Keith McCoy – a senior director in ExxonMobil’s Washington D.C. government affairs team – told an undercover reporter from Unearthed how ExxonMobil fought climate science through sleazy third party “shadow groups“:
Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.
McCoy called Sen. Joe Manchin as “the Kingmaker” and said he spoke to his office on a weekly basis, especially on gutting rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions and taxes on oil companies in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure and jobs bill:
That’s a completely different conversation when you start to stick to roads and bridges. And instead of a $2 trillion bill, it’s an $800 billion dollar bill. If you lower that threshold, you stick to highways and bridges then a lot of the negative stuff starts to come out. Why would you put in something on emissions reductions on climate change to oil refineries in a highway bill? So, people say yeah that doesn’t make any sense, so then you get to the germane of saying that shouldn’t be in this bill?
McCoy bragged that he puts out “bait” and then “reels in” congressmen on issues like carbon tax, electric vehicles, chemicals, taxation and infrastructure:
When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: “Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah.” And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programmes, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax. You know, it’s all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in.
Exxon lobbyist Dan Easley — who left the company in January after working as its chief White House lobbyist throughout the Trump administration – bragged about Trump’s reduction in the corporate tax rate, which was “probably worth billions to Exxon,” and the renegotiation of the NAFTA trade agreement.
(Source: Unearthed)