How Mobil Pushed Its Oil Agenda through 'Charitable Giving'

by Sharon Kelly (The Guardian) The Mobil Foundation funded universities and civic groups in the 90s, documents reveal, but largesse was not disinterested -- ... The Mobil Foundation also sought to use its tax-exempt grants to shape American laws and regulations on issues ranging from the climate crisis to toxic chemicals – with the explicit goal of benefiting Mobil, the documents show.

Recipients of Mobil Foundation grants included Ivy League universities, branches of the National Academies and well-known civic organizations and environmental researchers.

Benefits for Mobil included – in the foundation’s words – funding “a counterpoint to so-called ‘public interest’ groups”, helping Mobil obtain “early access” to scientific research, and offering the oil giant’s executives a forum to “challenge EPA behind-the-scenes”.

The documents, which include research, engineering and environmental affairs grant recommendations for 1994, cover over 120 proposals worth about $1.2m – roughly 10% of the foundation’s total budget that year – and list more than 700 grants from prior years.

Dozens of the single-page grant recommendations include full paragraphs on the “benefits to Mobil” that Mobil executives predicted the company could cull from the foundation’s gifts.

Each recommendation offers an unprecedented window into Mobil’s internal reasoning.

One page lists $100,000 in grants from 1990-1993 for the HarvardSchool of Public Health’s Center for Risk Analysis. The center’s director, John Graham, “has been effective in … pointing out the safety risks associated with excessively stringent fuel economy standards”, Mobil Foundation wrote as it proposed more funding. Graham had previously published a 1992 report titled The Safety Risks of Proposed Fuel Economy Legislation which made no mention of Mobil’s funding for the Harvard-based center.

Another page reveals the former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assistant administrator John Moore sought out grants from Mobil and at least seven other large corporations for the Institute for Evaluating Health Risks, where Moore served as president and chief executive officer.

Mobil gave $40,000 to help the newly formed institute “staff up and demonstrate its effectiveness”. Mobil Foundation recommended more for 1994, writing that Moore’s work offered a way “ultimately to influence the development of more cost-effective [environmental, health and safety] regulations”.

A third page reveals Mobil Foundation’s efforts to expand its audience inside environmental circles via a grant for the Environmental Law Institute, a half-century-old organization offering environmental law research and education to lawyers and judges.

“Institute publications are widely read in the environmental community and are helpful in communicating industry’s concerns to such organizations,” the entry says. “Mobil Foundation grants will enhance environmental organizations’ views of Mobil, enable us to reach through ELI activities many groups that we do not communicate with, and enable Mobil to participate in their dialogue groups.”

In some cases, the foundation described how volunteer-staffed not-for-profits had saved Mobil money by doing work that would have otherwise been performed by Mobil’s paid staff, like cleaning birds coated in oil following a Mobil spill.

In 1987, the International Bird Rescue Research Center’s “rapid response and assistance to Mobil’s West Coast pipeline at a spill in Lebec, CA not only defused a potential public relations problem”, Mobil Foundation said, “but saved substantial costs by not requiring our department to fly cross country to respond”.

If Mobil classified donations as charitable contributions but it actually received valuable services as a result of its “gifts”, that could raise concerns about illegal self-dealing, tax experts told the Guardian.

The IRS today, he added, has less ability to investigate than it did in the 1990s, when there were at times special audit programs looking at foundations.

“Based on the contacts of the Academy,” the Mobil Foundation wrote as it recommended that larger grant, “the Environmental Associates Program has the potential to challenge the EPA behind-the-scenes on the effectiveness of a regulation for the environment and whether sound science supports the proposed law.”

Another $15,000 grant for the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) is listed under “Health Agencies” in the Mobil Foundation’s 1994 tax filing. Mobil Foundation’s internal documents reveal concern over regulation motivated its grant-makers.

“ACSH promotes rational understanding of the relative minor risks from most industrial chemicals compared with those accepted as normal from natural causes,” the Mobil Foundation wrote as it recommended a $15,000 grant for 1994, adding that the proposed grant had the support of Mobil’s medical and public relations departments.

The IRS approved Mobil Foundation’s merger into the ExxonMobil Foundation in 2001, after Mobil Corp joined with Exxon to form the world’s largest publicly traded oil company.

ExxonMobil is currently facing investigations or lawsuits by multiple state attorneys general, related to claims the oil giant failed to communicate known climate change-related risks to investors and the public.

From 1991 to 1993, Mobil gave $75,000 to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, famed for its climate change research, and recommended an additional $25,000 for 1994 so employees could “develop personal relationships with some of the key experts” on what Mobil predicted would be “the key international environmental issue of the 1990s”.

“While there currently are no regulations limiting emissions of greenhouse gases, such regulations are a real possibility within the next five years,” the grant recommendation adds. “Technical information and understanding will be key to Mobil’s ability to participate in the debate on these regulations.”

A Mobil vice-president named John J Wise signed the approvals for that recommendation, along with about $1.2m in other grants for the year.

Wise ultimately co-authored two UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, serving as a lead author on one. One report chapter Wise co-authored prominently recommended, among other things, burning natural gas (an ExxonMobil product) instead of coal as a way to combat climate change. READ MORE