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Oil Baron's Descendants Shame Exxon Mobil For 'Morally Reprehensible Conduct'

The Rockefeller Family Fund announced it is divesting from fossil fuels and threw shade on Exxon Mobil in the process.
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Senior Politics Reporter, HuffPost

  • The Rockefeller Family Fund will divest from fossil fuels, prioritizing Exxon Mobil holdings.

  • The fund’s statement rips Exxon Mobil for allegedly deceiving the public about climate change.

  • The decision by a nonprofit trust born of oil wealth carries symbolic weight.

  • A recent ruling by the SEC also requires company shareholders to vote on a climate change resolution.

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Rex Tillerson, chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil. The FBI is considering whether to investigate the company for deliberately misleading the public about climate change.
CNBC/Getty Images

The Rockefeller Family Fund is divesting from major segments of the fossil fuel industry, the fund said in an announcement that also singled out Exxon Mobil for blistering criticism.

The nonprofit trust, which was started by the heirs of the industrial-era oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller, called Exxon Mobil’s alleged efforts to cover up evidence of climate change “morally reprehensible conduct” in a Wednesday statement.

The fund, which provides grants to further environmentalism, women's rights and corporate and government accountability, is the latest in a long list of institutions to divest from oil, gas or coal holdings.

With assets of $130 million, the trust is hardly the largest institution to make the leap. (The significantly larger Rockefeller Brothers Fund, another family philanthropic venture, made the divestment pledge in September 2014.)

The day before the announcement, the Securities and Exchange Commission dealt Exxon another setback. On Tuesday, the SEC ruled in favor of a group of shareholders who are pushing the company closer to disclosing its vulnerability to climate change and new government regulations.

But the fund's stinging indictment of Exxon Mobil, part of a new escalation of investor-driven climate change advocacy, is especially notable because it comes from the heirs of the Standard Oil fortune, the mega-company from which Exxon Mobil first emerged.

“Evidence appears to suggest that the company worked since the 1980s to confuse the public about climate change’s march, while simultaneously spending millions to fortify its own infrastructure against climate change’s destructive consequences and track new exploration opportunities as the Arctic’s ice receded,” the fund's statement says. “Appropriate authorities will determine if the company violated any laws, but as a matter of good governance, we cannot be associated with a company exhibiting such apparent contempt for the public interest.” 

In the first stage of its divestment process, the fund will immediately eliminate all Exxon Mobil holdings, as well as all investments in coal and “tar sands-based companies” that the fund holds directly. directly managed by the fund, rather than outside asset managers. It will limit its “exposures for these three categories of investment” to less than 1 percent of its holdings. The second stage will involve divesting from other fossil fuels the fund holds directly, and all fossil fuels held in commingled funds.

"That is a longer process because these commingled funds are very difficult to get out of and we have to be very cognizant of our fiduciary duty to the institution," said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund.

Exxon Mobil's potential involvement in denying climate science first came to light in the fall, when Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times published explosive reports suggesting the company had privately acknowledged the reality of climate change even as it cast doubt on the science in public. After those reports, Reps. Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier, Democratic congressmen from California, asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the oil giant violated federal laws like the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. (The federal government used RICO to press charges against tobacco companies 1999, claiming they had engaged in a conspiracy to suppress evidence of tobacco products’ health risks.) Earlier this month, the DOJ asked the FBI to look into whether Exxon Mobil acted illegally.

Exxon, for its part, brushed off the Rockefeller Family Fund’s divestment decision.

“It's not surprising that they're divesting from the company since they're already funding a conspiracy against us,” the company said in a statement. 

The company pointed to the fund’s financial support for Inside Climate News and the Columbia University Journalism School, the latter of which collaborated with the Los Angeles Times on its series of stories about Exxon. Exxon called the influential reporting backed by the fund “inaccurate and deliberately misleading stories about ExxonMobil’s history of climate research.”

Wasserman said the grant to Inside Climate News was made without any knowledge that it would be used for the reporting project. The grant to Columbia Journalism School was directed at "public interest research into what the fossil fuel industry understood about the science of climate change and how they acted given that understanding both internally and regarding the public," but it did not target Exxon Mobil specifically, Wasserman said.

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Before You Go

Climate change seen from around the world
(01 of05)
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A boy whose house was destroyed by the cyclone watches an approaching storm, some 50 kilometres southwest of the township of Kunyangon. Further storms would complicate relief efforts and leave children increasingly vulnerable to disease. In May 2008 in Myanmar, an estimated 1.5 million people are struggling to survive under increasingly desperate conditions in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which hit the southwestern coast on 3 May, killed some 100,000 people, and displaced 1 million across five states. Up to 5,000 square kilometres of the densely populated Irrawaddy Delta, which bore the brunt of the storm, remain underwater. (credit:Unicef)
(02 of05)
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In 2003 in Djibouti, a girl collects water from the bottom of a well in a rural area in Padjourah District. Drought has depleted much of the water supply. (credit:Unicef)
(03 of05)
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On Sept. 11, 2011, a man carries his daughter across an expanse of flood water in the city of Digri, in Sindh Province. By Sept. 26 in Pakistan, over 5.4 million people, including 2.7 million children, had been affected by monsoon rains and flooding, and this number was expected to rise. In Sindh Province, 824,000 people have been displaced and at least 248 killed. Many government schools have been turned into temporary shelters, and countless water sources have been contaminated. More than 1.8 million people are living in makeshift camps without proper sanitation or access to safe drinking water. Over 70 per cent of standing crops and nearly 14,000 livestock have been destroyed in affected areas, where 80 per cent of the population relies on agriculture for food and income. Affected communities are also threatened by measles, acute watery diarrhoea, hepatitis and other communicable diseases. The crisis comes one year after the country�s 2010 monsoon-related flooding disaster, which covered up to one fifth of the country in flood water and affected more than 18 million people, half of them children. Many families are still recovering from the earlier emergency, which aggravated levels of chronic malnutrition and adversely affected primary school attendance, sanitation access and other child protection issues. In response to this latest crisis, UNICEF is working with Government authorities and United Nations agencies and partners to provide relief. Thus far, UNICEF-supported programmes have immunized over 153,000 children and 14,000 women; provided nutritional screenings and treatments benefiting over 2,000 children; provided daily safe drinking water to 106,700 people; and constructed 400 latrines benefiting 35,000 people. Still, additional nutrition support and safe water and sanitation services are urgently needed. A joint United Nations Rapid Response Plan seeks US$356.7 million to address the needs of affected populations over the next six months. (credit:Unicef)
(04 of05)
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A girl carries her baby sibling through a haze of dust in Sidi Village, in Kanem Region. She is taking him to be screened for malnutrition at a mobile outpatient centre for children, operated by one nurse and four nutrition workers. The programme is new to the area. Several months ago, most children suffering from severe malnutrition had to be transported to health centres in the town of Mundo, 12 kilometres away, or in the city of Mao, some 35 kilometres away. In April 2010 in Chad, droughts have devastated local agriculture, causing chronic food shortages and leaving 2 million people in urgent need of food aid. Due to poor rainfall and low agricultural yields, malnutrition rates have hovered above emergency thresholds for a decade. But the 2009 harvest was especially poor, with the production of staple crops declining by 20 percent to 30 percent. Food stocks have since dwindled, and around 30 percent of cattle in the region have died from lack of vegetation. (credit:Unicef)
(05 of05)
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A boy carries supplies through waist-high floodwater in Pasig City in Manila, the capital. On Sept. 30, 2009, in the Philippines, over half a million people are displaced by flooding caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana, which struck on Sept. 26. The storm dumped over a month's worth of rain on the island of Luzon in only 12 hours. The flooding has affected some 1.8 million people, and the death toll has climbed to 246. (credit:Unicef)
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