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ExxonMobil's Latest Campaign To Stymie Federal Climate Action

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ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson acknowledges climate change is a "serious issue," but he is still trying to undermine government efforts to curb carbon emissions.

Recent press accounts report that ExxonMobil is now actively promoting a carbon tax. If true, that's big news. It would mean that, after nearly 20 years of blocking action on climate change, the world's biggest energy company has finally come to its senses.

But wait a minute. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So one might well ask: Is this anything more than a PR ploy?

Let's take a closer look.

As I reported earlier this year, ExxonMobil has paid lip service to the idea of a carbon tax since 2009 but, all the while, has continued to fund federal lawmakers who resolutely oppose it. In March 2015, for example, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010 voted in favor of the prohibition. Meanwhile, in March 2013, 156 House members cosponsored a nonbinding resolution stating that "a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses and is not in the best interest of the United States." Ninety-three percent of the cosponsors were funded by -- you guessed it -- ExxonMobil.

OK, but that was then, and things can change, right? After all, last December, Ken Cohen, the company's outgoing vice president of public and government affairs, blogged about ExxonMobil's strong support for a carbon tax, noting that the company has been holding "countless private briefings with members of Congress on carbon tax policy options."

So how have the company's friends on Capitol Hill responded?

In June, the House passed a resolution stating "a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy" on a 237 to 163 vote. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution received ExxonMobil political donations since 2013; 82 of them are documented climate science deniers. By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution -- a measly 16 percent -- received ExxonMobil money.

The numbers are unambiguous: When it comes to a carbon tax, there's no escaping the fact that ExxonMobil still funds legislators who don't favor it and, by the same token, doesn't support many who do.

Disingenuous Origins

In his December blog post, Cohen traced ExxonMobil's support for a carbon tax back to January 2009, when company CEO Rex Tillerson endorsed it in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Cohen, however, neglected to explain the context for this pronounced break with ExxonMobil's long-held position against any policy that would curb carbon emissions: Tillerson was trying to derail momentum on Capitol Hill for a different approach.

Back then, Congress was seriously considering instituting a cap-and-trade system, modeled after the George H. W. Bush administration's successful plan to reduce acid rain, which would have set a cap on overall carbon emissions and established a regulated marketplace where polluters could buy and sell emissions allowances. The less carbon they emitted, the less they would pay.

The European Union had instituted such a system in 2005 and, although there were disagreements over the details, the idea of a U.S. cap-and-trade system had the support of a number of environmental organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, and more than two dozen companies, including oil giants BP America, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Perhaps most important, the plan had the backing of President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, who then controlled both houses of Congress.

Tillerson was having none of it. "A carbon tax strikes us as a more direct, transparent and effective approach" than a cap-and-trade system, he said in that January 2009 speech. "It is the most efficient means of reflecting the cost of carbon in all economic decisions, from investments made by companies to fuel and product choices made by consumers." Any carbon tax, he added, should be revenue-neutral, meaning it should be offset by reductions in income and corporate taxes.

But there was a major obstacle in the way of Tillerson's preferred solution: It had no political support. When California Rep. Pete Stark proposed a carbon tax just the year before, it attracted only three cosponsors.

Tillerson, who surely knew Congress wasn't about to pass a carbon tax, publicly conceded it faced long odds. "Right now, any talk of imposing new taxes would rattle the markets and individuals," he told E&E News, a trade publication, the same day he spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "...But probably later this year, I think they're going to get around to want to further investigate what their alternatives are."

As it turned out, the House narrowly passed a cap-and-trade bill on a 219 to 212 vote in June 2009. In the Senate, however, it was a different story. The legislation never made it out of committee for a number of complicated reasons, but the fact that fossil fuel interests had plenty of friends in the upper chamber -- many of them longtime recipients of ExxonMobil political donations -- no doubt played a significant role. The bottom line? ExxonMobil ultimately got what it wanted by plugging a carbon tax: gridlock.

Beyond the Rhetoric

There has been some speculation about what motivated ExxonMobil to recently ramp up its pro-carbon tax rhetoric. First, with multiple investigations underway by state attorneys general of the company for misleading its shareholders and the general public about climate risks, it likely feels the need to polish its tarnished image. Second, the company knows that last December's historic U.N. climate meeting in Paris, where 195 countries committed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, means that it will be harder to maintain the status quo. Third, if and when Congress does seriously consider a carbon tax, ExxonMobil wants to position itself to influence the debate. And finally, ExxonMobil would likely benefit more than its competitors from a carbon tax, because such a tax would favor the cleaner-burning natural gas over coal and ExxonMobil has the largest natural gas reserves of any U.S. company.

These are all plausible reasons, except for one thing: The evidence suggests that the company is still doing what it can to obstruct policies to combat climate change.

Last fall, for example, California Rep. Ted Lieu -- who has not received any ExxonMobil campaign contributions -- met with the company's lobbyists in what was presumably one of the "countless private briefings" Cohen cited in his December blog. Lieu asked the lobbyists what they would do if he drafted carbon tax legislation. They replied that "they would take a look at it," Lieu told InsideClimate News. "They didn't say they wouldn't support it and they didn't say they would," he added. "It's clear that they are not going around championing their position. If they actually believe this internally, then they ought to do so in a much louder way than just quietly sticking it on a website."

In the Senate, meanwhile, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii have introduced a carbon tax bill, the "American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act." Has ExxonMobil endorsed it or lobbied on its behalf? According to Whitehouse and Schatz, no.

"Regarding ExxonMobil's alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we've seen no meaningful evidence of that," the senators said in a letter they sent to the company just yesterday. "None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil's management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation."

Conversely, House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, a climate science denier, explained to Fox News host Steve Doocy in December 2012 that he told ExxonMobil lobbyists a carbon tax was a "bad idea." "I sat down with the Exxon folks a couple of months ago," Upton said, "and let it be known that this is not a proposal that ... is going to be coming through in the House." Nevertheless, ExxonMobil donated more to Upton during the current election cycle than it did in either the 2012 or 2014 cycles.

Besides its political donations and lobbying, the company is still spending millions of dollars a year on think tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that dispute climate science and disparage climate policies, including a carbon tax. Just last month, ExxonMobil was a lead sponsor of the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) annual conference, which featured Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a self-described free-market think tank ExxonMobil has been funding since 1998. According to one conference participant, Cass "absolutely eviscerated the case for conservatives adopting a carbon tax." Conference organizers also provided ALEC state legislator members with a sample resolution against the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to curb power plant carbon emissions.

ExxonMobil doesn't just rely on paid surrogates, however, to spread disinformation and block government action. Company executives may sing the praises of a carbon tax, but they still find time to misrepresent climate science and question the necessity of taking any action at all.

Climate Science Denial Starts at the Top

In March 2013 -- the same month 146 ExxonMobil-funded House members cosponsored a resolution against a carbon tax -- Tillerson appeared on on PBS's Charlie Rose, ostensibly to promote one. The CEO told Rose he preferred a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade system, but then he doubted whether scientists knew enough to warrant one. "The facts remain there are uncertainties around climate change, why it's changing, [and] what the principal drivers of climate change are," Tillerson claimed, repudiating the consensus among climate scientists worldwide. He also falsely claimed there is no scientific evidence of a link between global warming and extreme weather events.

Two years later, at ExxonMobil's 2015 annual shareholder meeting, Tillerson again argued that climate models are not accurate enough to justify a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels. "What if everything we do," he asked, "it turns out our models are lousy and we don't get the effects we predict?" He recommended continuing to burn fossil fuels and adapting to whatever happens, be it sea level rise or crop failures. "Mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity," he said, "and those solutions will present themselves as the realities become clear."

Contrary to Tillerson's assertions, climate models have proven to be extremely accurate. A March 2013 peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, for example, found that the models accurately predicted the rise in global temperatures over the previous 15 years to within a few hundredths of a degree. No matter. When given the chance to set the record straight at this year's shareholder meeting in late May, Tillerson would not back down. "My view on the competencies of the models," he said, "has really not changed."

Perhaps the most revealing statement demonstrating the depth of ExxonMobil's support for a carbon tax, however, came the day before the House resolution vote in June -- the one where nearly 90 percent of the ExxonMobil-funded House members casting a ballot voted yes, a carbon tax would hurt the U.S. economy. A Huffington Post reporter contacted ExxonMobil Media Relations Manager Alan Jeffers to find out what the company had to say. Given the company's supposedly heightened interest in persuading Congress to pass a carbon tax, one would have expected Jeffers to register the company's opposition. Certainly he would explain why the resolution was misguided and tell House members to vote no. It was what some would call a teachable moment.

So how did Jeffers respond?

"We're not commenting on the resolution."

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Dave Anderson and Jayne Piepenburg provided research for this article. ExxonMobil federal campaign contribution data was supplied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

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Here's What's Keeping College Students From Getting The Sleep They Need

Late last month, I visited the California offices of Chegg, a higher education company that specializes in helping college students with everything from affordable textbook rentals to online tutoring. Lately, Chegg has committed to gaining a deeper understanding of another subject central to college students' lives: sleep. And as Chegg's CEO Dan Rosensweig and I began a conversation with an audience of Chegg employees, Dan shared the results of a new Chegg survey on the sleep habits of college students.

The survey's findings bring valuable data to a familiar problem: for an alarming number of students, college has been turned into one long training ground for burnout. The motto "sleep, grades, social life: pick two," or some version of this, can be heard on campuses across the country. The combination of academic pressures, social opportunities -- and for many, newfound freedoms and the resulting challenge of time management -- creates an environment where sleep doesn't get the respect it deserves.

So as thousands of young people across the country prepare to head off to college, here are a few findings from the Chegg study -- which surveyed 473 students from a mix of public and private colleges -- that I found most illuminating.

Most students know there is a link between sleeping and academic performance.

Over half of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that students who do better in school probably get more sleep. (They're right, of course. A 2014 study by the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota showed that the effect of sleep deprivation on grades is roughly equivalent to binge drinking and drug use.)

And the vast majority of students want to get the sleep they need.

Fully 84 percent said 8 or more hours would be "ideal" on a school night.

But very few are meeting that goal.

Only 16 percent usually get 8 or more hours on a school night, with far more (79 percent) sleeping 5 to 7 hours a night.

Today's college students are constantly connected.

Students overwhelmingly cited time spent online and with electronic devices as significant obstacles to sleep. Asked to name the reasons that keep them from sleeping, 51 percent cited too much time online doing non-school related activities -- second only to having too much homework.

Even in bed.

A whopping 86 percent said they take their devices to bed with them -- for email, texting and other non-school activities. And 90 percent leave their phones on when they go to sleep.

The good news?

Chegg's survey found that most college students have plenty of free time each day (much of it, for better or worse, is spent online). So there's an opportunity for students to set aside some of that time for sleep, whether that means going to bed 30 minutes earlier or finding time during the day for a nap.

And the fact that so many students know how much sleep they should be getting, and are aware of how tethered they are to their devices, is at least a first step in changing habits. As more studies like this emerge -- and as I was researching The Sleep Revolution, I was struck by the sheer number of new studies adding to our understanding of sleep's vital role in every aspect of our lives -- people will be more equipped to make changes, even small ones, to help them get the sleep they need.

That's why HuffPost launched the Sleep Revolution College Tour, and why we continue to tell stories around sleep's impact on our lives -- everything from the military's rediscovery of sleep as an essential tool of judgment to the ways athletes increasingly view it as the ultimate performance enhancer. As we approach the start of another academic year, with all its possibilities, there's no better time than now to renew our relationship with sleep and savor all the benefits it brings.

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Jill Stein's Dangerous Anti-Science Campaign

On July 28th, 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to ever be nominated for president on a major party ticket in the United States. Her primary battle was hard-won against democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who ran an insurgent campaign within the Democratic Party. He attempted to paint Clinton as a corrupt, corporate Democrat without the will or ability to work toward genuine political reform. He eventually endorsed Clinton for president and moved to nominate her by acclamation at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. But among his millions of followers, another candidate's name was beginning to circulate.

Dr. Jill Stein is a medical doctor and political activist who currently hails from Massachusetts. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University before going on to receive a degree from Harvard Medical School. Throughout the 1990s, she was known among environmentalists for her work fusing human health to environmental concerns. She also won the role of Town Meeting Seat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 2005 and was reelected to the seat once.

As Stein's influence grew, she earned the nomination of the Green Party and ran for President of the United States in 2012, garnering less than half of one percent of the popular vote and securing no electoral votes.

This year, once again the Green Party nominee, she hopes to change that through a populist appeal to Bernie Sanders voters. Stein laid the groundwork by essentially offering Bernie Sanders the option of running as the Green Party nominee in place of her when he lost to Clinton. It was a shrewd move, as she knew he was going to stick with Clinton. Her offer, combined with his rejection, would signal to less politically astute supporters that he wasn't serious about reform and caved to the Democratic machine.

Of course, this isn't even slightly true. Sanders dramatically altered the Democratic Party platform, which was a huge victory for his movement and would've been impossible had he defected to the Green Party before the election cycle was complete. Only through supporting the Democratic Party could he hope to see his reforms fully adopted during a Democratic administration, and he's shown himself willing to play ball, albeit begrudgingly.

Stein's plan to court left-wing voters disillusioned with the Democrats worked better than political watchers had anticipated. Her media stock rose as she engaged in pointed anti-Clinton rhetoric. In Stein's world, Hillary Clinton is irredeemably corrupt with an appetite for war and loathing for the environment. Never mind that Clinton's actual voting record doesn't support the caricature. Stein's barbs aren't meant to reveal truth, rather provoke. Her style is remarkably similar to Donald Trump in its vapidity. One of her nastiest tweets attacked Clinton as a mother.

Green Party pandering for media attention has begun to take a more dangerous turn as Stein winks at dangerous conspiracy theories. Her comments in seeming support of the anti-vaccination fringe raise alarm, especially because she's repeated variations of them in multiple settings.

Here's what Stein, a medical doctor, told the Washington Post:

“There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines. There were real questions that needed to be addressed. I think some of them at least have been addressed. I don't know if all of them have been addressed.”

Notice the Trumpian ending. Stein just doesn't really know if vaccines are totally safe. This is disturbing stuff, given a trend of vaccine skepticism being promoted by medically illiterate celebrities and known fraudsters like Dr. Joseph Mercola, who's been repeatedly warned by the FDA over federal law violations.

Stein was directly asked about the Green Party stance on vaccinations in a Reddit AMA and replied, “I don't know if we have an ‘official' stance.” She then continued with a paragraph full of conspiratorial fear-mongering about regulatory agencies, a favorite target of the anti-science homeopathy and “alternative medicine” movements.

Recently, Stein went so far as to suggest wireless signals are bad for children's brains and punctuated her reckless statement with this alarmist soundbite: “We make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many die.” (Apparently, for all Stein is vehemently against, casual references to animal testing doesn't make the list.)

The stunning lack of medical and scientific literacy, from a seasoned medical professional who certainly knows better, continues in her food policy. Her official platform states, “Label GMOs, and put a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe.” This is absurd, as GMOs have been repeatedly found to be safe. There's zero serious scientific debate on this point, because the evidence is in and results are clear. GMO crops could save hundreds of thousands of children's lives in a single year. Stein is trying to stop their development to satisfy anti-science extremists.

Her non-medical pandering often dips into comical absurdity, such as the time she suggested appointing fugitive Edward Snowden to her Cabinet if she won the election. I'm all for principled whistle-blowing, but the idea of nominating a guy who leaked government secrets to the media as Secretary of Homeland Security seems beyond ridiculous. Pardoning Snowden is probably the right thing to do, installing him in the White House is just frightening.

Another chuckle-worthy nugget related to national security, taken from her platform: “Ban use of drone aircraft for assassination, bombing, and other offensive purposes.” That's the whole statement. Would she rather send manned aircraft and put more of our military in harm's way? She's not for disbanding the armed forces, so maybe that's the case. Hard to say when her platform is little more than a talking points cheat sheet.

The whole charade of Stein's media-driven candidacy covers the fact that the Green Party has no ground game. This is a one-candidate show, not a genuine reformist party working to change a system from the local level. Unlike the Libertarian Party, the Green Party doesn't hold a single state house seat. If this was a party sincere about its mission, it would be building infrastructure from the local level.

Instead, we have what amounts to a celebrity campaign seemingly designed to foil the Democrats. In a year where our democracy is threatened by a terrifying demagogue, the Green Party is revealing itself to be reckless and full of hot air. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote that doesn't go to the only candidate who can realistically defeat Donald Trump.

Liberals deserve better than Jill Stein. Luckily, with the assistance of Bernie Sanders, they already have the most progressive Democratic Party platform in history. Hillary Clinton may not be an ideological firebrand, but she listens to voters and makes serious policy proposals informed by their concerns. That's what a democratic leader does, and that's why she has my enthusiastic vote.

Jill Stein needs to head back to the drawing board and reevaluate her priorities.

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Being Overweight Makes The Brain Age Faster -- Much Faster

Scientists have long suspected that being overweight affects the brain. Now, a neuroimaging study from the University of Cambridge provides dramatic new evidence of how great the effects can be (Ronan et al., 2016).

The study, published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, compared a group of people with a normal Body Mass Index (BMI) of 19.5 to an overweight and obese group with a BMI averaging 43.4. It found that “cerebral white matter volume in overweight and obese individuals was associated with a greater degree of atrophy, with maximal effects in middle-age.”

The biggest changes were seen in the brain's white matter, the tissue responsible for communicating information between regions of the brain. White matter makes up around half the volume of the brain, and it connects various regions of gray matter to coordinate their functions. It joins all four of the brain's lobes (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital) with each other, and with the emotional brain or limbic system in the center.

The researchers looked at the brains of 527 people aged 20 to 87. They found few differences in the brains of younger people. By age 50, however, the effects of obesity in the brain were dramatic, with the brain of an obese 50 year old, for instance, looking like the brain of a lean 60 year old.

Other studies have shown that obesity is associated with other diseases like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. An examination of the lifespan differences found that obesity cuts 8 years off your lifespan. But when the effects of obesity-related diseases are factored in, the difference rises to 30 years (Grover et al., 2015).

One of the brain study's investigators, Professor Sadaf Farooqi of the Institute of Metabolic Science at Cambridge, says: “We don't yet know the implications of these changes in brain structure. Clearly, this must be a starting point for us to explore in more depth the effects of weight, diet and exercise on the brain and memory.”

This raises the intriguing question of whether weight loss can reverse the brain atrophy found in overweight people. One of the study's authors, professor Paul Fletcher of the Department of Psychiatry wonders “whether these changes could be reversible with weight loss, which may well be the case.”

While long term weight loss is elusive, with research showing that most dieters regain even more weight than they lost, there are several new studies demonstrating that it is possible. When emotional eating is successfully treated, not only do dieters maintain their new weight, they continue losing weight over time.

A study at Bond University found that using EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques, a common treatment for psychological trauma, dieters lost an additional 11.1 lb over the course of the subsequent year (Stapleton, Sheldon et al., 2012; Stapleton, Bannatyne et al., 2016). Lead researcher, psychology professor Dr. Peta Stapleton, is now using neuroimaging to study the brains of these successful losers. This will provide clues as to whether the atrophy noted in the Cambridge study is reversible.

References

Ronan, L., Alexander-Bloch, A. F., Wagstyl, K., Farooqi, S., Brayne, C., Tyler, L. K., & Fletcher, P. C. (2016). Obesity associated with increased brain-age from mid-life. Neurobiology of Aging.

Grover, S. A., Kaouache, M., Rempel, P., Joseph, L., Dawes, M., Lau, D. C., & Lowensteyn, I. (2015). Years of life lost and healthy life-years lost from diabetes and cardiovascular disease in overweight and obese people: a modelling study. The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 3(2), 114-122.

Stapleton, P., Sheldon, T., & Porter, B. (2012). Clinical benefits of Emotional Freedom Techniques on food cravings at 12-months follow-up: A randomized controlled trial. Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, & Treatment, 4(1), 13-24.

Stapleton, P., Bannatyne, A., Porter, B., Urzi, K.C., & Sheldon, T. (2016). Food for thought: A randomised controlled trial of emotional freedom techniques and cognitive behavioural therapy in the treatment of food cravings. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. In press.

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