day there would be a press conference organised by the International Chamber of Commerce and the Global Climate Coalition, where they would just hold press conference after press conference denying the science of climate change with Richard Linsen, with Fred Singer and a whole bunch of those old guys. They've been around since their very early days. And who were the groups who were behind them? It was the Global Climate Coalition and the International Chamber of Commerce, but the Global Climate Coalition in those days was just all the big oil, fossil fuel companies, big oil, big coal, big car companies and all of that. They were the whole lot swung in behind the Global Climate Coalition. And later on Shell and BP were the first ones to leave and then so many others left due to public pressure that they transformed themselves into an association of associations. But then they closed their doors after Kyoto, after the US didn't sign Kyoto, so they said their job was done. So Exxon was one of the members of the Global Climate Coalition? Exxon was a very active member, especially in the latter years, Exxon and Mobil. They were both very active members of that. And so since then you've continued to follow Exxon's funding of Denial's group? That's right. Well when Bush walked away from Kyoto, everybody went Exxon. And so that's when we really started to look into Exxon a lot more. And it was during those years that we decided to set up a website to track, to show people Exxon's funding. We got so sick of journalists writing stories about climate science and balancing it with a denier. And it was really difficult to get on the phone and talk to somebody and say, Fred Singer is related to this think tank and that think tank and this think tank and they're all funded by ExxonMobil. So we developed a website that showed that whole pattern of the one scientist with all these different think tanks that they were associated with and the funding that they all got from Exxon. So that's when it really kicked off. And actually that's when a lot of climate scientists started to get angry because they realised that they thought they were having a scientific debate but they realised that actually it was very politicised and that the fossil fuel industry was behind a lot of the denial that they were fighting on a daily basis. So the scientific community was starting to become aware. What about the general public? The general public, not so much in those days. I mean the idea was actually to get the journalists to actually acknowledge the fossil fuel funding and I don't know, it was around early 2000s that we managed to get some newspapers to say every time they quoted one of the deniers that they would say they were industry funded and that was a huge breakthrough. That's when it really started getting going when they started talking about they were being industry funded and it took a long time before they decided not to cover them at all. Could you talk about what kind of money is involved with Exxon? How much money have they funded to denialist groups? Well, from what we know, from Exxon's own 990 documents which they have to file with the Indian Revenue Department in the US 30.9 million was spent on 49 different think tanks that were funding Climate Denial from 1998 to 2014. Now obviously there was money going into them before 98. Mobile was a really big funder of those guys and Exxon was certainly funding them way before we sort of picked up the Exxon mobile after the merger. And what other ways were Exxon trying to involve I guess the political process or the IPCC process? Not so much the IPCC process although in 2001 Exxon's lobbyist Brian Flannery was trying to get the words human enhanced to remove from the text of the final SPM. This was the third assessment report? Third assessment report, yeah, the third assessment report. But in the rest of it, Exxon was along with all these other companies in the GCC they ran a really effective campaign against Kyoto. Their line was it's not global and it won't work. And so they really, Lee Raymond who was the CEO of Exxon from 93 to 2005 he was at the forefront of this with the American Petroleum Institute and they were really pushing the idea that what about China? What about China? And they said you know in so many years time and ten years time China is going to be a bigger emitter than the US. But of course China at that point was not the biggest emitter it was nowhere near the biggest emitter and the US was. And so they basically sort of set up this whole blame China thing blame China in the future, blame China now as China's emissions started going up. And China of course they knew that China was not going to act and start stopping emissions, cutting emissions until the US did until they took that responsibility. And here in the talks it's commonly known as CBDR common differentiated responsibilities which in the convention the industrialized countries agreed to go first. But then sort of in the by the mid 90s it was all like what about China? And that blame China line came from the oil industry and I believe we traced it back it actually came from Exxon. Could you reflect on the significance of your research into Exxon funding given this latest series of articles from LA Times and inside climate news about what Exxon knew? Well I think you know what Exxon knew I think you know we always knew that they had very good climate scientists in the IPCC process. And I always used to look at his name and think well hold on there's an Exxon funded scientist but everyone I talked to said no no he's straight up he's a good climate scientist and he was very good you know and he's still publishing he published with people like Bert Boleyn. And so we sort of knew that Exxon was doing proper science and I know that Exxon says now that the science the proper science that they were doing that they were always transparent about it they weren't. But then what I think the most important thing about what Exxon knew is what Exxon did next. And that was the funding of the absolute denial of of climate science and the funding of these huge campaigns against the climate science. And I think you know there was there was a 98 there was a memo that was published it was an API memo and it was basically a record of a meeting in which Exxon was at and the southern company but plus a number of think tanks that Exxon was funding. And that was that I don't know if we'd never knew if it got carried out because it got leaked but essentially it was the campaign against Kyoto and US signing of Kyoto and the whole premise was to place uncertainty in the minds of the public and the minds of the media and victory would be achieved when Kyoto was seen as an outlier. What's your comment on Exxon's response to the inside climate news article facing the emphasis on all the positive scientific research and really downplaying the meeting? Well exactly Exxon's doing a complete straw man look over here you know that's exactly what they're doing there they're just completely avoiding the conversation about denial I've seen Exxon's talking points and they're sticking to them rigorously and it's all about of course we did proper science of course we did and that's not the point and some people are getting that but others are taking it you know on on board and saying yeah well they did do proper climate science but that's when you but that's not looking at what Exxon did and you know in Exxon's also we've seen recently they've been going after inside climate news and sort of trying to say trying to allege that the inside climate news is a sort of as a nonprofit funded organization with a particular point of view so they've been really trying to shoot the messenger and point everybody in a completely different direction but you know we've been getting the message out that Exxon what Exxon did was fund climate denial centre of the climate denial campaign the other defence that Exxon has is that the funding that they supplied to these conservative groups wasn't necessarily the climate denial it was for possibly other purposes well no but we know that's not true because we've seen their 90s and we've seen their documents where they have to list the funding and there was a couple of years where they actually slipped up and really sort of noted in the public funding of their list of who they were funding you know they would say it was their climate campaigns climate energy research, climate education fund and there was one year where we saw that they did very little in their public document but then we got the 990 and they really listed out in that 990 what it was for and it was for their climate change campaigns it was very clear they said it themselves could you tell us the story about your investigation into Willie Soon's links with fossil fuel companies well yeah Willie Soon was, he was we started looking into him because there was I mean he was always, he was from the George C. Marshall Institute which is the next unfunded organisation and his cohort Sally Balliunas who was also at the Smithsonian Institute so we started looking into the funding of these guys and the Smithsonian was, you know in the US you get the very open, transparent freedom of information law so we applied to the Smithsonian to get a list of the funding that Willie Soon had received and we found that from 2001 to the present day Willie Soon has been funded to the tune of 1.25 million from fossil fuel, only fossil fuel interests and he's only been funded by them and one of his pay has been funded by those guys since 2001 so we can see that but he was funded by the American Petroleum Institute and others all the way back to the beginning of his career in the early 90s he's been linked up with those fossil fuel funders since for his entire career and what is the correspondence between him and the fossil fuel companies that describe how do they characterise the research that he's providing Well that was very interesting because we then went back and got a second lot of Could you talk about how you, how did you get hold of that information and then we'll do it We then went back and got a second lot of freedom of information request, we actually asked for the correspondence between him and his funders and that's where it became really interesting because some of the deliverables that he listed were to give evidence based on his research to the house of on the hill to the house of congress and to the senate committees and it was very clear between the conversations between him and his funders that he was there to confuse the science Willie Soones big thing has been the sun climate connection which has been totally proved to be wrong, there is the connection the graphs go in different directions so you can see that he was plotting with those companies to actually obfuscate the science and he was also with those companies it was very much, it was a very collegial discussion, you could see that they were quite friendly and oh look I'm doing some more stuff can you give me some more funding and it was all very friendly because you know, hi, there was a point at which suddenly Exxon didn't give him any more money and that was in a very interesting email that one and also the other thing that Willie Soones did was he was part of this paper in 2007 which said that global warming wasn't happening, the Arctic wasn't melting and polar bears were going to be fine and that was money from Exxon, the Koch Brothers and the American Petroleum Institute Could you talk about this latest revelation where two Greenpeace investigators had went under cover and posing as fossil fuel companies? Well that was very, yeah, exactly I mean the Greenpeace investigation has really revealed what we've thought has been happening a lot of the time, there's one particular scientist called William Happer and he's been he's given so much evidence on the hill in Washington, he's given so much climate-denying evidence and he's basically what we've Greenpeace set up a sting I guess you could call it pretended to be a fossil fuel company and asked him if he and others would write papers and not disclose, challenging the link between coal and climate change and pro-CO2 scientific papers but not disclose his funding and he was agreeing to do that Another person in this investigation was William O'Keeffe which he has a long history he was head of the Global Climate Coalition he then was at the American Petroleum Institute he was at the George C. Marshall Institute he's another person who's been at the center of this there's emails in there showing him coaching encouraging these guys to apply to the Donors Trust which is a dark money foundation which we know, well we strongly suspect gets lots of fossil fuel money to try and hide it's a laundering process so nobody actually knows where the money's coming from so he was very much encouraging a lot of these scientists to go and get money from there The Donors Trust is like the dark money ATM I think probably as a result of the campaigning that us and a lot of others have done like on the Koch Brothers and Exxon funding these funders were like no longer willing to Exxon willing to show their faces and actually be mailed for funding these people and so the Donors Trust was set up it's only been going for a few years to funnel that money, to launder that money through to these denial campaigns and so there's millions and millions have come from this trust for example Mark Morano and his Climate Depot which is associated with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow they call themselves CFACT he got four million to set up this trust from the Donors Trust to set up Climate Depot that's what we think it wasn't because we don't actually have the details of it but it's a very suspicious couple of different foundations that are laundering process So what role does these kind of investigations and do civil society groups like Greenpeace play in the effort to reduce emissions? Well essentially I mean the moment you say I mean the US is or I mean I think the most obvious example is the US and the US is failure to come on board with Kyoto the US is failure to act on climate change until very recently and so that's had the world's biggest emitter for a very long time it's failure to actually do to act on climate change is direct result of this climate denial because the US media, the US public have been very much in doubt as to whether the science is real all that sort of stuff essentially why, what happened is that if there's funding of these right wing think tanks and these neoliberal think tanks the rest of their agenda is a very right wing agenda it's like less taxes, small government all that sort of neoliberal agenda so what they've done is they politicised climate science so it's almost like left and right now you know if you're on the Republican in the US these days you don't accept the science of climate change you don't believe in it it's actually had a huge effect on US legislation it's why the US has not been able to act and I mean look at the presidential campaigns today there's not one single Republican candidate who accepts the science of climate change so yeah it's had a huge... so I think in exposing that we're starting to shift the public we're certainly starting to shift the media in the US but there's still a long way to go what role does resources like Skeptical Science have in having communicated with scientists to respond to the misinformation? Well Skeptical Science is great because it actually can give you and give a lot of media some understanding of the reality behind the science and the ridiculousness of the claims that these deniers have been making and I think it's played a fantastic role and when people don't understand it and especially journalists they go to SkepticalScience.com and they can actually get the full truth about what these deniers are saying and there's also the 97% consensus which has been absolutely huge it's tweeted by Obama it's been absolutely huge and actually convincing people because it's one of those facts that people see they say oh okay 97% of scientists agree with this people don't want to be in the 3% so I think it's had a huge impact as well So we're only a couple of days away from the end of COP how do you think it's going and what should you expect from the last week? Everything is open we still don't know we're hoping to get agreement that we should keep warming to 1.5 degrees as someone said yesterday if the world whether we can actually get to 1.5 we can limit warming to 1.5 it's going to be very very difficult if you aim for 1.5 we might at least keep warming below 2 and that's the most important thing that's the most important thing in play here because if you look at 1.5 to do that you need full decarbonisation by mid-century of our energy system and also you need to get the if you have less warming then less finance is going to be there for adaptation and finance is a huge issue here there's going to be less compensation that has to be paid for the liability for the loss and damage that countries and people are suffering that they can't adapt to so it's right at the centre of all of this we're stuck on finance, we're stuck on loss and damage the US is worried there's anything about compensation and liability but as one of the small island state ministers said the other day if we don't have that much warming you won't have to pay so much so why don't you get on and cut emissions but what we've also seen is very much sort of a push by the oil producers, the Saudis absolutely rolling out anything, blocking everything and also big coal coal countries like India blocking with their coal companies all behind them and everything blocking progress and that's you can see the influence of the fossil fuel industry coming through and people ask me I've worked on climate change for so long they ask me what would you do to stop climate change Cindy and I say full words separate oil and state and that's it if you break that influence between the fossil fuel industry and governments you'll actually get movement because the people want it people want to see it work