15 June 2007Terry Macalister
ExxonMobil criticised Greenpeace, the Kyoto treaty and the European carbon trading system yesterday but insisted it was not a "climate change denier" and said it wanted to play a constructive role in countering global warming.
The world's biggest non-state-owned oil group said its position on global warming had been repeatedly misunderstood and it had come to accept there should be a US federal - and preferably global - carbon tax through a cap-and-trade system.
Kenneth Cohen, vice-president of public affairs for Exxon, said: "Our company has been put in this bucket of not taking the climate issue seriously and that is flat wrong... Those who meet with us understand we are not a denier.
"We believed then and today that Kyoto is not the right approach... Our opposition to Kyoto has been seen as opposition to climate change and I regret that." He said Exxon's long-term aims were to respond to rising energy demand but also to planetary warming.
Mr Cohen was in London to explain the position of Exxon, which many environmentalists have characterised as public enemy number one because of its support for President Bush's opposition to Kyoto and other steps to tackle climate change.
The firm's funding of third-party thinktanks, which have produced papers questioning the human role in climate change, has recently been heavily criticised in a Greenpeace report.
Exxon retaliated yesterday by saying some of Greenpeace's facts were "just flat wrong" and in one case "absurd", though the company hinted that it may stop funding the controversial thinktanks.
"For you to suggest we should stop funding all groups and Greenpeace to cherry-pick which groups we can fund or not, I reject that," said Mr Cohen, who would not say whether the more controversial thinktanks such as the Heartland Institute and the George C Marshall Institute would lose donations.
Exxon said the EU carbon trading system had not been successful, with so many emission allocations released by governments that credits had virtually no value, but it denied it had lobbied against the system or opposed any second phase of it.
Exxon "leaned" towards a cap-and-trade system for the US that would license "upstream" power providers like itself rather than "downstream" power users as in Europe because that would place the cost of carbon on most active parts of the economy rather than just a few players.
"We are supporting a federal carbon market," said Mr Cohen, who said Exxon and International Energy Agency figures suggested that by 2030 the world would still be 80% dependent on carbon fuels.
