Kert Davies’ Climate Investigations Center (CIC) is at it again, trying to create a scandal by releasing cherry-picked documents from Imperial Oil’s publicly available archive, even as CIC was slammed by a non-profit group Thursday for “using dishonest and potentially unlawful business practices and wasting tax dollars to engage in its investigations.”
Anti-energy activists have spent years trying (unsuccessfully) to prove #ExxonKnew. This week was more of the same—literally—as DeSmog Blog and the CIC launched another collection of documents from an ExxonMobil Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil. Lost in the hype was the fact that the documents are as stale as the story the activists are still trying to sell and have been publicly available for years.
The posted documents include more than 300 pages of company reports, a letter to the Canadian government, and development plans, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s and found in the Imperial Oil archive at The Glenbow Archives, the largest non-governmental archival repository in Canada. All of this material has been publicly accessible for years–the only really “new” aspect about CIC’s trove of documents is that they are digitized.
Nevertheless, CIC and DeSmog are trying to pitch the release of the docs as a trove that sheds new light on Imperial’s (and by extension ExxonMobil’s) climate research and correspondence. That doesn’t hide that these claims are as warmed over as Thanksgiving leftovers.
Again, all of these documents have long been publicly accessible. They have been available to researchers for years, first at the Glenbow Library and then at the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary. Climate activists know this because they have visited the archive before. As the CIC admits, DeSmog first visited the Imperial archive in late 2015. Other materials from the Imperial archive were used in reporting by InsideClimate News in 2016. They even were part of the Rockefeller-funded LA Times/Columbia Journalism School stories that helped lay a foundation for the climate liability lawsuits.
That hasn’t stopped climate activists from attempting to make hay out of the different approaches ExxonMobil and Imperial Oil took on climate policy. Their attacks conveniently disregard that the two companies operate in different countries, facing different regulatory and business environments.
The CIC’s interest in the inner working of Imperial Oil and ExxonMobil is more than a little hypocritical, since the center itself is funded through passthrough donations and a sea of dark money.
Recent reporting by the Washington Free Beacon uncovered that, despite describing itself as “a not-for-profit association of writes and advocates,” the CIC has never registered as a non-profit with the IRS. It also does not produce annual reports, or otherwise list its funders or disclose its parent organization.
Rather than registering as a nonprofit, CIC exists under the umbrella of Our Next Economy, a group founded in 2009 by John Passacantando, who worked with CIC founder and president Kert Davies at Greenpeace and Ozone Action before that. The deceptive arrangement allows CIC to obscure its funders. While the CIC does not appear to receive direct support from groups like the Rockefeller Family Fund, Tide Foundation of the Sustainable Markets Foundation, these groups dramatically increased their support for Our Next Economy in 2014, coinciding with the founding of CIC.
Between September 2010 and August 2017, the Sustainable Markets Foundation (SMF) donated nearly $5 million to Our Next Economy through payments to independent contractors earmarked for “program coordination.” For the first three years, these payments ranged between $180,000 and $320,000, but jumped to more than $1.5 million per year after CIC’s founding.
The SMF itself has received major donations from key funders of the climate litigation campaign, including the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The RFF has also promoted previous CIC document dumps and invited Passacantando and Davies to its 2016 strategy session plotting how to “delegitimize” ExxonMobil by “creating scandal.”
CIC is even facing a complaint from D.C.-based free market organization FreedomWorks, which argues that the center misrepresents itself to federal agencies to obtain documents through FOIA requests without paying for them. The CIC “is brazenly asking federal taxpayers to repeatedly foot their bill so they can engage in fishing expeditions into the annals of government records for the purpose of attacking the private entities they are averse to,” according to a lawyer representing FreedomWorks.
“Climate Investigations Center appears to be nothing more than a well-funded attack website that advances the agenda of its unknown financial backers,” the lawyer added. The Daily Caller News Foundation also reports that Davies appears “to be engaging in undisclosed lobbying activities.”
Ironically for a man seemingly obsessed with transparency, this isn’t the first time Davies has been accused of trying to obscure his funding and operations. In addition to his work with CIC, Davies is also on the board of the organization behind Climate Liability News, an anti-oil and gas website funded by dark money that promotes climate lawsuits against energy producers. That group, which is incorporated in Washington D.C., was subject to a separate complaint earlier this year that accused the organization of failing to register as a foreign business in Maryland, where it is located and conducts its business.
The CIC’s latest document dump adds nothing new to the case activists have been trying for years to build against ExxonMobil. Rather than mounting a new case, they are left reposting old documents to new websites in the name of transparency while engaging in multiple tactics to hide their own financial backers and work around federal disclosure requirements.
