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Targeting ExxonMobil. Phooey!

By Alan Caruba
May 2002

The great detective, Nero Wolfe, as portrayed these days on the Arts & Entertainment network series, derisively dismisses cockeyed theories with a single word, "Phooey!"

A ludicrous attack on the petroleum and gas giant, ExxonMobil, has been launched by Mark Mansley of Claros Consulting based in London, England. If you listen to him, you’d better dump your stock because he is predicting a $100 billion loss in the company’s value. If you don’t listen to him, you will continue to hold onto stock in a company that netted $15 billion in profit last year on sales of $213 billion.

ExxonMobil has been one of the energy industry’s consistent, strong performers when it comes to stock evaluation. So, to Mr. Manley and Claros Consulting, I say "Phooey!"

The real story of the Claros report is actually very interesting because it demonstrates the sophistication with which radical environmentalists spin their lies and use the media to spread them.

In this case, Claros issued a shrill news release to announce the end of ExxonMobil. They then had a conference call on May 2^nd to encourage media coverage of their phony economic analysis that the company’s policies regarding global warming would lead to shareholder discontent, weakening the energy giant’s bottom line and share value. However, a reporter challenged the data asking, "where do I go in this report to be convinced that Mark Mansley is correct?" Mansley replied, "It is very difficult to put numbers on this sort of thing."

Well, of course it is. All the numbers that have been conjured up to support global warming have been discredited, given the fact that the Earth hasn’t warmed so much as one degree Fahrenheit in more than a half century and that legions of climatologists and meteorologists, along with 18,000 other scientists, have come forth to say that there is no evidence to support this bogus theory.

Mansley was reduced to the utterly lame response that ExxonMobil’s "emissions impact" from the energy it sells to enable the modern to function. The numbers, he argued, "are based on a fairly complex model of the United States and energy economy there. They are only an economic analysis. They are only going to be an approximation to the truth, but the results appear reasonable. They appear to reflect reality."

Well, there you are. If you own stock in ExxonMobil, Claros Consulting wants you to sell it because their findings are "an approximation to the truth." Or, to put it another way, they are a pack of lies.

The Claros report is an integral part of "Campaign ExxonMobil", an attack on the company that has been under attack all year and the report was commissioned and funded by—guess who—"Campaign ExxonMobil." It will move into high gear at the company’s annual meeting in Dallas the last week of May.

This theatre of the absurd will no doubt get its share of media coverage. The objective is to stir up shareholder discontent with a bunch of proposals. Two of them, say its organizers, will be proposals urging shareholders "to curb ExxonMobil human and gay rights abuses, and to promote more responsible policies in relation to global warming and renewable energy." To pull this off, people claiming to be victims of the company will be paraded before the press. It promises to get very bizarre.

The name of the game is to smear ExxonMobil. The campaign is coordinated and/or funded by the usual eco-shakedown artists like Greenpeace, the rent-a-protester groups like the Ruckus Society and Uproar, the Green Party, and Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group. Funding most of this will be several well-known Leftist foundations, including Pew, Rockefeller, and Turner, among other lesser-known puppet-masters. These foundations owe their existence to capitalism, but they have been totally taken over by people who hate the notion that anyone should earn an honest living selling something people need and want.

This is, in fact, what environmentalism is all about; the destruction of capitalism in general and the economy of the United States in particular. Its primary method is to issue lie after lie until the sheer weight of them bring our economic system crashing around us. The radical’s problem, however, is that ExxonMobil has not only been a good corporate citizen, but the Financial Times has noted that its P/E ratio (profit to earnings) is a robust 15, exceeding both British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell. "ExxonMobil continues to lead the industry."

The Green anachist’s lies are beginning to catch up with them as the powerful light of truth grips them in its glare. And to those lies we say "Phooey!"

Alan Caruba is the founder of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns designed to influence public opinion and policies. The Center maintains an Internet site at www.anxietycenter.com.