This Huffpo article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shows the extent to which ExxonMobil is not our wise old friend belatedly coming to our rescue on the issue of global warming:

Last week the release of the IPCC Report by the world’s 2500 top climatologists closed the scientific debate on global warming once and for all with a grave warning about its apocalyptical consequences to human civilization.

After years of denial the oil giant finally acknowledged the role of fossil fuel emissions in global warming, pledged to stop funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the country’s most visible global warming denier, and boasted of its own efforts to deal with the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

But behind the scenes, Exxon was engaged in the same old mischief. The American Enterprise Institute, a corporate front group financed by ExxonMobil and staffed by Bush administration dead enders, sent letters to top scientists and economists in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere, offering them $10,000 each plus expenses for articles explaining shortcomings in the report.

To read the horrifying conclusions of the IPCC, here is the summary written for policy makers:  Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis”  You would think that President Bush would take this report seriously, but he’s not.  Here’s the garbage being generated by the White House as of February 8, 2007, in the words of Stephen L. Johnson, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: 

The US has had an unparalleled commitment to trying to understand the science of global climate change and to develop the technologies to address it. Since 2001 the Bush administration has invested $29 billion in climate change science, technology, and tax incentives – more than any other country in the world. Because of this investment, the United States was a major contributor to an international scientific report (IPCC) on climate change that was just released last Friday. The IPCC report was a result of hundreds of scientists from around the world getting together to evaluate the science of climate change.

The scientific conclusions reached in that report concluded that global climate change over the last 50 years is very likely the result of human activity. I certainly support the scientific conclusions that they reached.

In the US, we have and continue to, invest in the science and the technologies to address green house gas emissions.

For example, under the President’s leadership we are moving off the treadmill of dependence of foreign oil towards renewable fuels and clean coal technologies, which will result in zero emissions.

This is part of a comprehensive, aggressive yet practical plan to address global climate change.

Why would I say that this is “garbage”?  After all, the White House goes out of its way to applaud the IPCC report?

It’s garbage because it’s only cheap talk and no real action.  As with Iraq, the government refuses to call upon the citizens as a whole to make any sacrifices for the causes. 

Here’s the government’s real position.  The White House is totally opposed to any mandatory reduction of greenhouse gases,  and B) because much of the energy of the Bush administration has been directed to paying science whores to claim that there’s no problem at all.   See here and here and here.

That’s the “unparalleled commetment” we’re getting from the best government money can buy.