Anyone who read Jonathan Matthews' recent article - The Uncle Tom Award - about Monsanto's black-washing activities will be familiar with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and their policy advisor Paul Driessen.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=60&page=1

But it's not just Monsanto who fund CORE and find a bit of black-washing desirable. ExxonMobil also would like to counter the perception that its products and policies are an assault on poor people of colour (See 'Black Gold?' - item 1 below).

In fact, CORE and Driessen and a whole crowd of other familiars are as active in denying global warming as they are in promoting GM crops. On global warming their stance is to hell with the scientific consensus. On the GM issue, by contrast, they claim the critics should bow down and accept the views of the biotech establishment.

Notable among the spin-studded cast in the pieces on global warming below are the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who co-founded CS Prakash's pro-GM AgBioWorld campaign), Tech CentralStation, the "Junkman" Steve Milloy, and the American Enterprise Institute. All GM enthusiasts to a man - and ALL PROFILED at http://www.lobbywatch.org

from As The World Burns
1.Black Gold?
2.Some Like It Hot
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1.Black Gold?
(from As The World Burns
A Mother Jones special project on global warming)
By Chris Mooney
Mother Jones, May/June 2005 Issue

HERE'S A SHORT LIST of people on the front lines of climate change: the residents of Tuvalu, the Maldives, and other island nations facing rising oceans; the Arctic Inuit, whose food supply and way of life is threatened by melting sea ice; Africans at risk from even more devastating droughts. What do they have in common? Answer: They're all people of color. In the United States, too, "unemployment and economic hardship associated with climate change will fall most heavily on the African American community," according to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

So why, then, does the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the nation's most storied civil rights groups, organizer of the Freedom Rides and the 1963 March on Washington, attack those who want to curb global warming?

ExxonMobil, which in 2003 gave CORE $40,000 ($15,000 was earmarked for "global climate outreach"), would obviously like to avoid any appearance that its products and policies are a slow-moving assault on poor people of color.

How better than to turn the accusation around? In that bit of public relations jujitsu, CORE has been most useful. To those familiar with CORE's recent history, its allegiance to ExxonMobil comes as no surprise. In 1968, Roy Innis seized control of CORE and moved the group to the far right. Innis has been accused by founder James Farmer and other black leaders of renting out CORE's historic reputation to corporations like Monsanto and ExxonMobil. (CORE even mounted a counterprotest to environmentalists picketing an ExxonMobil shareholders' meeting.)

"We all want to protect our planet," says CORE spokesman (and Roy's son) Niger Innis. "But we must stop trying to protect it from minor or illusory threats - and doing it on the backs, and the graves, of the world's most powerless and impoverished people." Niger Innis has also said that the terms "eco-imperialism" and "eco-slaughter" should be household words.

Helping CORE form these talking points is its senior policy adviser, Paul Driessen, the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, who also works with several other ExxonMobil-funded groups. At a 2004 ExxonMobil shareholders' meeting, Driessen referred to CORE as "one of America's oldest and most respected civil rights organizations" and called for greater funding for the group.

I met Driessen at AEI's Michael Crichton event [see below]. He looked like every other white, middle-aged wonk in the room. He promptly told me I had a homework assignment, reached into his briefcase, and pulled out a copy of Eco-Imperialism, which pictures a starving African child on the cover. Environmentalists, presumably, are responsible for such suffering. With a courtly flourish, Driessen inscribed the book, "To Chris, to get you started on your own search for truth, science, and human progress." Tucked inside was his CORE business card.
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2.Some Like It Hot
(from As The World Burns
A Mother Jones special project on global warming)

Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.

By Chris Mooney
Mother Jones, May/June 2005 Issue
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html

WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change. However fantastical the book's story line, its author was received as an expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI)...

This concerted effort [to undermine the science on global warming] reflects the shared convictions of free-market, and thus antiregulatory, conservatives. But there's another factor at play. In addition to being supported by like-minded individuals and ideologically sympathetic foundations, these groups are funded by ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company. Mother Jones has tallied some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of "skeptic" scientists who continue to do so.

Beyond think tanks, the count also includes quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website providing "news, analysis, research, and commentary" that received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even religious and civil rights groups. In total, these organizations received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received another $55,000...

During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi eugenicists. "Auschwitz exists because of politicized science," Crichton asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no acknowledgment that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just that: politicize science.

The audience at hand was certainly full of partisans. Listening attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently censured by the British House of Commons for "unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David King, the Government's Chief Scientist." Ebell is the global warming and international policy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received a whopping $1,380,000 from ExxonMobil.

Sitting in the back of the room was Christopher Horner, the silver-haired counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition who's also a CEI senior fellow.

Present also was Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise ($40,000 in 2003). Saying he's "heartened that ExxonMobil and a couple of other groups have stood up and said, 'this is not science,'" Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style emissions regulations as an attack on people of color””his recent book is entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see "Black Gold?" - see above).

Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can play in helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets "can provide research, present credible independent voices on a host of issues, indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and promote responsible social and economic agendas," he advised companies in a 2001 essay published in Capital PR News. "They have extensive networks among scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community leaders and politicians
. You will be amazed at how much they do with so little."

THIRTY YEARS AGO, the notion that corporations ought to sponsor think tanks that directly support their own political goals - rather than merely fund disinterested research - was far more controversial. But then, in 1977, an associate of the AEI (which was founded as a business association in 1943) came to industry’s rescue. In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol memorably counseled that "corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested," but should serve as a means "to shape or reshape the climate of public opinion."

Kristol's advice was heeded, and today many businesses give to public policy groups that support a laissez-faire, antiregulatory agenda...

...no company appears to be working harder [than Exxon] to support those who debunk global warming. "Many corporations have funded, you know, dribs and drabs here and there, but I would be surprised to learn that there was a bigger one than Exxon," explains Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which, in 2000 and again in 2003, sued the government to stop the dissemination of a Clinton-era report showing the impact of climate change in the United States. Attorney Christopher Horner - whom you'll recall from Crichton's audience””was the lead attorney in both lawsuits and is paid a $60,000 annual consulting fee by the CEI. In 2002, ExxonMobil explicitly earmarked $60,000 for the CEI for "legal activities."

Ebell denies the sum indicates any sort of quid pro quo. He's proud of ExxonMobil's funding and wishes "we could attract more from other companies." He stresses that the CEI solicits funding for general project areas rather than to carry out specific sponsor requests, but admits being steered (as other public policy groups are steered) to the topics that garner grant money. While noting that the CEI is "adamantly opposed" to the Endangered Species Act, Ebell adds that "we are only working on it in a limited way now, because we couldn’t attract funding."

EXXONMOBIL'S FUNDING OF THINK TANKS hardly compares with its lobbying expenditures””$55 million over the past six years, according to the Center for Public Integrity. And neither figure takes much of a bite out of the company's net earnings””$25.3 billion last year. Nevertheless, "ideas lobbying" can have a powerful public policy effect.

Consider attacks by friends of ExxonMobil on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA). A landmark international study that combined the work of some 300 scientists, the ACIA, released last November, had been four years in the making...

Industry defenders shelled the study, and, with a dearth of science to marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead. "Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice," blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000 from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two days later the conservative Washington Times published the same column. Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global warming concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money from ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy’s home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents. ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action Institute - also registered to Milloy’s residence. Under the auspices of the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education Institute, Milloy publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the corporate social responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is "affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly from Exxon."

Setting aside any questions about Milloy’s journalistic ethics, on a purely scientific level, his attack on the ACIA was comically inept...

Nevertheless, Milloy's charges were quickly echoed by other groups. TechCentralStation.com published a letter to Senator McCain from 11 "climate experts"...