ExxonMobill: A private empire

From Harper's Magazine:

Measured by revenue, ExxonMobil is the largest corporation on earth. Its operations span the globe, and it behaves like a powerful sovereign, exercising immense influence over the governments of the United States and many other nations in which it has operations. Now two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Steve Coll has written Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, an in-depth study of the company under its past two CEOs, focusing on how it effectively pursues its own foreign policy and deflects demands for fiscal and environmental accountability. I put six questions to Coll about his book.......

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One example of the Q & A

3. A good deal of your reporting in this book examines ExxonMobil’s aggressive tactics in dealing with scientific studies that have produced conclusions unfriendly to the company. As a general matter, is ExxonMobil’s science honest?

I’d say that their scientists are generally honest but their science management policies are not, in the sense that those policies are ultimately controlled by litigators and lobbying arms of the company, which use science not for the pursuit of truth, but as elements in directed arguments and campaigns tailored to advance corporate interests. I would imagine that there are a fair number of scientists within ExxonMobil who feel uncomfortable about the corporation’s uses of science in public policy and litigation, but who are not in a position to express dissent openly. I was able to tease out a little bit of this perception, but I feel confident that there is much more of it than I was able to document.

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