More on Exxon as The Great Satan

The Whig Standard - Ontario, CA

Q: So this movement has more staying power?

A [David Suzuki]: It damn well better have. What happened in 1988 was two things. One is when we hit the 1990s, the economy went into a recession and the fossil fuel industry, led by Exxon Mobile, began to spent millions of dollars on an anti-climate change campaign. They set up dummy, green-sounding organizations to say that global warming was junk science and they supported a handful of skeptics - some of whom were paid by the tobacco industry years before to say smoking wasn't dangerous - to say that global warming isn't caused by humans. They were very effective in creating confusion in the minds of the public, who said, 'Oh well, I guess scientists haven't made up their minds.' I think what Exxon Mobile and the other fossil fuel companies did was criminal. It was a criminal activity that they deliberately set out to garble the message and distort what scientists were saying.