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Old-timers remember Herb Schmertz, the take-no-prisoners communications director of Mobil Oil in the ’70s, who was known to answer the critics every Thursday with an advertorial in The New York Times.
These days, energy companies and most other corporations tend to keep their mouths shut when attacked publicly, choosing to fight their battles instead via owned media like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
That’s why it’s been so encouraging to see the Schmertz descendants at ExxonMobil refusing to stay silent when faced with a withering — and blatantly unfair — attack from climate change activists, sympathetic journalists, posturing politicians and on-the-make state attorneys general.
The current attack on the beleaguered energy giant stems from a series of articles in environmental news site InsideClimate News, as well as the Los Angeles Times, that essentially accused Exxon of purposely misleading the public about the dangers of global warming. The publications based their “investigative reporting” on ExxonMobil’s own documents regarding its climate change work, which the company voluntarily made available on the Web.
Predictably, the stories were immediately followed by calls from liberal Democrats — led by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton — for the Justice Department to investigate Exxon, just as it had with tobacco companies who lied to the public about the dangers of smoking.
While the comparison of Exxon and climate change with cigarettes and lung cancer seemed far-fetched —people die from smoking, but so far at least, nobody has been killed by global warming — it was enough for New York’s high profile, publicity-seeking Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to subpoena Exxon’s documents and launch a full-fledged investigation, to see if Exxon had willfully kept material information away from its shareholders.
Schneiderman, who’s made no secret of his upwardly mobile political aspirations, pulled a similar stunt with Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company. After his office made Peabody jump through hoops for two years, costing the shareholders beaucoup legal fees, Schneiderman announced that Peabody had agreed “to make more robust disclosures to its investors about the financial risks it faces from future government policies and regulations related to climate change.”
In other words, Schneiderman got nothing for his wild coal chase, while costing the shareholders — the ostensible group he was purportedly working to “protect” — plenty. The same fate will likely befall ExxonMobil’s shareholders, who will be forced to pay exorbitant legal bills while the attorney general-gone-wild raids the multinational oil and gas corporation’s climate change archives.
But the good news in public relations terms is that ExxonMobil, unlike most of today’s fraidy-scared companies who roll over when challenged by some half-cocked government official, is fighting back. Its chief spokesman, public and government affairs VP Ken Cohen, has vehemently denied the trumped-up charges during regular blog posts and interviews.
Cohen has labeled the orchestrated campaign against it as a matter of “cherry-picking evidence taken out of context” to fit a sinister narrative. The real narrative, Cohen insists, is that Exxon has regularly communicated its climate change findings, and its public statements accurately, reflecting the company’s evolving understanding of the causes and risks of climate change. Cohen has challenged InsideClimate News reporters to defend their accusations, and he has invited the public to read the Exxon climate change documents for themselves and reach their own conclusions.
Cohen’s and Exxon’s PR defense in the face of this orchestrated, left wing onslaught is refreshing. Just because Exxon makes money selling fossil fuels doesn’t mean it is necessarily evil; despite the going-in assumptions of Attorney General Schneiderman’s Star Chamber inquisition. The fact is that neither wind nor solar nor that many batteries power the vehicles that most of us have to drive to get around.
Exxon has made no secret regarding the fact it believes fossil fuels, whether we like them or not, will be with us for some time to come. Meanwhile, the company—just like the rest of us — would be smart to continue investigating how it must alter its business to respond to society’s need to decrease carbon emissions.
Exxon claims it has been doing this, and has been sharing its findings truthfully as it has learned more over time — despite what InsideClimate News and Hillary Clinton and Eric Schneiderman might think.
And if you don’t believe ExxonMobil, read the material and decide for yourself whether the company lied or misled or threatened the safety of the human race. You can find all the documents here.
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Fraser P. Seitel has been a communications consultant, author and teacher for 40 years. He may be reached directly at [email protected].
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